Tag: amazing

Wilson Primes

By Anupum Pant

Thanks to the guys at Numberphile for introducing me to Wilson primes. Although the piece of information that describes Wilson primes itself has more or less no practical use, I still think it’s a good thing to know.

The first thing you need to know is that all prime numbers follow this rule – If you take a prime number P and put it in the following equation you get a number that is perfectly divisible by the prime number P.

The equation: (P − 1)! + 1 = Q

Note: ! is a sign used for factorial. That means P! is equal to the product of all natural numbers smaller or equal to P. So, for example, 3! = 3 X 2 X 1

This rule is valid for all prime numbers and no composite numbers follow it. So, for instance, if you take a composite number for P, the number you get after you put it in the above equation is never divisible by the number itself. This is called the Wilson’s theorem.

Wilson primes (P) are a few special numbers which can divide Q in the equation above two times. So, for example, since 5 is a Wilson prime, you get 25 if you put it in the equation above. And 25 can be divided perfectly by 5 once, and the result (quotient 5) can be divided again by 5 to get a whole number.

Now, for Wilson primes here’s the deal – 5, 13 and 563 are Wilson Primes. And a very interesting thing to note here is that, in spite of all the computing technology we have in the world, these are the only three Wilson primes we know yet.

Mathematicians are pretty certain that there are several other Wilson primes waiting to get discovered, probably infinitely many. But one thing is for sure, below the number 20,000,000,000,000 5. 13 and 563 are the only three which exist.

The Largest Object in the Solar System

By Anupum Pant

On November 6th 1892, after being spotted by a British astronomer Edwin Holmes, comet Holmes was not seen again for several decades. Thus it came to be known as the lost comet. Out of the blue, more than 70 years later, the comet was again seen in the year 1964.

Now it is known that comet Holmes was captured by Jupiter several thousand years ago, and it never went back to the Kuiper belt. It is a Jupiter family comet. Every 6.88 years, the comet orbits the sun.

Even this year, on 27th of March, it was one of the most bright comets of the year. But it was something that happened back in the year 2007 which made it one of the most popular comets in the sky.

For a brief period, comet Holmes, which is also a part of our solar system, became the largest object in the solar system. Yes, even larger than the sun!

On November 9th 2007, the diameter of comet’s coma – a cloudy region surrounding the comet made up of very tiny shiny ice and dust particles – measured about 1.4 million km. The sun’s diameter rounded to the nearest hundred is estimated to be 1.392 million km. Agreed the coma wasn’t as massive as the sun, but the size of it did measure slightly more than the sun at that time.

It indeed is a great achievement to become the largest object in the solar system (for some time) for an object that is just a tiny mass of ice and dust that is only about 3.6 km wide.

That day, the cloud around it erupted due to a mysterious outburst which still puzzles scientists. Such outbursts have been seen in the past too and are thought to have been originated as a result of its collision with a meteor (or probably due to an internal steam eruption).

via [space]

Chladni Figures

By Anupum Pant

If you take a surface, membrane with a layer of loose particles or certain liquids on it, you’ll see that these particles get arranged in beautiful patterns if the membrane is made to vibrate with varying frequencies.

This phenomenon has been known for a long time now, probably since the time when early human tribes used to put grains of sand on drums made of taut animal skin. Since then Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo Galilei have been known to have observed this phenomenon by hitting or scraping a surface covered with visible particles and .

Later, with information gleaned from Galileo’s and Leonardo’s notes, in the year 1680, Robert Hooke, English scientist from the Oxford University, devised a simple equipment which demonstrated this effect much clearly. He made a glass plate covered with flour to vibrate with the help of a violin bow. And observed beautiful patterns.

Much later, Ernst Chladni explained these figures using mathematics, spread it all across Europe and made a lasting impression on The French Academy of Sciences. These patterns thus came to be known as Chladni figures.

Brusspup, a YouTube channel known for it’s amazing videos demonstrates these Chladni figures on video.

Today, this study, which makes sound and vibration visible to the naked eye, is called Cymatics.

The Hexagon Storm

By Anupum Pant

Saturn is probably the most beautiful planet we have in our solar system. But did you know, Saturn is also home to a very peculiar phenomenon which has never been seen anywhere else before – a hexagonal hurricane.

A hurricane in the shape of a hexagon (six-sided), not circle. If that doesn’t blow your mind, try this – the storm is an incredibly huge – 30,000 km across! And it is about 100 km deep, with winds of ammonia and hydrogen moving at  more than 320 km per hour. It is large enough to swallow four planets of the size of Earth. This is what the Earth would look like if it were kept beside the storm.

saturns hexagonal storm and earth comparision

It’s only natural for hurricanes to be circular. And yet, researchers at Ana Aguiar of Lisbon University have been able to show that the hexagonal storm raging in the north pole of Saturn is also very natural too. In the year 2010, they proved  to by reproducing a similar effect in the laboratory by using rotating liquids.

According to them, a very narrow jet stream that goes about the hurricane’s edge creates a couple of other tiny hurricanes. These little storms are the ones that push the larger hurricane’s borders and give it a hexagonal shape.

In the 80s, the storm was first spotted by the twin voyager spacecraft.

A Piece of Paper as Thick as the Universe

By Anupum Pant

Linear growth is only what we can visualize well. Estimating things that grow exponentially, is something not many of us can do properly.

Here’s what happens when you fold a piece of paper. A paper of thickness 1/10 of a millimetre doubles its thickness. On the second fold it is 4 times the initial thickness and so on. It doesn’t really seem like it would grow a lot after, say, 10 folds, right?

After 10 folds, the paper which was about the thickness of your hair, turns into something that is as thick as your hand.

Without any calculation, how thick do you think would it become if you could fold it 103 times?  (I know, no one has ever folded a paper more than 12 times)

Think about this for a second: How many times do you think would you have to fold a paper to make it 1 kilometre thick? The answer is 23. Yes, it takes just 13 more folds to go from the thickness of a hand to a whole kilometre.

Turns out, if you manage to somehow fold a paper 30 times, it would become 100 km tall. The paper would now reach the space.

For the sake of imagining how exponential growth works, a paper folded 103 times would be about 93 Billion light years thick – which is also the estimated size of the observable universe.

Watch the video below to see one other great example of how exponential growth can mess with you.

Evolution of Eggs

By Anupum Pant

Eggs come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Birds, a major group of creatures that descended from reptiles have, for several years, continued to evolve the design of their eggs for millions of years now (not consciously, through natural selection).

Eggs could have been cube shaped. In that case they would have been very difficult to lay. Also, they would have been weakest at the centre points of a face of the cube. Hence, eggs didn’t end up being squarish.

While most eggs have evolved to, well, an egg-shape, some eggs like those of some owls are nearly spherical in shape. But oval and pointy eggs do have an advantage of sort.

Spherical eggs tend to roll easily, and if laid somewhere near a cliff, they’d roll away, never to be seen ever again. Oval eggs normally tend to roll in circles. Usually, they roll in big circles. Still dangerous for birds who perch on cliffs most of the time.

Of all the eggs, the egg of a common guillemot bird is probably the most incredible – in the sense that it has a design that doesn’t let it roll down cliffs very easily.

Common guillemots are sea birds and they normally like to perch on cliffs. To add to the danger of their precarious perching places, they usually perch on such cliffs with a huge group. Also, they don’t even make nests.

Had their eggs been shaped like those of owls, they would have easily gotten knocked by someone from that huge group of perching birds, perching on precarious cliffs. So, their eggs have evolved to survive these conditions.

This is how their eggs look like. They are very awkwardly shaped. But when it rolls, thanks to natural selection, it rolls in very small circles! They don’t fall off cliffs easily. Wonderful!

common guillemot egg

First seen at [io9]

The Langton’s Ant

By Anupum Pant

Think of a cell sized ant sitting on a huge grid of such white cells. The thing to note about this ant is that it follows a certain sets of simple rules. The main rule is that when the ant exits a cell, it inverts the colour of the cell it just left. Besides that:

  1. If the ant enters a white square, it turns left.
  2. If it enters a black square, it turns right.

Here’s what happens if the ant starts out in the middle and moves to the cell on the right, as a starting step (this can be on any side).

First step, it goes to the right.
First step, it goes to the right.
Enters a white cell and rule 1 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns left.
Enters a white cell and rule 1 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns left.
Enters a white cell and rule 1 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns left. (Again)
Enters a white cell and rule 1 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns left. (Again)
Enters a white cell and rule 1 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns left. (Again)
Enters a white cell and rule 1 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns left. (Again)
Enters a black cell and rule 2 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns right.
Enters a black cell and rule 2 kicks in. The exited cell is inverted in colour and it turns right.
Rule 1 again and so on...
Rule 1 again and so on…

Now as this continues, a seemingly random figure starts taking shape. The black cells are in total chaos, there seems to be no specific order to how they appear on the canvas. (of course the pattern is always the same chaos, considering the ant starts on a blank array of cells).

And yet, after about 10,000 steps are completed by the turing ant, it starts creating a very orderly highway kind of figure on the canvas. It enters an endless loop consisting of 104 steps which keeps repeating for ever and creates a long highway kind of structure.

Suppose, initially you take a configuration of black spots on a canvas (not a blank white canvas). Take an array of cells with randomly arranged black spots, for instance. If given enough time, the ant ultimately always ends up making the looped highway. However, before it starts doing it, it might take a significant amount of steps less, or more, than the ~10,000 steps it took to reach the loop in a blank array of cells.

No exception has ever been found. A computer scientist Chris Langton discovered this in the year 1986.

Incredible Natural Phenomenon – Sea Foam

By Anupum Pant

Sea foam is a fairly common occurrence. But usually when sea waves crash and get agitated, the organic matter present in the water forms a foam that is not too much in quantity. It forms and then breaks down before a lot of it gets collected. Normally, only a few thin lines of foam can be seen on the surface of the sea here and there.

However, sometimes when the conditions are totally right, the volume of foam formed can reach incredible levels. This happens when decayed algal matter washes up on the shore and the sea water gets agitated due to breaking waves.

In the past such a blanket of foam 1-3 meters high, formed in the sea, has been washed up on a couple of coastlines, where it has reached the roads and also into people’s homes. In spite of being a fascinating natural phenomenon to experience, this foam is only a trouble for the people wishing to carry on with their daily grind.

Most times it is harmless. But other times when the decayed algal matter has algal toxins, it can produce a foam that can make your skin and eyes irritated. Even mass deaths of sea creatures and birds have been seen in the past.

Door to Hell

By Anupum Pant

For more than 40 years now, a 250 feet hole in the ground in Turkmenistan has remained glowing with a yellow-orange flame. They call it the door to hell.

It started in the year 1971 when soviet scientists set up a rig to extract natural gas at that place, and the rig collapsed. When that happened, the scientists feared the spread of huge amounts of methane gas, and set the place on fire. They estimated that the fire would go out in a couple of hours. But it lasted, and has lasted for more than 40 years. The fire in it is still burning strong.

The hole is in a very isolated place and it’s hard to find directions to reach it. It is still a tourist place and locals do know how to reach it.

The huge blasts of hot air, and the pungent gases that emanate from the pit make it hard to stand at the edge, but mesmerized by its view people still do it.

Bizarre Starfish Wasting Syndrome

By Anupum Pant

Up in the Washington state a videographer and also a diver, Laura James noticed a couple of  dead Starfish on the coast one day. The dead bodies looked like something mysterious had happened. There were broken bodies and splats all over the place as if the fish had been zapped by a laser.

Laura videographed some of the tens of thousands of starfish bodies all over the north america’s pacific coast. No one was sure what was actually happening. And then there were reports of these mysterious starfish deaths from all over the west coast of North America.

For some time, only the sunflower starfish were thought to be affected by this. However, on further investigation, it was found that almost 12 different species of starfish were dying mysteriously all over the west coast (and some on the east coast too). When this was confirmed to be an epidemic of some sort, they started calling it the sea star wasting syndrome and notified the scientists.

Ben minor, a western Washington university professor of biology started collecting sea stars at the coast. They found a number of normal sea stars. Later when the search continued a pile of sea star arms and twisted parts of them were found at different places. Some of the live starfish were collected and were studied in the laboratory.

It was confirmed that the starfish which were affected by this epidemic experienced twisting arms and lesions first and then the arms crawled away in different directions, tearing the body of a starfish apart. All of it in under 24 hours. This bizarre disease then left a spill of inside parts of the fish and broken body parts all over the place.

No one knows for sure what causes this bizarre disease among the sea stars.

Staircase to the Moon

By Anupum Pant

Broome is a coastal town in the Kimberley region of west Australia. Every year when all the conditions perfectly fall in place, a very interesting and brilliant natural spectacle occurs. They call it “Staircase to the moon“. It indeed looks like stairs reaching to the moon. Thousands of tourists and the local people gather to watch it happen.

For it to happen the weather, sunset, moonrise and the tide conditions all need to be perfectly right. Before I tell you what happens there, look at a picture of this natural phenomenon. (Or it won’t seem very interesting if I tell you about it first).

Staircase-To-The-Moon

This happens only during the low tide at the coast when the moon is rising. During the low tide, the mudflats get exposed and the rising moon creates this mesmerising reflection on the sand.

The natural phenomenon can also been seen from other coastlines at Onslow, Dampier, Cossack, Point Samson Peninsula, Hearson Cove and Port Hedland.

The Weissenberg Effect

By Anupum Pant

Remember the time we talked about a boiled egg spinning on a pool of milk? If you don’t then it’s good to know that if you do spin a hard-boiled egg on a pool of milk (or any relatively viscous liquid) the milk mysteriously climbs the side of the egg, reaches the equator, and then sprinkles around beautifully. It’s fun to see it happen. This is something similar…

The thing we see today is called the Weissenberg effect and this is how it works.

You take a spinning rod and put it into a solution of liquid polymer (which is usually very viscous). And when you do that, you see that the liquid polymer magically climbs the walls of the rod.

Some liquids reach a little high and never beyond. While others can climb up really high. The difference in heights to which different liquids can climb to is demonstrated in the following video very clearly. The three liquids used in it are as follows:

  1. Guar gum solution crosslinked with sodium tetraborate
  2. Pancake batter
  3. and Dyed glue crosslinked with sodium tetraborate.

[Read more]

A 2-Minute Exercise to Do Better in Interviews

By Anupum Pant

Is there a job interview or a public speaking gig coming up for you? Well, you don’t have to worry as much as you are doing right now because Amy Cuddy is here to save you.

Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, talks about a power pose – a 2-minute pose – you could strike before going into an interview which has been proven to have a significant difference in your performance at anything that requires confidence (like an interview).

She introduces this concept in the a very convincing TED talk that I’ve attached below. If you do not need much convincing, you could skip watching the talk and just do this before you go into an interview or go to the stage for something.

  • Find a quiet place where no one will see you and make fun of you.
  • Strike a superhero pose. If you don’t know what that means, stand like this. For 2 minutes. Done! Otherwise, here is a nice infographic based on Cuddy’s research. [Link]
  • If you don’t, at least do not stoop and close your shoulders while waiting in the lobby because it certainly affects you negatively.

Apparently, according to an experiment by Amy Cuddy and Dana Carney of Berkeley, 86% of those who posed in the high-power position (the superhero pose) opted to gamble, while only 60% of the low-power posers (closed poses) felt comfortable taking a roll of the dice.

Moreover, a significant difference was found in the saliva samples of both the high-power pose people and the low-power pose people. Who’d have thought that a simple 2 minute pose could make chemical differences in your body!

On an average, the high-pose people saliva showed an 8% increase in the testosterone level, while the ones who did the low-power pose had a 10% decrease of the same. That is phenomenal, if you ask me.

Also, the hormone related to stress, Cortisol decreased by 25% among high-power posers and increased 15% among low power posers. (A decrease in cortisol levels is better for activities like interviews)

The Giant Japanese Hornet is an Intense Killer Machine

By Anupum Pant

For the sake of knowing, scientists have given the Japanese Giant hornet a name – Vespa mandarinia japonica – a name normally you need not remember. However, there is a thing you should always remember about them. See the picture of this insect below and remember what it looks like. And if you see it coming towards you while you are holidaying in Japan, just run for for your life. This is the Japanese Giant Hornet:

giant hornet

Yes, this giant hornet is a deadly killer machine. You should fear it because…

Well, first of all they are large and fearsome and have stingers that are more than 6 mm long. They use these to inject a relatively large amount of venom into the target – A kind of venom which attacks the nervous system and damages tissues. The venom is also known to destroy red blood cells, which can result in kidney failure and even death in some cases.

Secondly, just read what Wikipedia says about it…

Thirty to forty people die in Japan every year after having been stung, which makes the Japanese giant hornet the second most lethal animal in Japan after humans (bears kill zero to five people and venomous snakes kill five to ten people each year).

Thirdly, these hornets are known to move around in small groups of 20-30 individuals who manage to kill tens of thousands of bees in their own beehive, and then they steal their young ones. About 30 of these giant hornets can kill 30,000 bees in a single attack. They don’t just kill, they rip the bees apart mercilessly. Watch a video of them ravaging a beehive…

Also remember that it won’t come searching for you to sting you to death, until it senses threat.

It’s So Easy To Make A Speaker At Home!

By Anupum Pant

While doing a random experiment with the ordinary motor, a youtuber Andy Elliott who runs the channel mist8k (known for his awesome videos) mistakenly touched the 3.5 mm jack of a speaker cable to the motor’s wires.

This resulted in something very interesting. The sound being transmitted through the cable started coming from the motor. And consequently, he invented the very basic speaker. Then he made a video of him explaining how to make a speaker at home using just a copper wire, magnet, tape, jacks and a disposable plastic cup.

I first saw this on Gizmodo and I thought it deserved a mention in the engineering section of this blog. I can’t wait to try it myself and probably improve the “very basic speaker” to make a nice iPod dock in the future…

Here is what he does –

  • Uncoils a copper wire from a component of an old PC, turns it into a small circular coil of the size of the circular magnet and then tapes it to the back of a disposable plastic cup.
  • Then, makes a larger coil by winding it around a bottle cap and tapes it on top of the smaller coil.
  • Connects one end of the larger coil to the tip of the 3.5 mm jack and the other end of the coil to the base of the jack. The other end of this wire having the 3.5 mm jack is also a 3.5 mm jack, which goes into the computer’s (or any player’s) speaker plug.
  • Places a strong neodymium magnet on top of the coils and plays the music. That’s it!

The computer turns the sound signal into an electric current. This current flows into the jack and then into the coil. Thus, the coil produces a magnetic field of its own. This varying magnetic field coupled with the static magnetic field of the neodymium magnet makes the coil move. Which in turn moves the back of the cup (as it’s taped on it) and makes the air vibrate. As a result, sound is created.

Here’s the video where he teaches how to do it…