By Anupum Pant
Did you know? Back in 1931, Nazi denounced Einstein’s scientific work saying that it was Jewish physics, banned all Jews from teaching and put a $50,000 bounty for his assassination. And more…
HIV Infecting in Real-Time
By Anupum Pant
Scientists from Yale have been able to image HIV infecting a mice in real time by using florescent markers on the virus. A special technique called the two photon laser scanning microscopy to image what was happening under the skin was used. The virus appears in green colour and helps them understand how it spreads.
Mushroom Batteries get Better as they Age
By Anupum Pant
Researchers from UC Riverside are definitely onto something here when they say they have found that your humble Portobello mushrooms may have the answer to batteries that might actually get better with age. Yes, you heard it right. Better as you keep using them, and have electrodes made out of Mushrooms!
Using nanostructures from a mushroom and treating it with KOH and high temperature, the researchers made anodes from this natural highly porus structure which can hold a lot more number of lithium ions than your traditional synthetic graphite, thereby increasing capacity.
Moreover, since mushrooms are rich in potassium salts, as the batteries get used, more number of pores open up, thereby increasing the capacity more. Imagine having phones whose batteries improve charge times as they age!
The batteries made right now are no where close to what commercial batteries are, however this might be a great stepping stone for amazing batteries of the future.
[Paper]
Lifting Boats Efficiently
By Anupum Pant
The fallkirk wheel in Scotland is probably one of the engineering’s most ingenious designs. It is the world’s only rotating boat lift. It is a massive piece of equipment which harnesses the basic laws of physics to drastically reduce the energy input used to lift boats from one canal to another, 80 feet up. Tom Scott explains…
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
By Anupum Pant
As hard as it may sound and the very fact that there hasn’t been a good one commercially available yet, actually making a holographic display is not very hard if you have a few pieces of plastic (an old CD case) lying around. Yes, that is all you need. Here’s how you can do it at home…
When you are trying to prove someone wrong on the internet, you might not be arguing properly because of a simple fallacy which might be undercutting your own claims. It’s better understood through this parable – That is how it gets its name.
Let’s say a Texan randomly shoots some rounds on a wooden wall. Then he goes to the wall and finds a small area with maximum number of holes and draws a bulls-eye around it. This makes him look like a sharpshooter who shot a couple of shots right in the bulls-eye.
Build a Holographic Display
By Anupum Pant
As hard as it may sound and the very fact that there hasn’t been a good one commercially available yet, actually making a holographic display is not very hard if you have a few pieces of plastic (an old CD case) lying around. Yes, that is all you need. Here’s how you can do it at home…
A Bat’s Tongue
By Anupum Pant
A bat’s tongue, as she says in the video, is a phenomenally strange work of nature. It’s just a long tongue, there’s no tube inside of it. And still, it manages to somehow put it inside a long jar full of honey and slurp in the honey water. How does it do it? Well, scientists do not seem to have understood it yet, but it looks like there is some sort of capillary action going on here, due to the special grooves on the tongue of this bat.
Nitrocellulose or Guncotton
By Anupum Pant
Nitrocellulose is an interesting material, an explosive of sorts, which burns very fast with little heat and leaves a very little residue. That’s the reason magicians use it in the flash paper. It can be made at home. Cody shows how…
For this, you’ll need a cotton tighty-whitey underwear…
And of course a few chemicals like potassium nitrate and sulphuric acid.
Mechanics of a Retractable Ball point pen
By Anupum Pant
The three main parts of a retractable ball point pen work in unison to produce 4 clicks for every cycle of retraction. Here’s a great explanation of how all of it works. The engineer guy breaks down the process into eight steps and reveals the interior workings of a click pen in the following video.
Fact, Theory, Hypothesis and Law
By Anupum Pant
Fact, theory, hypothesis and law are all completely different words for a scientist. Here is a good way to understand what are the subtle differences between them…
Making an Elaborate Chandelier
By Anupum Pant
Every part of this 3 feet by 3 feet chandelier is hand made. It has 24 arms and hundreds of individual pieces, each of which takes an incredible amount of expertise and precision. Watching how it is made is a beautiful experience.
Fold and Cut Theorem
By Anupum Pant
Cutting a square off the center of a paper is easy. Jab a scissor into the paper and start cutting. But there’s an easier way. Fold it in half and you can do it in two turns, no jabbing required. Fold it two times and you need just two turns. Fold it thrice and you don’t need any turns at all. You then can just cut a straight line and you’ve got a square when you open it up. If you fold at the diagonal first, you won’t even have to do three folds to reach just one cut to get a square.
The most amazing thing about this is that there’s a theorem in mathematics about this which says, as long as a shape is made up of straight lines, there is always a way to fold it properly such that you get that shape with a single straight cut.
As long as you avoid curvy letters, you can do this for every letter in the English alphabet. Here’s an example…
Why There are No Brainaches
By Anupum Pant
Your brain has no pain receptors. The only nine pain sensitive areas around the brain like cranium, muscles, nerves, arteries and veins, subcutaneous tissues, eyes, ears, sinuses and mucous membranes. That means when you have an headache, it comes from one of these nine areas, and not the brain. It has no specific reason and can originate from anything like fatigue and sleep deprivation, stress, the effects of medications and recreational drugs, viral infections and common colds, head injury, rapid ingestion of a very cold food or beverage, dental or sinus issues, and many more.
Velvet Ants are not Ants
By Anupum Pant
The velvet ant is know by that name because of the dense hair they have on their bodies. Some of them have black and white hair, those are popularly known as panda ants. They have extremely powerful stings and are also called as cow killer ants.
Although so much about them seems like that of ants, these actually aren’t ants at all. With an unusually tough exoskeleton, these are actually a specie of wasps known as Mutillidae. The females of this variety have no wings and that’s the reason they look like ants.
Money Does not Smell, You Do
By Anupum Pant
Do you notice that smell off your hands after you have handled pennies, or touched an iron railing, or anything metallic for that matter? There’s a hint of metallic smell left on your hands, right?
Well, that’s not the metal you are smelling. The smell comes from the compounds on your hand that change when iron or copper touches them. So if someone hands you a few coins and you smell the metallic odor, you actually are smelling something that has passed off from their bodies. And it smells like metal because you’ve always associated that smell with metal.
[Nature]