Tag: death

Popping a Pimple Can Actually Cause Death

By Anupum Pant

Never ever try to pop a pimple on your face, especially if it is in the danger triangle of the face (explained below).

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that popping a pimple coming out in a certain area of your face could be lethal. If not lethal, it can cause facial paralysis or meningitis. Of course the chances aren’t that high, but it’s 100% true. If you don’t trust me, or you think Wikipedia is not always right, you could go and ask your physician about the “danger triangle of the face“. For real recorded cases of grave problems caused due to popping of pimples, you could check this link. To quote one…

A moderately stout man of 20, scratched the head off a pimple on his lip six days before admission to the hospital and died 36 hours after admission.

Recent example of a serious problem caused due to popping of a single pimple.

The danger area: The danger triangle is sort of a triangle, more of a rectangle on your face which covers the eyes (and eyebrows), the nose and the upper lip. The diagram is not completely accurate. Pimples in this area of the face should be left untouched.

Why? This area of the face covers something called the Cavernous sinus. In simple words, it is a cavity at the base of the brain which drains deoxygenated blood from the brain back to the heart. Unfortunately, the facial veins which circulate blood to the danger part of the face can drain blood directly drain into this cavity, the same cavity which has a direct access to the brain. Also, since there are no check valves, the blood can flow in any direction in these parts.

Now, if pimples are popped, the bacteria from these pimples can flow back and ultimately reach the brain. Imagine noxious pus flowing into your brain. That’d definitely be dangerous. But it is highly unlikely. Still, there is a chance.

Be careful. Don’t use your hands to pop pimples. Leave them alone.

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Gompertz Law – The Dreadful Law of Death

By Anupum Pant

There is no astrologer in the world that can tell you for sure if you’ll die this year or not. But, thanks to Gompertz Law, if you ask me, there is one thing I can tell you for sure – Whatever may be the odds of you dying this year, in 8 years, the likelihood of you dying will double.

This dreadful law of death was named after the first person who noted it – Benjamin Gompertz, in the year 1825. The law rests on a general assumption that a person’s resistance to death decreases as he ages. The Gompertz Law of mortality, put simply in a sentence would compute to this:

Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years.

It is amazing, and no one knows how it works exactly. Why does nature pick the number 8, to double our likelihood of death? We’ll probably never know.

There is a whole table which relies on census data, and statistically notes the probabilities of people dying at different ages. And when it is plotted on a Probability of death vs. Age graph, you get an exponentially increasing mortality rate with age. That is death coming faster as you get older.

Gompertz Law can be verified for real-life data – the 2005 US census data. The following graph and the probability vs. age plotted using the law match almost perfectly. Amazingly, the law holds true for several other countries too.

gompertz law graph

That means, the probability of me, a 25-year-old dying during the next year is very small — about 1 in 3,000. When I become 33, this probability will grow to something around 1 in 1,500. In the next 8 years, the probability of me dying will be 1 in 750, and so on…At the age 100, the probability a person’s death will be about 1 out of 2 – fat chance of successfully moving on to 101!

Theoretically, using this data, it can be said with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130 (of course only if medicine doesn’t start tampering with human genes, or some other artificial factor). There is one thing for sure – there is almost no chance that you are going to beat Mr. Ming.

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Making Fresh Water With Apple and Tomato Peels

By Anupum Pant

Water on Earth

It’s Christmas! On this happy day let’s take a minute to look at what the major part of the world is facing today.

The present situation might not look as bad, but the truth is that we are running out of fresh water. To give you an idea about how much water is actually there on earth, this image of the whole world’s water compared with the size of earth is, in my view, the best thing that could prove it to you.

Fresh water in all the lakes and rivers on the whole planet is represented by the tiniest dot.  Yes, there is a third water sphere in the picture. You might have to squint to find it. So, that is the amount of fresh water we have here on earth.

global-water-volume-fresh
Source: http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

War for water: If this image isn’t much of a proof that fresh water is scarce, probably this will do the trick:
Countries consider fresh water a very precious resource. Several countries all around the world are fighting with their neighbors for this blue gold. Two good examples of that – [India starts water war] and [This]

The Point

Today, economically and technologically backward countries require good cost-effective methods to purify water. Scientists are doing a tremendous amount of work in this area and coming out with innovative methods to deal with the problem. Also, it is one great idea for taking up as a science fair project by students. One such recent research regarding this caught my attention.

The fruit peel method

Note: If you are wondering why have I written fruit when we are dealing with a tomato here, this might come as a shock to you that Tomato is actually a fruit. And BTW:

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn’t belong in a fruit salad. – Miles Kingston

Mr Ramakrishna Mallampati, under the guidance of Associate Professor Suresh Valiyaveettil of the Department of Chemistry at the NUS Faculty of Science, have discovered a new way of purifying water which is both innovative and cost effective. Moreover, it uses the waste product of a fruit, its peel, for something good. They hope that their new technology will comes as a boon to the people living in areas where a water treatment plant cannot be set up.

According to their research, a tomato’s peel, under certain conditions, can remove dissolved organic and inorganic chemicals, dyes and pesticides. Additionally, an apple’s peel was also found to have these wonderful properties. Apple’s peel loaded with Zirconium were found to be effective in removing phosphate, arsenate, arsenite, and chromate anions. This is the first time ever someone has used to remove two different kinds of pollutants using two different kinds of peels. Notably, all their processes can be scaled up for large scale applications.

I hope that this new discovery will come as a respite to all the poor nations where people die everyday due to the unavailability of drinking water – due to diseases.

Source: http://water.org/water-crisis/water-facts/water/#
Source: http://water.org/water-crisis/water-facts/water/#

For more details – [NUS researchers developed world’s first water treatment techniques using apple and tomato peels]

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Building A Solar Death Ray At Home

By Anupum Pant

Sun’s Energy

Sun is an huge fusion reactor. Every second it produces enough energy that could power the US for 9 million years. But from the perspective of people living on earth, most of it radiates into the space and gets ‘wasted’. Still by using even the part of energy that is received by us, a solar death ray that melts steel can be built.

Earth is only a fraction of the size of sun. In comparison, sun is so mind-boggling-ly big that I bet you can’t manually scroll this page from Sun, all the way to earth (and this is a heavily scaled down version of our Solar System). In short, earth is so small that it receives a microscopic fraction of the energy radiated out by the sun.

Technically: The total flux received by earth is about 343 Watt per meter squared. On the way to earth’s surface, 30% of this gets scattered by the atmosphere and 19% of it is absorbed by the clouds. So, out of 343, only 51 percent reaches the surface. Which is calculated to be about 175 Watt per meter squared. Which is a very small part of the energy that sun gives out. [Source]

And yet, sunlight received by earth has by far has the highest theoretical potential of the earth’s renewable energy sources.

Harnessing this energy

For humans, it is possible to directly harness this energy broadly in two ways – heat or electricity (photoelectric effect). We are interested in only the heat part here. To demonstrate the kind of heat that can be generated by focusing 2 meter square worth of this energy to a single point, watch how this equipment can melt steel in seconds (The melting point of steel is around 1500 degree centigrade).

Making at home

Building something similar at home is fairly easy as far as the concept is concerned. But the process can be very tedious. I found three interesting ways in which this can be done at home.

1. Using a satellite dish: A satellite dish is parabolic and is designed to focus signal to a single point. Instead of signal, you could use it to focus light (sun rays). To use an old dish for making a solar death ray, all you’ll have to do is stick 5,800 tiny pieces of mirrors on its surface, like Eric Jacqmain did. – [Source]

2. Use a projection TV: A projection TV has a huge Fresnel lens in front of it. It is kind of a convex lens that is flat. If you can find an old projection TV, you could use the screen to make a solar death ray like Grant Thompson did.

3. Using water: Another creative way could be to use water. By combining the power of gravity and stretching plastic, you could turn clear water into a parabolic lens like this [Video]. Although I don’t think something like this could be efficient enough to melt steel. It could still be used as an outdoor machine to cook breakfast.

EDIT: Why isn’t there a comments section?

First I forgot to add this and remembered only when a reader pointed it out. I promised in my yesterday’s post, that i’d tell you the reason behind a missing comments section on this blog. Here it goes…

I use a theme built by Leo Babauta (see FAQ) and am a fan of his teachings. It [the theme] has an inbuilt comment section but Leo doesn’t use comments on his blog. For me to not use it too, there are 3 reasons:

  1. I’m a fan of Leo Babauta and try to emulate his ways in my life. (not perfectly)
  2. I want to create a pure reading experience for the reader (now ads, which hinder the pure reading experience, are for experiment only). People who really like to interact usually mail me. And it is a much more enriching experience.
  3. Unlike every other blogger, comments have a great effect on me. This in turn affects my ability to write. For instance, comments which appreciate, seem flattering to me. As a result, I become complacent. If they are critical, I get concerned about my writing abilities. There are hardly any neutral comments. I’d like to focus my energy on writing than arguing on the internet.

I do have plans to include it in the future. It is just that I’m not sure when I’ll do it. Probably when I change my theme, I’ll do that.

Sharks Are Not So Bad After All

By Anupum Pant

Sharks have been on earth for millions of years more than we have been here. Also, they haven’t changed much since a long time. The kind of sharks we see today, were the same sharks that existed 350 million years ago.

That means, modern sharks have lived happily for millions of years without eating humans. Even today, they aren’t very keen on killing us for food. They simply aren’t designed (or haven’t evolved) to do that. Humans were never a part of their normal diet. Instead, they normally feed on small fish. While a few other species of sharks may eat seals, sea lions and other mammals too. In fact, they can go on for months without food.

Funny as it may sound, sharks are scared of humans. When a shark sees a human in water, it gets confused and scared. It goes near to check,  and this usually results in an accidental bite. They don’t kill humans out of aggression. With 15 rows of razor sharp teeth on each jaw, even their gentle bites may kill a person. About only 20 out of 300 species of sharks are reported to have been involved in accidents with human beings.  About 100 such accidents occur every year.

Not being insensitive about human deaths: Can you estimate how many people do sharks kill every year? The answer is 10. Ten people, on an average are killed by shark bites every year. That is about 1/15 th of number of people killed by coconuts every year*
*Note: “150 people are killed by coconuts every year”, is a popular urban legend. The coconut death figure is a crude estimate or just a figure pulled out of thin air.

Nevertheless, the number of people killed by sharks every year is very very less (again, even a single human death isn’t really ‘less’). I’d rather not use statistics to prove my point. [image]

Why are sharks scared of us? … Why shouldn’t they be?
We kill about 100 million sharks every year. That is such a huge number when compared to number of people sharks kill every year. Again, statistics could be deceiving here. But we do get an idea. There is a massive difference in the number.
Why? Humans catch sharks for their meat, internal organs and skin,  to make products such as shark fin soup, lubricants, and leather etc. Some times, fins are cut and live sharks are thrown back into the sea, crippled. This eventually kills them due to excessive bleeding or other obvious reasons.

It is ironically that we move into their natural habitat and in turn blame sharks for destroying our boats, surf boards. Moreover, we are shocked to hear about reports of shark attacks on humans. Shouldn’t it be the other way round? We should stop looking at sharks as if they are the monsters; we are. At the same time, that doesn’t mean you should risk your life by going in shark waters to give it a high-five.

Random Science Fact:  

Only 14% of the Earth’s species are known to us. 75% of all the species on Earth will be gone within the next 300 years. Think about those species which will go extinct while we are here, and we’ll never know about them.

Pope John XXI – A Man of God and Science

by Anupum Pant

Pope John XXI was the only pope ever, who had an illustrious medical career alongside his work as a theologian. He was also a fruitful writer, who wrote on subjects like logic, physics, philosophy and medicine. Before being elected as a Pope, he served as personal physician to Pope Gregory.

In medicine, he contributed towards great advances in female reproductive system and wrote about a few remarkably effective methods of birth control, during times when the Catholic Church condemned contraception. He also taught medicine at the University of Siena.

As men with thoughts ahead of their time are always labeled as heretics, John was also called a magician after his death. His death was announced to have been caused by “an act of god”.

The unfortunate accident

His brief papacy [of 8 months, 1276-77] ended with a tragic accident:

As a man of the science, he dabbled in astronomy and had a special room built in the papal palace. He loved spending hours in this special room, where he could observe the stars at night. It was in this room, where he sustained severe injuries, when the roof of his palace collapsed. He died six days later (on May 20, 1277).

Stephen Hawking’s interpretation

In 1277, Pope John XXI’s declared ‘laws of nature’ to be heresy because they conflicted with God’s omnipotence. Several years later, Hawking and Mlodinow, with their book, The Grand Design, caused quite a stir when they wrote – “Pope John was killed by the effects of the law of gravity a few months later when the roof of his palace fell in on him“.

Bonus Death Fact: Jack Daniel, the founder of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey distillery, died in very peculiar manner:

Unable to open the safe in his office, Mr. Jack kicked it in frustration. This blow broke his toe and infection set in, leading to his untimely death in 1911. – [Source]