In the year 1949, George Zipf found that most of the words in a language are actually used very rarely. When ranked in the order of the amounts they are used, with the highest used word first, the second one was used almost exactly half the times first one was used. The third one was used a third of times as first. And so on. Considering how natural language is used, without any sense of this pattern, and a pattern still emerges is a very interesting mystery. Michael from Vsauce explains.
I hope you know that bananas a slightly radioactive. Typically, one normal banana would contain 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. Actually they are radioactive enough to trigger sensors which might fool authorities into thinking that nuclear material is getting smuggled. Still, they aren’t as radioactive as Brazil nuts.
That kind of radiation might not be even close to hurt you in anyway but there’s another thing about them that might really kill you. In fact, people in the past have died because they ate too many bananas at once. The same could happen if you eat too many tomatoes too.
Bananas and tomatoes contain high amounts of potassium. One banana for instance would contain around 450 mg of potassium, and a person’s recommended daily dose of potassium is around 3500 mg a day. While potassium is essential for you, too much of it can be bad for some people. Especially to ones who have a low kidney function. This can cause build up of potassium.
So, if you are that kind of a person, more than 7.5 bananas could in theory be lethal. But that’s not how it works for most people. Most people would have to eat around 400 bananas to overdose on them. So, it’s not really a danger unless you know your kidneys do not function properly. Certainly, something you should know about.
People who talk about how awesome they are can be really annoying some times. And then there is a psychologically disposable severe personality dysfunction Narcissistic personality disorder, also referred to as NPD. To find out if some one you know has that, just ask them. Yes, it’s as simple as that. They’ll tell you if they are…
How hard is making a sandwich. Not so much, right? Actually, if you try to make it from scratch it takes way too much effort than you can imagine. This man tried making every ingredient from scratch. Thankfully, he didn’t try making the equipment used to make the ingredients. Even then, it took him a complete 6 months and $1500 to make a single sandwich. And at a fast food place, you can get one for less than $5. That’s how far we’ve come.
If you think about it, this is what it takes to make a sandwich from scratch. Plant vegetables, get sea water to make salt, make salt, harvest vegetables, make pickle, wait for it to pickle, get wheat, make flour, bake breads, milk a cow, make cheese, collect honey, make butter, kill chicken, assemble and enjoy. And each of those things isn’t as easy as it sounds. Watch him do it…
George Aldrich has probably one of the strangest jobs on the planet. His job is to smell. George smells everything and anything, even the worst smells. And guess whom he works for?
He works for NASA! The space agency. Everything that is taken into space, George smells it. He makes sure it is safe to be taken inside the capsule that will be leaving for space. He’s been doing it for more than 3 decades.
If it wasn’t for George, manned missions to space wouldn’t have been very successful.
Everyone loves ketchup in the US. It must be the most sold condiment, right? No, mayonnaise is. In fact ketchup does not even have an american origin. Ketchup is British, actually Vietnamese.
While in Vietnam, the British loved it and brought it back home. They tried to recreate itwith nuts, sardines and mushrooms. But they failed. When someone tried to add tomatoes in it, he hit the jackpot. Ketchup, the name itself was actually created by Heinz.
Did you know, you can soak up your raw meat in salt water and pass electricity through it to cook it? If you are wondering that you should give that a try, I’d suggest you not to. You could seriously mess something up here if you do not know what you are doing. Electrons to cook steak. Check.
If that wasn’t enough, same can be done for a sausage, with LEDs stuck into it to make them light up while it is cooking.
Next, focus sun’s energy with a parabolic mirror to do the same. If you time it well, it gets cooked so well that you can actually eat it. Not very dangerous to try, this one.
IPA – isopropyl alcohol – a highly flamable substance, put inside a bottle so that it’s in vapor form and is set to fire. The fire cooked prawns. It burns like an upside down rocket, with such force that it throws the piece of fish into the air. This could easily kill you. Also, not a very good way to cook prawns.
Or you could just use lava at 1000 C to cook your steak.
Your toothbrush is full of microorganisms. But that doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, right? Because not all, in fact most of them are not dangerous.
Here’s the twist. There are so many bacteria in your toothbrush, about 10 million, which makes it highly likely that E. coli might be present among them. Especially if you keep your brush in the bathroom which has a toilet, it has more bacteria than there would have been if you had kept it out of your bathroom. Thankfully, mine always stays outside the bathroom.
When you flush, microorganisms turn into aerosol and get sprayed to everything that is in 5 to 6 feet. So, if you have your toothbrush in about 5-6 feet from the toilet, well you must consider putting it somewhere else. You don’t want to increase your chances of picking up E. coli this way.
A teddy bear that tweets when you squeeze it, or shoes that light up when you dance, or prom dresses that sparkle. Engineering can do it all. You are bound by only your imagination.
At first it’s painful and frustrating. If it wasn’t then it wouldn’t be that wonderful when it works out. It feels like the greatest reward.
That’s some wisdom from the video I connect with well because I’m dealing with a really tough assignment right now. And the only thing driving me is the thought of how rewarding it is going to feel when it is done.
Using 54 counter-rotation propellers arranged in the shape of a hexagonal this man has built for himself a drone-chariot or a super-drone-vehicle of some sort. Apparently the super drone vehicle is powerful enough to lift 164 kg placed in the center seat. That’s quite enough to lift a person driving it. It moves around pretty well too. Older tests were recorded on video and here’s the latest success.
If you don’t call it a success, well it sure can be used as a massive leaf blower.
Here is an ancient method that can churn out strong ropes using something as common as grass. Simple ropes made using this method can hold upto 50 pounds! And if you make thicker ones by using more grass or twisting more number of these ropes together, well, the possibilities are endless. The video teaches it step by step.
Online dating is a serious game these days. For any success of finding a mate online, Hannah Fry a lecturer in the mathematics of cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, has some really useful tips to share. Remember, all of these are backed by real math. Here is a quick rundown of the 3 most important points you should keep in mind if you are trying to find a partner online.
1. Be yourself. Turns out, trying to hide the ugly parts of yourself, you actually decrease your odds of receiving more messages. Counterintuitive, by completely backed by math.
2. According to optimal stopping theory, the math says that in the first 37% of your dating window, you should reject everybody for long-term relations. And when you are done with that, you should choose the next person that you think is better than everyone else you’ve dated before.
3. No compromise. Since 1 in two marriages fail, to avoid a marital breakup, it’s often mathematically
equivalent to see an argument between couples as an arms race. At least, the same equations are valid here too. Couples which spiral into a series of negativities are more prone to divorce than the couples who have bouts of positivity during arguments. So successful couples are the ones who do not let resentment built with time by having compromises. The ones who do not let anything unnoticed and allow each other to complain about everything.
This is amazing engineering. It probably is a very common thing for some people. But this caught my attention because I’m seeing it for the first time. I found it on scidump.
It is a water wheel that has fins overhanging by its side. When the water from the river flows against the fins, the fins are moved forward and the wheel spins. The wheel itself is actually a spiral pipe which picks up water from the outermost part of the spiral, from the same river while it is rotating. The spiral then moves inwards and sends water into a pipe at the center axis of rotation. The water is then carried to a tank located several feet from the wheel. It uses no electricity, is powered by the river and is used to transport the same water which powers it. Amazing!
We’ve all seen automatic faucets and this is how they work. You put your hand, the water flows and stops automatically when the hand moves away. Or that is how they are supposed to work.
I came to US about 1 year back. Since then I’ve been to a number of restrooms which have automatic faucets in the sink. But every time I try to use them, these things fail me. I used to think it was due to the darker color of my skin, but then that was a little too far-fetched. I was pretty sure it was me who was doing something wrong in the foreign country. Probably things worked a little different here because we had the same things back in India too, they worked pretty well with my brown skin color.
And then I stumbled on this viral video which demonstrated the same thing. My first guess seems to be right. To confirm that I dug a little deeper.
This redditor seems to know why this happens. The sinks work because they shoot off an infrared beam outwards. When this beam is unobstructed, it is programmed to not send out water, or soap, like in this case. When these get obstructed by something that is close, the body reflects back some of the infrared back. That is how the faucet knows something is close.
Darker bodies however are known to be better absorbers. So, they absorb most of the infrared and send only a tiny amount of it back which is apparently not enough to trigger the faucet. The amount of reflected signal it receives before it can be triggered apparently can be tuned by doing trials. Probably since faucet companies in the US use white people for trials, they have a default trigger which requires a greater amount of reflected light, on an average. So it works for white skinned people but seems to fail people with darker color.
However, in India since these tests must be done with people who mostly have a slightly darker skin color, the faucets are probably programmed to work fine with that kind of skin color and for white skins too.
If you’ve been reading awesci for some time, you probably know how fascinated I am about these creatures. I’ve sung songs, not quite literally, in their praise time and again and again. Here’s a nice video refresher containing more of it, something I couldn’t resist sharing.
