Tag: busted

Carrots Don’t Really Make your Eyes Better

By Anupum Pant

I have been lied about taste areas on the tongue, gas station & cellphones and what not! I feel everything I have ever known is wrong. And here we have one other myth that got busted today. I always thought was true. Thanks to the following Vsauce video (0:28 seconds) which opened my eyes and sent me to research on this topic.

I was so sure about carrots helping your eyesight that I had never questioned this belief. My parents told me, the doctors told me, my teachers and every one else (even Kawaii) told me.

Eat more carrots. Carrots will improve your vision.

eat more carrot kawaii

The truth about carrots

The truth is, carrots of course are good for the health of your eyes like any healthy diet is, but they don’t improve your vision. You won’t start seeing in the dark if you eat more carrots. Your normal diet gets you enough of vitamin – A to keep your eyes healthy. Carrots do no extra magic.

Carrots contain a substance called beta-carotene, which gets converted into vitamin – A and as everyone knows vitamin – A is good for your eyes. Of course the lack of vitamin – A in your diet could land your eyes in a problem. But you normally get enough of it through a normal diet. You don’t need carrots to keep your eyes disease free. Any more of vitamin – A supplied by carrots isn’t going to make your vision better. 

What is more interesting is how this propaganda started…

The Interesting Myth Origin

Turns out, “carrots make you see better” was a widespread World war II propaganda, clearly a bold faced lie which was used to save London from the tyranny of Nazi. It probably did better than the best email scam ever. The lie blew up, and today it has reached almost every living kid. I’m pretty sure even textbooks mention this.

During the WWII, the Royal Air Force started using radar to spot Luftwaffe bombers at night. But they wanted to keep this trick of their’s a secret. To achieve secrecy What did they do? They started a propaganda.

A story came into existence. According to it, a very skilled British Pilot, “Cats’ Eyes” who ate a lot of carrots, had developed a night-vision of sorts, and had gained the ability to spot German bombers at night by just tweaking his diet habits. British civillians loved the story and started eating more carrots. They thought it would improve their vision and they’d start seeing at night. The story spread like wild fire. Who would have known that the Cats’ eyes story was a propaganda issued by the Navy to conceal their use of radar technology.

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The propaganda of course did save London.

Too much of anything is bad

FYI: Like too much of anything, even too much of Vitamin – A can be toxic. Deaths rarely happen due to this. But, they do!
Also, eating too much carrot may overdose your body with beta-carotene and could cause Carotenemia. As a result, your skin would turn yellow. It looks like jaundice, but it’s harmless and easily reversible.

Can Your Eyes Breathe?

By Anupum Pant

Wait! Who says eyes breathe

The transparent front part of the eye that covers the iris and pupil is called Cornea. Cornea contributes a lot to the focusing power of the eye. That means, light has to pass through it without obstruction. To do that it has to remain completely clear. Consequently, to remain transparent, it can’t have any impurities nor can it have any blood vessels – that would have made it less transparent.

Every organ needs oxygen to run the cell processes with the energy that comes by oxidizing nutrients contained in the cells. To receive oxygen, they need to have access to blood. Since Cornea does not have any blood vessels, it cannot receive oxygen from blood. So what does it do to stay alive?

It absorbs oxygen directly from the air through diffusion. Oxygen gets dissolved in the tears and then diffuses across the cornea. However, the amount of diffused oxygen is so less that it is just enough for only the cornea cells. This can’t be supplied to other parts of the body. And this is exactly the reason you would get yourself killed if you plug your nose and your mouth, expecting your eye would keep you alive by breathing in oxygen.

In a sense, you could call it breathing. But it isn’t exactly ‘breathing’. Breathing, according to the medical definition means:

The process of respiration, during which air is inhaled into the lungs through the mouth or nose due to muscle contraction and then exhaled due to muscle relaxation.

Clearly, as the oxygen received by cornea doesn’t come from the mouth or nose and never goes through the lungs, it cannot be called breathing.

Other ways?

Let us consider the second possibility. At the inner corner of the eye there is a very thin tube that connects to the nose. Through this tube (A.K.A the Punctum), your eye is able to drain off excess tears. Punctum is the reason, you have to blow your nose when you cry. Punctum is also the tube that enables this guy to squirt milk out of his eyes (By sucking it through his nose first) [Video – Pretty disgusting to watch]

Also, you can blow an extremely tiny volume air out of these corner eye holes. But, you can’t breathe in through them.

Conclusion

Although the cornea of your eye has the ability to absorb oxygen directly from the air, you cannot technically call it breathing.

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Is Glass Liquid Or Solid

By Anupum Pant

Glass stories have tormented me for years. A few well informed gentlemen, over the years, have communicated to me anecdotes that have contradicted and shown glass as liquid or solid, without solid proofs that could have helped me believe just one of them. A few days back, like I cleared my doubts about the gas station and cellphone story, I decided to find this out too. So, what is it really? Is glass liquid or solid?

Glass is a liquid?

1. Antique glass panes: A couple of years back I was told (I don’t remember where it came from) that glass windows of very old buildings have glass panes that have been found to be thicker at the bottom. That, according to them, absolutely proves that glass is a liquid that flows very slowly. And apparently explains, how the lower parts of these old panes get thicker – the glass from the upper part of the pane flows down as time passes. I thought it would be something like the world’s slowest experiment; so it could be true.

Till today, I had believed the same. It turns out, I was wrong all along.

Explanation: Firstly, there is no statistical study ever conducted that proves, all antique window panes are thicker at the bottom. Secondly, even if all of them are really thicker at the bottom, the difference in thickness has nothing to do with whether glass is a solid or a liquid. The cause of thicker bottoms is due to the fact that glass manufacturing process that was employed at the time wasn’t able to create perfect glass panes (with uniform thickness). The process made it almost impossible to produce glass panes of constant thickness.

Or, you could simply wait for a few years to see if perfect glass panes stuck on skyscrapers today mysteriously turn thicker in the bottom.

If you think you can NOT take my word for it, I have a quote for you from a distinguished science textbook – Glass Science – below:

Glass is an amorphous solid. A material is amorphous when it has no long-range order, that is, when there is no regularity in the arrangement of its molecular constituents on a scale larger than a few times the size of these groups. A solid is a rigid material; it does not flow when it is subjected to moderate forces. – Doremus, R. H. (1994)

2. Glass is a Super-cooled liquid? : This misunderstood phrase from Gustav Tammann’s book is probably the origin of the myth that glass is a liquid. The quote “glass is a frozen supercooled liquid” has been misquoted hundreds of times with the word “frozen”, forgotten. Today, this misquotation has grown to such great levels that it is actually difficult to go down and extricate the original quote that contained the word “frozen” in it. One word can indeed make a huge difference.

Finally, glasses are only amorphous solids. Where the term amorphous and solid have been separately been explained clearly in the year 1994 by Doremus R. H.
Together, these two words mean the same as definition of two separate words put together. Glass is not a liquid.

If you haven’t read about the ancient Nanotech marvel, Lycurgus cup, you are probably missing something amazing about ancient glass technology.

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