natural – Awesci – Science Everyday

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.

To Gluten or Not To Gluten

By Anupum Pant

With every aisle in the supermarket mentioning “gluten free” at least 3 times, I was very curious to know what gluten really is, and if it really makes any sense to go for gluten free foods, or not. Like always, I didn’t just believe what was being seeded in my mind (that gluten free is a healthier food choice). This is what I’ve found after a simple online search. Thanks to the ASAPscience channel of Youtube.

Gluten is a combination of two proteins Gliadin and Glutanin. Hence the name, Gluten. It’s just protein. Gluten is like a binder, something that makes your bread spongy and makes food chewy.

Moreover, there’s no evidence that gluten is bad for you. Nor does it have any great advantages too. It’s just a part of a normal diet, which comes naturally with grains like wheat, barley and rye.

In fact, to bind gluten free foods artificially more fat and sugar is added. Which makes foods containing gluten a better choice actually.

Gluten is of course bad for people with the Celiac disease in which case, the affected people aren’t able to eat Gluten. But Celiac disease doesn’t affect most of us.

So, the supermarket evangelism mentioning “gluten free”, seeding the idea that gluten free food is healthier, is mostly out of confusion in this area – that it is bad for people with Celiac disease, not for normal people like you and me.

A very small percentage of us (people not having the Celiac disease) are also sensitive to gluten. Still, major part of the population falls out of both these categories.

So, unlike what supermarkets want us to believe, gluten free food isn’t automatically a healthier choice. In fact, it can be a worse choice in some cases where, to substitute the natural gluten protein, more fat and sugar is added artificially into foods.

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).

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.

Killer Lakes – A Very Weird Natural Disaster

By Anupum Pant

In the Northwest Cameroon (Africa) there’s a lake which is commonly known among the locals as “The Bad Lake”. The official name of this lake however is, lake Nyos. This is one of those three or four special lakes in the world which are mostly know for their mass killings. The locals living near the lake Nyos in particular have a very grim story to tell from the past.

The Story

A seemingly innocuous landslide occurred on August 21st, 1986. This created a mini tsunami and sent red water (due to iron) flying 300 feet in the air. There was nothing really dangerous about the flying water. But, as a result if this landslide, it is believed that about 1.2 cubic kilometres of carbon dioxide from the lake Nyos got released. The trigger could have been something else, but the gas that got released was carbon dioxide for sure.

This rare kind of a natural disaster is known as a Limnic Eruption or Lake overturn. There are just 2 other lakes known where scientists think this can happen – Lake Monoun, Cameroon, and Lake Kivu of Congo

The huge amount of CO2, being heavier than air, spread into the nearby low-lying villages in a range of 25 km. People had nowhere to escape and nearly everyone died. Only a few hundreds who acted quick, and escaped to higher ground on vehicles could save themselves. That day, 1,700 people and 3,600 livestock got suffocated to death.

Why it Happened

Lake Nyos like only a few other lakes in the world was formed about 400 years ago on a huge crater. Far below the lake there’s magma and it spews CO2 continuously into the lake, forming huge amounts of carbonated water (a good thing for Coke lovers). The CO2 doesn’t usually release in a single go all the time. It happens gradually, and the pipes now installed to fix this keep releasing CO2 all the time (The pressure of gas also carries water along to form a beautiful fountain).

Sometimes however, due to some triggers, the CO2 can get released in a single go and cause the absurd natural disaster which ends up killing thousands.

The Lake Kivu which is in Congo probably holds a much worse headline for the future. This one is about a 1000 times larger than lake Nyos and is surrounded by heavily populated towns. There’s magma below it too and any sort of disruption could cause massive amounts of carbon dioxide to release into the nearby towns. To add to the fears, researchers have found that the massive lake Kivu’s life goes extinct every 1000 years. We can only wait and watch what happens…

The Greenest Invader in the History

By Anupum Pant

Background

The impact of human activities on climate change is by no means new. It is not an 1800s or 1900s thing. It did not start happening when we started burning huge amounts of coal or oil. In fact, human impact on the climate has been here for a long long time now. It started happening about thousands of years ago when our ancestors started clearing forests to make land for cultivation. The impact was less back then, but it had started.

So, basically an overly simplified equation has been like this – more humans, more cleared forests (for cultivation), more carbon emissions.

All these years humans have also been hit by some very unfortunate historical events which have resulted in the death of a great number of people. Of course these events like the fall of Ming dynasty, Black death and Conquest of America were sad events. They resulted in a massive wipe-out of human population which we would not wish to see ever again.

However, the huge number of deaths that happened due to these unfortunate events did have a common salubrious effect on our planet. Huge tracts of cultivated lands turned back into forests. As a result, great amounts of carbon dioxide got absorbed and there was effectively a global cooling happening.

The Mongol Invasion

Among all these historical events, one stands out – The Mongol invasion which lasted for about 150 years and covered more than 20% of Earth’s surface.

After founding the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan has been believed to have started these Mongol invasions. Time and again he was involved in the decimation of huge settlements. It is estimated that these invasions led by Genghis Khan resulted in the death of a whopping 40 Million people!

Death of so many people meant that the cultivated lands of settlements started turning back into forests and these forests ended up absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the air. Result – Global cooling (kinda).

It is estimated that the Genghis Khan invasions helped remove about 700 Million tons of carbon from the atmosphere. That about the same as a whole year of carbon that is being put back into the air due to burning of petrol today, in this industrialised world!

Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history.

Random Genghis Khan fact:
1 in 200 men are direct descendants of Genghis Khan – [Source]

Hit like if you learnt something today.

Intelligent Men Look Different – Says Science

By Anupum Pant

Background

I know, I’m not a very big fan of intelligence scores or IQ points measured using the standard IQ tests available today. And even if this study does rely on those scores, I still find it pretty interesting. You will too…

Judging a book by its cover isn’t unwise after all. A recent study published by researchers from the Czech Republic proves that all of us humans have a natural ability to estimate how intelligent a man really is, by just looking at his facial features. That said, the study also mentions that you can’t judge a woman’s intelligence by observing her facial features. It works for only men. However, both men and women have this ability to estimate the intelligence of a man by looking at his face.

The study finds no solid correlation between the features of a woman’s face and their intelligence. That means, to find out about how intelligent a woman is, you’ll have to dig deeper than just the facial features.

People can accurately judge intelligence by looking at faces of men, but not women.

The study did not use a very huge sample – Still pictures of 40 men and 40 women were used. Nevertheless even 80 pictures contribute a significant amount to science. No experiment is a bad one. We’ll probably see more such studies and know more about the phenomenon in the near future.

They also measured the intelligence of these 80 people using standard IQ tests and asked people to rate their intelligence. It was found that people were able to almost accurately tell the IQ of a man by looking at his picture!

How do we do it?

We have an inbuilt ability to spot the shape and features of intelligent men. This could be a pretty logical evolutionary trait.

Faces of intelligent men: According to the researchers, longer faces with greater distance between the eyes, pointy chins, larger noses, slightly smiley lips are the features of highly intelligent men.

Faces of not so intelligent men: Whereas broader and rounded faces with eyes closer to each other, shorter faces, sad lips and bigger chins are the signs which tell us that a man is not so intelligent.

Here see the difference yourself. What do you think? Could you spot it? Which one of these faces is the closest to your face? Tell me in the comments below. Tell me about mine too.

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