Tag: fact

The Simple Difference Between Venom and Poison

By Anupum Pant

Venom and Poison are both toxic substances. Still, some animals are called venomous and others are poisonous. The only difference between being called poisonous or venomous is in the way these animals deliver the harmful substance.

Venom: When animals like snakes use their sharp fangs to bite into the flesh and let the toxic substance move into the body of their prey,  through the punctured skin, they are called venomous animals. To deliver venom an animal has to use tools like fangs or stingers.

Poison: Poison is something that can get inhaled, ingested or seeped into the skin directly. For example, if you accidentally touch a brightly colored poison dart frog, you will transfer the toxins it secretes from its skin, to your own skin. And then the poison will seep into your blood stream.

The same substance can be Venom + Poison: Some substances can be both venom and poison depending on how an animal delivers it. eg: Tetrodotoxin – an extremely toxic substance – is found in both puffer fish and in a blue ringed octopus. It is poisonous in a puffer fish and venomous in a blue ringed octopus.

The same animal can be both venomous and poisonous: One example for this is the pelagic sea snake – a snake related to cobra. It has a poisonous flesh and its bite can also deliver a venom.

Non-poisonous Venom: There are some venoms which can be ingested without experiencing any ill effects because it was not designed to survive the acids present in the stomach. These types of venoms won’t get a chance to get absorbed in the blood stream. Before they try that, they might get digested. This is the reason a snake doesn’t die when it swallows its own venom. That doesn’t mean you can try drinking snake venom.

So you can happily go around telling everybody that most snakes aren’t poisonous, because most snakes use fangs to deliver venom, not poison. [Video]

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Taste Areas on the Tongue is a Lie

By Anupum Pant

Background

At some point in your school education, each one of your science books has shown you the ‘tongue map’ [Image]. There are solid demarcated boundaries shown in that diagram. The boundaries shown enclose areas on your tongue which exclusively specialize in tasting specific kinds of tastes. According to it:

  • The back of your tongue is responsible for the bitter taste.
  • Sides are responsible for sour and salty tastes.
  • And the tip is for tasting sweet stuff.

What it is really?

Unfortunately, it may be hard to digest the fact that taste areas don’t work that way. Although some parts are slightly more sensitive to specific tastes, mostly, all parts of your tongue can taste all the four (or five, or six) tastes almost equally. There are no taste area demarcations. Please don’t unsubscribe me for debunking something that you’ve believed in all these years.

Agreed it isn’t completely BS, you can call it an oversimplification of something. But one thing is for sure – It shouldn’t be shown on science books. The worst part – We have known this fact for more than 30 years and we still continue to propagate the misconception in school textbooks.

Where did this start?

It started a century back when a German scientist D.P. Hainig did a study which relied on subjective whims of his subjects. In five words, it was not very scientific. They were asked to report which parts of their tongues tasted which flavor. And THERE! He had a result – The tongue map.

Test at home

All said, I tried this at home. Since the ‘sweet buds’ are said to be located on and near the tip of the tongue, I found that it would be easy to isolate these buds by sticking out my tongue (and looking dumb by doing that. Fortunately, I did it in a closed room). Now, I placed a few sugar crystals in the middle part of the tongue. I made sure that it never touched my tip. The sugar did not taste sweet at all. And as soon as I retracted my tongue, the sweet taste was felt. Confusing!

However, salt tasted salty at the tip of the tongue. According to the map, it isn’t supposed to.

Well, that test wasn’t really scientific. It was exactly what the German scientist D.P. Hanig did to come out with the tongue map. It was busted in the year 1974 by a scientist named Virginia Collings.

Productivity: A Doze of Cuteness is good before Work

By Anupum Pant

If you like to secretly surf the /r/aww page at work, well, science says, it no longer has to be a secret activity. An experiment conducted by researchers at Hiroshima University is a perfect scientific document to convince your boss to allow you a dose of cuteness at work. So here’s a picture of a bunny with a backpack. bunny with a backpack

Note: Cuteness also causes “cute aggression”

According to the study conducted by scientists at Hiroshima University, looking at cute pictures could make you work better. More specifically, cute pictures inspire fine tuned attention and careful behavior.

The study conducted three experiments to check the effects of cute pictures on tasks performed afterwards:

1. A few university students were asked to perform tasks which required a careful coordination of small muscular movements (eg: small finger movements), before and after viewing images of baby or adult animals; performance was measured. It was found that performance measured using the number of successful trials increased after viewing cute images. A performance increase of about 45% was measured. “Less cute pictures” had a positive effect too. But this was found to be much lesser than the performance increase measured after watching cute pictures – around 12% increase.

2. The second experiment was conducted on the same lines, except that the performance task was changed. This time subjects were asked to perform counting tasks. For example, they were given an array of numbers and were asked to count the number of times the number 3 appeared in it. Again, cute and less cute pictures resulted in a performance increase of 15% and 2% respectively.

3. In the third experiment a global-local letter task (more about it here) was given to the subjects. The results showed that the students performed tasks requiring focused attention more carefully after viewing cute images.

Explanation

The study propelled the lead researcher, Hiroshi Nittono, to find an proper reasoning for this effect; he implies that since humans are hard-wired to speak & deal slowly & carefully when they are around little babies, they are inclined to do the same with other tasks after looking at cute things.

Gravity Defying Chain of Beads

By Anupum Pant

Chain of Beads

Suppose, you have a neat pile of a really long chain of beads in a beaker (Newton’s beads) and you give one end of the beads a tug and let it drop on the floor, what do you think will happen?

Steve Mould, a YouTuber, did the same with a 8000 bead chain. It was 50 meter long chain of beads placed neatly in a container. Then, after he tugged it out and let it drop, the chain mysteriously formed an arc above the beaker and continued to self-siphon away till the end. Just like a water-siphon.

Watch it in video to see what happens. [Video]

What keeps it going?

To figure out what was actually going on here and to understand the exact physics of it, a group of physicists recorded the “gravitational defiance” using a hi-speed camera. Here is a five-minute long video-bliss, brought to you by the Earth Unplugged channel. [video]

As Steve explains, it is like a tug-of war between the outer chain and the inner chain. The inner chain has to keep up with the fast-moving outer chain. As a result, it [the inner chain] goes up fast. It builds up momentum and is unable to stop itself. So, it ends up forming that arc while it is trying to slow down and change direction.

Benford’s Law Will Make You Wonder For a While

By Anupum Pant

Benford’s law is a fairly simple law to grasp and it will blow your mind. It deals with the leading digits of numbers.

So, for example, you have the number 28 – The leading digit for it would be 2. Similarly, the leading digit for 934 would be 9. Just pick the first digit. Now…

In a data set you’d say – it is common sense to assume that the probability of leading digit one (1) appearing would be more or less equal to that of leading digit nine (9).
As there are 9 possible leading digits, you’d think that the probability of each leading digit would compute to something around 0.11
You’d imagine that it would be normal to assume a nearly straight graph of probability vs. leading digit. But this isn’t true.

Benford’s law says

Your common sense fails. What actually happens is that the likelihood of 1 appearing as the first digit in a data set is around 0.3
For the following digits, the probability keeps decreasing. And the following graph appears. You’ll see that the numbers rarely start with nine!

Benford2

When does it work?

This counter-intuitive result applies to a wide variety of natural data sets. It works the best if your set spans quite a few orders of magnitude. Natural set of data like stock prices, electricity bills, populations, which could range from few single digit values to several digits work the best. Other data like the heights of people doesn’t work because it does not span “quite a few orders of magnitude”. Also, artificially tampered data fails to comply because the person who tampers does the same mistake everyone does. Therefore, Benford’s law is also used to detect frauds in data.

Example:

  1. Count the number of data points in a data set which have the leading digit 1 and write the number next to the number 1 in a table.
  2. Then, keep repeating it for all the numbers 2, 3, 4 and so on.
  3. Calculate the probabilities for each. In the end you’ll be left with a table that would look something like this. (Probability = Number of Data Points for that  digit / Total Data Points)
Leading Digit Digit Probability
1 0.301
2 0.17
3 0.125
4 0.097
5 0.079
6 0.067
7 0.058
8 0.051
9 0.046

How does it work?

Watch the  following video for the explanation:

Try it yourself: [Kirix]

Tsutomu Yamaguchi Survived Two Nuclear Bombs

By Anupum Pant

Two nuclear bomb blasts which resulted in a complete annihilation of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, involved deadly X-ray-heated fireballs sending off a shock waves in all directions at a velocity greater than the speed of sound. In theory, no object, living or dead, should have stood straight after the shock wave passed. At least, some person standing at just a 3 km distance from both the places, where Little boy and Fat man were dropped, should have  completely been vaporized; Twice!

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Tsutomu Yamaguchi didn’t die. He survived the immediate effects of, not one, but two nuclear bombs. Moreover, he was just 3 km away from both the ground zeros. Both of these bombings happened within a three-day span, during which, after having seen the first blast, he found the time to travel to the second site.
Although it is estimated that there are about 160+ such people, no one except Tsutomu Yamaguchi has officially been recognized to have survived both the nuclear bombs.

However he did die due to lung cancer on January 4, 2010. He died at an age of 93. So, technically the bombs didn’t kill him and he lived decades past the average human age.

His Story

First Bomb: Yamaguchi was going back to Nagasaki after a three-month long stay in Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945 when he was heading to the railway station to catch the train to Nagasaki, he found out that he’d forgotten his travel pass. He went back to take it. It was on his way back to the station (the second time), he saw the bomb falling down with a parachute. An instant later, everything went white. He was temporarily blinded, his ear drums got ruptured and he was burnt all over.

Second Bomb: With great difficulty he made it to an air-raid shelter, spent the night there and left for Nagasaki the next morning.Three days later, on August 9th, he thought he was fine to go back to work. At work, When he was explaining his burns to his boss who was listening in disbelief, the second air raid happened. Again, it was the same blinding lights that fell over this city now. Luckily, the second time he wasn’t affected with as many injuries.  However, he had been exposed  to a huge radiation dose which probably caused the cancer that killed him.

Isn’t is fascinating how millions of tiny little events had to happen at the right time and place for Yamaguchi to see and survive both of the nuclear bombs.

[Read More]

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There Is No Lake Like The Taal Lake

By Anupum Pant

Geologically this is quite a phenomenon and might get a bit confusing to grasp if you stop paying enough attention. Here we go…

Island in a lake on an island in a lake…

Taal lake is a freshwater lake on the Luzon island of Philippines. Almost at the center of this lake, is an island called the volcano island. At the center of this island is another lake called the main crater lake. And in this lake is a small landmass called the Vulcan point. [map]

Now take a deep breath…in short, it is, Luzon island > Taal lake > Volcano island > Main crater lake > Vulcan Point.

The main crater lake: Even though the crater lake isn’t a very big lake, it is still claimed as the  world’s largest lake on an island (Volcano Island) in a lake (Taal Lake) on an island (Luzon). Of course it is, where else in the whole world would you find a lake on an island in a lake on an island?

Vulcan point: On this world’s largest lake on an island in a lake on an island, is a tiny land mass called the Vulcan Point which is the world’s largest volcano in a lake (Main Crater Lake) on a volcano (Taal Volcano). It isn’t even big enough to support a small house.

Home to Unique Species

But all that is just a part of what is interesting about the Taal lake. Ecologically it is another marvel in a way that it is home to a few species of animals that are found nowhere else on earth. In this lake you’ll find the only varieties of fresh water sardines, sharks and sea snakes.

Reason: This lake was not a lake several thousands of years back. Then, due to volcanic eruptions, it got separated from the sea. Now the only thing that connected this water mass and the sea was Pansipit river. Gradually, several hundreds of years of precipitation converted this lake from a saltwater lake to a freshwater lake. For centuries, animals living here have remained isolated and have evolved into unique species to adapt to this desalination.

Largest Meteorite Left No Crater On Earth

By Anupum Pant

You should know: Meteor vs. Meteoroid vs. Meteorite

Meteor: The streak of light that we see in the sky is “Meteor”. When debris enters earth and gets burned up while entering, it leaves a streak of light. Unlike what is popularly believed, meteor is not the debris itself rather the word “meteor” refers to only the flash of light.

Meteoroid: A meteoroid is a mass that is small – ranging from a kilometer to only a few millimeters in diameter. Most meteoroids that enter the Earth’s atmosphere are so small that they vaporize completely and never reach the planet’s surface.

Meteorite: If the Meteoroid survives and reaches the earth’s surface, it becomes a Meteorite.

Hoba the Meteorite

About 80,000 years back, a ridiculously huge mix of Iron and Nickel entered the earth. It was so large that what was left out of all the burning through the atmosphere, measured 66,000 kg in the end. About half ton of this meteorite has gone to laboratories for research. Even after accounting for losses towards laboratories and vandalism, it is still the largest single mass of natural Iron on the Earth’s surface. It is the largest meteorite ever discovered till date and is called “Hoba”.

This meteorite was discovered by a farmer in Namibia in the year 1920. Since then, due to its mass, it has never been moved. The meteorite and the site has been declared as a national monument by the Namibian government and several tourists visit it every year.

Farmer’s Story: 

One winter as I was hunting at the farm Hoba I noticed a strange rock. I sat down on it. Only its upper part was visible. The rock was black, and all around it was calcareous soil. I scratched the rock with my knife and saw there was a shine beneath the surface. I then chiselled off a piece and took it to the SWA Maatskappy in Grootfontein, whose director established it to be a meteorite.

If that was hardly interesting…

The most puzzling thing about this meteorite is probably not that it belongs to a very rare class of meteorites (Ataxite), but the fact that it has no crater to be seen around it. Normally, a meteorite of this size should have left a crater hundreds of meters wide.

The best theory that explains the absence of any preserved crater around it is that, this piece of rock must have hit the earth’s surface at a very low angle. As a result, it must have skipped on the surface like a flat stone on water surface. And in the end, must have landed at the place where it lies today.

Ambergris – Whale Vomit Can Make You Rich

By Anupum Pant

It is yellow/gray, smells really bad and can make you rich [image]. Ambergris, or commonly known as whale vomit is a waxy, hard, flammable substance that sells for several thousand dollars a pound. Although it is known as whale vomit, it is usually excreted (not vomited) by the sperm whale. It is formed by the lumping of Bilary Secretions in a whale. They can’t be digested and are often excreted by whales. These lumps can float for years and might get washed to the beach or are found in whale abdomen.

A fresh lump would be black and slowly a lighter colored coating forms on it with age. Generally, lighter colored pieces have a sweeter smell because they have cured in the ocean for a longer time.

What makes it so costly?

Firstly, it is rare to find a lump of Ambergris. Secondly, as this substance ages, it leaves the stink and starts emitting a sweet, musky odor. Not all people like this smell. Other than its unique scent, the perfumes made of this substance last much longer than other scents that tend to evaporate. Both these reasons make it a substance in high demand.

Although the scent can be mimicked by using chemicals, there is nothing like using the real substance. Thus, whale vomit will always carry a premium price.

This year, Ken Wilman, while walking his dog on the beach, spotted a 6 lb lump of whale vomit that turned out to be worth £100,000.
Note to self: So, the next time you are going out for a walk on the beach, take your dog with you. And go on walks more often.

[read more]

McGurk Effect – What You See is What You Hear

By Anupum Pant

Do Not Cheat

  1. Close your eyes: Before you watch this video, you should know that, when you watch it for the first time, you have to watch it with closed eyes. Well, you can’t ‘watch’ with closed eyes. It simply means, you have to just hear the sound track first. I’m sure you can do it because closing eyes for 5 seconds is not asking for much. I don’t have any veiled interests here. It is for you. You won’t appreciate the effect if you keep your eyes open during the first go.
  2. Open your eyes: Watch it again with your eyes open. Be calm. It happens to everyone.

So that was the McGurk effect. It is a perfect example to show that accurate perception of reality may involve more than one sense. This is called “Multimodal perception”. In simple words, our senses do not learn from the surroundings independent from each other, they work together and learn together to help us perceive information.

The video

The video shows a man moving his lips as if saying “Ga” or “Da”, although it is just a visual of him saying that, let us call this the visual for the first sound (“Da” sound). The second sound is the “Ba” sound that is actually playing – this is the second sound.

When your eyes are closed, you hear the correct sound, the second sound – the “Ba” sound.
When you watch it again with your eyes open, you hear the “Da” sound. The brain combines the visual and audio signals to make you believe that the sound you are hearing is actually “Da”. Even if you are aware of this illusion, your brain doesn’t correct it for you, no matter how many times you repeat this.

Some interesting things about McGurk effect

  • You can focus anywhere on the face (not just the mouth) to perceive the same effect.
  • Women show a stronger McGurk effect than men.
  • Normally, people with mental disorders do not hear much difference in the sound with eyes open or closed.
  • By the age of 4 months, infants are able to identify facial movements and relate them to sounds. So, even infants show this effect to a certain extent.
  • Information rich perceptions are easier to remember. So, the next time you are trying to learn something, involve more senses. Probably involving a particular smell that goes with a piece of information will help you remember things well. Or a sound, maybe.

Note: Since my posts were getting longer everyday, I’ve tried to keep this one short. I don’t want the posts to be overwhelming for people who are not used to long reading. This blog is meant to make science sound interesting to everybody, not to scare them away from it. I’ll be waiting to receive your feedback on this. You can get in touch through twitter (@indigoanalysis)

Ming – A 507 Year Old Organism Killed By Scientists

By Anupum Pant

A few years before Leonardo da Vinci started painting the Mona Lisa, somewhere deep in the ocean, in the year 1499, a clam was born. When it stepped into this world, it was also the period of Ming Dynasty in China, so several years later the clam was named ‘Ming’ (Scientific name: Arctica islandica) by scientists. Ming was the 507 year old organism that unfortunately got killed.

Like crocodiles, clams are also one of those biologically immortal organisms. This one lived on for 507 years till the year 2006, when it was discovered by a group of researchers in deep oceans. Unaware of its age, researchers stored it like all the other 200 clams they had gathered, using refrigeration, which killed it (and the others). It was an unfortunate accident; definitely not intended in any way.

World record: Ming the clam was recorded as the oldest individual animal ever discovered. The record mentions “Individual” because often colonies are recorded to live for really long times. By those measures, this clam would have stood nowhere in comparison. For example the deep-sea black and gold corals 2700 years old have been found. But, scientists are pretty sure that there are older individual organisms [than Ming] still living out there, waiting to be discovered.

Why do they live so long?

Their genes, extremely slow oxygen intake and very slow metabolism are some of the known factors that enable these clams to live for centuries. Their age is measured accurately by using Radiocarbon dating.

The Rings: But more importantly these clams have rings on their shells. These rings are like our fingerprints, unique for each clam. The number of rings on the shell also gives a pretty accurate estimate of their ages; like rings on a tree stump help us to find the age of a tree. Initially, a few researchers, using these rings, wrongly estimated the age of Ming to be around 400 years. It was corrected later by others.

The oxygen isotopes present on the rings can be detected too. These measurements give scientists a useful insight about the climate changes that must have happened over the years.

Author’s Note: This is the 50th post by me here which marks a 50 day anniversary. By now, I’ve become a happy blogger with more than 12K views already. Thanks all. Do take some time to check out the archives.

There Is No Pink

By Anupum Pant

As we’ve seen before in a talk by David Eagleman, that there is nothing like colors really. They are simply electromagnetic waves with varying wavelengths. Colors are perceptions created by our brains that give us an evolutionary advantage to differentiate things easily. Without colors it would have been really difficult for us to spot fruits on trees. Of course that is just one of the millions of examples of how colors help us.

Perception kept aside for a while, we actually do know that there is a spectrum of visible light as we see it – ranges from violet to red. We see this spectrum on rainbows and thin films. Each of these colors on the spectrum is a wave (and particle) that has a particular frequency.
Mysteriously, the universal symbol of love, the color pink, is absent in this spectrum. There is no specific frequency for the color pink. There is no pink. Still we see it. So, what is pink, really? If it isn’t in the spectrum, why do we see it?

Why do we see pink?

Single type cone alone: We detect colors through these things called cones that are present at the back of our eye. There are 3 types of cones – let us call them red, blue and green. So, if an object absorbs all the white (sun) light and sends just the red color [waves] towards your eyes, red cones get activated and your brain tells you, you are seeing the color red. Similarly, green or blue cones get activated when the respective green or blue waves come towards your eye and then you are able to see the colors green or blue.

2 of them together: For other colors, things can get a bit complicated. To see pure yellow, both red and green cones have to get activated. Similarly, when green plus blue cones get activated, you see cyan, and blue plus red cones let you see the color magenta.

But cone aren’t switches that go either one or zero. They are like sliders. For instance, to see the violet color, your blue cones get fully active, while the red cones are activated only to a certain extent. As a result, your brain says, violet! That is 2 types of cones working together.

3 of them together: Now let us see how three of them work together. The color white activates all the 3 type of cones fully. Black activates none. And so on…

Pink does something similar as it uses three types of cones. To see pink, all three types of cones have to work together.  When red cones get fully active and the other two are only partially activated, we see the color pink.

So, even if objects don’t reflect magenta, yellow or pink (or several other RGB combinations like that), our cones can send mixed signals to our brains and the brain in turn creates these colors for us. In reality, they don’t exist.

[Read more]

What is pink really?

Henry Reich of minute physics, in his video explains this by referring to pink as white minus green. So, according to them, the color pink is actually minus green.  In short, absence of green color is nothing but pink. I’ve attached the video below:

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.

Paper Bags Are Not Better Than Plastic Bags

By Anupum Pant

Plastic bags are terrible things. They choke animals, aren’t easy to recycle, do not break down, pollute our oceans, their production adds to our oil demands…and the list goes on. Some time back, we realized their ill effects and started taking steps that would encourage people to use bags made of alternative materials. Furthermore, several cities all over the world have banned the use of plastic bags.

Side Note: Interestingly, plastic bags aren’t actually banned for any of those reasons. They are banned because they tend to fly with the wind and move out of your trash fairly easily. They create a mess at places where they aren’t supposed to. That is the major reason as to why they are being banned.

In 2007, San Francisco banned plastic bags for supermarkets and pharmacies. Last year, it got expanded to all retail stores. Now, they have been banned for restaurant takeaways too. Also, the use of plastic bags at retail stores has been banned in several Indian cities. But the point isn’t to list out all the cities where it has been banned. There are many cities. I hope you get the idea…

When it comes to finding an alternative for plastic bags, paper bags seem to be the first choice. But it turns out, paper bags are not better than plastic bags.  Most of us underestimate their ill effects. Here are a few reasons that will make you realize why paper bags are not so good:

The point isn’t to make paper bags look bad or to make plastic look good or vice versa. It is to dispel the image of “the green paper bag” from our minds.

Reasons

Production: Production of paper bags all over the world involves cutting down 14 million trees every year. It is estimated that the production of paper bags creates 70 % more air pollution than plastic bag production.
Production of paper bags also results in much more water getting polluted when compared to the production of plastic bags. This is because their manufacturing process requires a lot of water.
Almost the same amount of petroleum used for plastic bags (for the material) gets consumed in making of paper bags to fuel the machines plus transportation.

Weight: Paper weighs a lot more than plastic. It is estimated that to carry the same number of paper bags it takes 7 times the transportation it takes to haul plastic bags. More trucks, more pollution, greater greenhouse impact.

Space: Paper bags occupy a lot more space than plastic bags do. This creates a problem at landfills that are getting filled to the brim already.

Recycling: Paper bag activists would say, plastic bags live for ever in the landfills. Yes they do, but there, paper bags do not decompose within a meaningful time period either. In fact, most of the stuff lives on for a long time in landfills. Landfills aren’t meant to make things degrade. With a paucity of oxygen and water in landfills, it is hard for things to decompose there. Even food items thrown away at landfills last for years.
That said, even plastic bags are almost never recycled.

Also they tear easily. As a result, more number of paper bags have to be used.

Solution

Both of them – plastic and paper bags – are equally bad. Recently developed biodegradable plastic bags are not any good either (they have a bigger carbon footprint). Carrying canvas, cloth or jute bags and saving them for future use is probably the best alternative.

If you liked this, you’ll probably also like – Understanding the Impending Helium Crisis

Miniature Sealed Self-Sustaining Ecosystem

By Anupum Pant
  1. 53 years ago, David Latimer (80) from Surrey planted an indoor Spiderwort in a huge glass globular bottle. He has watered it just once, in the year 1972. Since then, this self-sustaining ecosystem, has been sealed away from the outside world for around 40 years. In spite of being sealed away like that, the plant has grown very well in its own miniature ecosystem [Picture]. The only regular external energy it has received has been in the form of light. [more about this self-sustaining ecosystem and how it works]
  2. The EcoSphere or the Original EcoSphere takes it to the next level by introducing a shrimp in a similar setting. Like David Latimer’s bottle, this is also a self-sustaining ecosystem consisting of algae, bacteria and shrimp. The company that sells these things says that the shrimps would last for just around 10 years. Although, they also claim of 25-year-old spheres with living shrimps.
    10 years is little as compared to the ecosystem discussed in the first point. But we are talking about a pet living in a completely sealed space for 10 years, without demanding food, change of water or an appointment with the vet. For these little creatures it is probably a safe haven away from the dirty oil slicked oceans and predators; or probably just a prison.

These little biospheres are a far simpler and smaller versions of our big worlds. We are like the shrimp and the trees, our algae. This diagram explains in a simple way, how these artificial, extremely simplified versions of Earth work – [Diagram]

The shrimp and algae biospheres were discovered by two scientists, the late Dr. Joe Hanson and the late Dr. Clair Folsome. Later, NASA became interested in these systems. There got interested because:

  1. This tiny model of the Earth could add information to NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth program for studying Earth’s biosphere.
  2. It could help NASA’s research on human life support systems directed toward the construction of space stations for exploring our solar system.

Make it for yourself: Make magazine published a detailed DIY guide on how to create these living biospheres at home. [Link]
Carl Sagan’s Review of these biospheres: The World Arrived in The Mail.

Random Foliage Fact:

The world’s smallest park is located in the median strip of SW Naito Parkway, approaching esplanade along the Willamette River near SW Taylor Street in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Mill Ends Park, a 2 ft is a circular park, has held a place in the Guinness book of Records since 1971. It isn’t a park you can send your children to. – [Wikipedia]