Tag: science

Do You Feel Alone? – By Kurzgesagt

By Anupum Pant

If you feel worthless or alone, or both, you probably are looking at things very superficially. It’s time to realize who you are and where you stand in this vast universe.

Today, I’m just going to leave you with a brilliantly animated, science + philosophical video by Kurzgesagt.

(Just that because I’m too tired to write and happened to stumble upon this amazing video which I felt like sharing)

Also, don’t forget to check out their other videos. All of them are brilliant. Yes, I’ve watched them all. [Channel link]

Dozens Died During The Dance Epidemic of France

By Anupum Pant

Background

In the year 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea suffered with a very mysterious, contagious and a scary disease. Till date, doctors or science has no explanation on what really was going on in her body and the disease is still named among one of the most bizarre and the most unexplainable diseases ever – The Dance plague of 1518.

In the month of  July Frau Troffea came down to a quiet street in the city of Strasbourg, France and started dancing fervently on the street.  Even 6 days later, the woman was still dancing. On the 6th day, she probably died out of exhaustion.

But by the time she had stopped, the dancing disease had spread to 34 more people. And by the end of that month there were 400 others who were experiencing this irresistible urge to dance. Dozens died out of exhaustion.

Ironically, doctors and physicians suggested that the cure to this dancing plague would be to dance more. It was literally dance till you drop. Musicians were hired, stages were made for these hoards of dancers.

Similar contagious of these dancing epidemics in other European cities have been recorded in the history at least 10 other times before this. There was one in the year 1374, which the records say, spread to several towns!

Agreed the story is too old and seems to have become hyped due to repeated story telling, but clearly that isn’t the case because the certainty of the event, is established through a number of independent records.

Why was this happening?

Well, no one knows for sure. The mysterious disease has baffled scientists for years. However, there are of course some weak theories that explain the behaviour of these dancing people.

One theory says that the dancers got high on ergot – A psychotropic fungus that grows on rye and must have reached these people through bread. Since the symptoms associated with ergot poisoning are very similar to what these people were experiencing, it seems like a valid explanation. But there’s almost no chance that ergot poisoning happened…

That is because when a person gets poisoned by this fungus, they start having hallucinations and involuntary muscle contractions. However, the people who were affected by the dancing plague, according the people who had seen this happening, were clearly not willing to dance – which doesn’t happen when you are poisoned by ergot.

Also, these “muscle contractions” they were experiencing weren’t just involuntary contractions that are associated with ergot poisoning. They were moving in a very coordinated manner, actually dancing. Clearly, it wasn’t ergot.

Another possible explanation says that it was out of fear, anxiety and desperation among the people because of the widespread famine and disease in that area during this period. This is presently a widely accepted explanation.

Still, what exactly was happening their brains and what exactly caused it, no one knows.

[Source] [Read more here]

The New York Pizza and Subway Ride Connection

By Anupum Pant

This is funny and interestingly true at the same time. According to Eric M. Bram of New York, there’s an unspoken rough law that says – there’s a connection between the price trends of a pizza* and a subway ride ticket in the New York city.

Their prices have remained more or less same for about 50 years now, moving up and down together! If one goes up, the other has been seen to move in the same direction too. The trend has been observed to be more or less valid for the last half century. 

Don’t ask why. I say, just go with the flow.

It was first observed in the year 1980 by Eric M. Bram. He observed that there was an uncanny similarity in the price of a slice of a pizza and a subway token in the year 1960, in the NYC – Both 15 cents.

In the 70s pizza started costing about 35 cents. So did the subway token! and so on…

Fairly recently, in the year 2002, when the price of pizza was about $2.00, and the price of a subway token was $1.50, it was predicted that the price of the subway ticket would rise. And as the “law” states, it did!

Again in the year 2005, the price of pizza went up to $2.25 and it was predicted that the subway token price would rise. It did again!

Once again in the year 2007. In 2013 the fare moved to $2.50, again just after the average pizza price had risen to the same price. No one probably knows why.

With 50 years of record, I’m pretty sure that the trend is going to keep up. Some one from the future, living in New York could confirm it in the comments section below.

So, if someone starts mass producing pizzas, floods the pizza market in the NYC, and drops the price, will the Subway ticket drop too? Someone should try that. 

*When we say pizza here, specifically, we are talking about a plain tomato + mozarella + crust pizza only.

A Fun Way to Multiply Numbers

By Anupum Pant

Please note, in the heading I said, a fun way to multiply numbers, not necessarily a quick way. Widely touted as an “amazingly quick Japanese method to multiply”, I think firstly, it really is not a very quick method. Secondly, I couldn’t find any sources confirming that it is a method developed by the Japanese. In fact, I’m not even sure if there’s anything Japanese about it. Nevertheless, the method sure is fun and should work great for people who don’t remember the multiplication tables well.

Another great thing about it is that it is a multiplication problem turned into a visual counting  problem. Since multiplication exercises don’t really make kids happy, they’d definitely love to count intersections instead (multiplication disguised intelligently).

Of course the counting can be used for single digit numbers too, but that won’t be too useful. For slightly more complex problems involving 2 digits like 32 X 42, it could be a life saver. It’s a fairly simple 3-step process. Here’s how you do 32 X 42 with it…

Step 1Step 1: The best way to go about it is by starting from the top left. First, you draw the 3 lines for the 3 of the number 32. And then you make 2 lines for the number 2, as shown.

Step 2

Step 2: Next make 4 lines and 2 lines intersecting the previously made lines as shown. Clearly, 4 lines for the 4 of 42 and 2 lines for the units place of 42.Step 3

 Step 3: Count the number of intersections in the far left (a), centre (b), and the far right (c). (a), (b) and (c) are 12, 14 and 4 respectively, for this problem.

The 1 from 14 gets carried to the number just at the right of it – 12 of (a), and (a) becomes 13. A similar carrying of the ten’s place to the immediate right column happens if there are any 2 digit numbers. So you are left with 13, 4 and 4 now. 1344 is the answer to 32 X 42.

This can be done for 3 digits too and more…
If there’s a zero, you could make a line and not count any intersections with it. As it has been shown in the video below…

Please hit like if you learnt something from this article.

Helium Balloon in a Car

By Anupum Pant

Background

Whenever I choose to write about Helium, there’s something I almost never forget to mention – Helium is precious (Click to know why). So, if you’ve read that, you’ll know that you shouldn’t use it in party balloons, nor should you use it to make your voice sound funny. These are the most silliest things you could do with a borderline non-renewable resource. However, if someone uses it in party balloons to make science look cool to 5-year-old, it’s beautiful.

The Experiment

Destin, a super-cool dad, from the YouTube channel Smarter every day, did exactly that. This is what he did:

Pendulum in a car: First, he tied a pendulum to the roof of his car. Then he accelerated the car. As everyone must have guessed, the pendulum moved back as the car accelerated. It’s natural for our brains to assume that everything would move back in an accelerating vehicle.

Helium Balloon in a car: Next, he tied a balloon filled with Helium to the base of the car. Then, right when he was about to accelerate his car, he asked his 5 year olds sitting in the back seat – “Where do you think the balloon would go if I accelerate?”

Answer the question before proceeding, and reason it if you can. (Even if you don’t know it, it’s easier to guess it right now because of the build up I gave in the previous paragraphs)

The Answer

Unless you already have dealt with this “anomaly”, it’s pretty tough to guess that the balloon would actually move forward as the car accelerates. Yes, it moves forward! Something moving forward in an accelerating car sounds counter intuitive. I knew it because someone had asked me it in a physics puzzle sometime back. Just for the record, I had answered it wrong then. There’s no way I could have guessed, or reasoned it accurately the first time. Did you?

The balloon seems to be defying the laws of physics. But a helium balloon moving forward as the car accelerates can be completely explained by physics. It’s just our brain fooling us again.

Simple Analogy

Here’s how Destin explains it with a simple analogy – using a glass jar filled incompletely with water (so there’s an air bubble inside). Assume that the glass jar is like the car. The water in it, is like the air in the car. And the Helium balloon is like the air bubble in the jar – Since an air bubble is lighter than water, it is safe to assume that because even Helium is lighter than the air.

Now when the jar accelerates forward, the water in the jar moves back – so does the air in the car. As a result, the air in the jar moves forward – just like the Helium balloon does.

Here, watch the video if that sounds too confusing…

Most of you probably know this. But I’m sure that many don’t. Moreover I found the video really cute – A super cool dad explaining science to his little kids in a car. Plus they ask you to go to their audible link that would get you a free audio book. At the same time, it would help a cool dad fund his children’s education. My heart melted. If nothing, the video will at least make you smile.

A Miniature Planet Inside a Planet

By Anupum Pant

A couple of months back I wrote about a miniature sealed self-sustaining ecosystem that an old man has been running successfully for more than 53 years now. The whole ecosystem surviving out of itself in a completely closed system for such a long time is really fascinating. It’s like a little planet.

What if I tell you, there’s a much larger version of this completely sealed biosphere in Arizona. Much larger than the bottle, but way too smaller than our planet, and yet it works like a little planet inside a planet.

They call it the Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 is the plane earth’s biosphere). It is a completely closed 3-acre facility, currently owned by the University of Arizona, which doesn’t allow any matter to go in or out. There’s just energy moving in and out of this little planet that is the size of 3 football fields. Exactly like a miniature version of our pale blue dot.

Think about it this way. If you had to make a pizza in a place like that, it could take you two months or more, assuming you had everything needed to make a pizza (goats/cows for the cheese etc…). Just thinking about it makes you appreciate the fact that we’ve come so far. So far, that we’re able to get a pizza right on our door step in under 30 minutes.

The Biosphere 2 was designed to get a deeper understanding on how the earth’s biosphere actually works. Also, its aim was to try and create a prototype space base for Mars – Something like a little planet earth where we could live in and could carry it with us on a trip to other planets.

In the Biosphere 2 are areas that are meant for humans to live. Besides that there is a miniature rainforest, a savannah, a desert, a marsh, and a little mini-ocean in there!

Jane Poynter, with her team, walked into this biosphere when she was 29 years old. She lived in there for about 2 years and then came out. The world felt like a completely different place to her. It is really interesting to hear her talk in this TEDx talk…

Is Cheetah No Longer the Fastest Land Animal?

By Anupum Pant

Read this for the answer to the question above

If you haven’t previously heard of the Betteridge’s law of headlines, also known as the Davis’ law or the journalistic principle, here’s what it says:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

(Of course, you aren’t supposed to take the “law” too seriously.)

Did you see the headline for this article? So, basically you can read no further and still say – No, Cheetah still is the fastest land animal. But if you look deeper, things sure get interesting.

Absolute Speed vs. Relative Speed

To be specific, Cheetah is the fastest land animal because its absolute speed on land is the highest (112 to 120 Km per hour). When you measure absolute speed, you don’t take into account anything other than the speed. The weight or size of the animal doesn’t matter. Here, Cheetah is a clear winner.

But, when you do take into account the body length of an animal and measure the speed in terms of, number of body lengths the animal can cover in a single second, there are number of other animals that beat Cheetah by a huge margin.

Here’s a fact – When running at full speed, cheetahs can cover the length of up to 16 to 20 cheetahs in a single second. That’s pretty fast. The fastest humans on earth can do about 10 – 11 body lengths per second. [Source] Do you know what’s the fastest animal of you measure speed relative to their respective body lengths? Wait for it…

It is a mite. Yes, a tiny little 1-2 mm Californian blood sucker can cover up to 322 body lengths in a single second! Scientists just found out about it. Graphic designers who’ve used elegant cheetah silhouettes to represent speed in their graphics will have to use a tiny blood sucker now? How disappointing!

By the way, 322 body lengths in a single second of a sesame sized animal translates to just about 0.8 km per hour of absolute speed. But, imagine this. If it (the Californian mite) were the size of a human being (which it is not), it would have moved at a whopping 2,100 km per hour. I know the physics of it would have been different in case it were that big. Since it is not, we aren’t even putting in the effort to consider those details at the moment.

In case someone comes searching for the scientific name of this mite, it is called – Paratarsotomus macropalpis (I won’t remember that)

Other land animals “faster” than the Cheetah

  • The Australian tiger beetle held the record before they found out about the tiny mite. The beetle can cover up to 171 body lengths in a single second.
  • The household cockroach is pretty fast too. It does about 50 body lengths in a single second.
  • The ghost crab can run at about 100 body lengths per second.

All of them, much “faster” than the cheetah (in relative speed). And still Cheetah always wins the race because it is absolutely the fastest land animal. Still. Please don’t trust the click bait titles like:

Cheetah beaten to title of fastest animal in the world by tiny Californian mite

A Chat With Srikant of Red Matter Tech

By Anupum Pant

Experiences

Experiences are precious, and learning from the experiences of others is, I think, a very efficient way of avoiding mistakes and identifying the patterns to success. I treasure them. I view it like, collecting XP (experience points) in a Pokémon game – where the game is your life and the greater XP you manage to collect, the better you do in the game.

A great man’s biography no doubt is one good source of this precious experience. A better way to go about collecting XP is by simply asking the successful person himself – by doing an interview maybe. That is what I did… (an interview once again!)

Red Matter Tech and Dabblr

I had a chat with one of the four masterminds, Srikant Rajasekharuni of, Red Matter Tech. They are the ones who chose themselves (not the traditional office cubicles) and brought in this one of its kind student companion smartphone app, Dabblr. It is creating waves in the student community. If you are a student and you have a smartphone that does not have Dabblr installed in it, you are seriously missing out on something.

It is an app which lets you carry the updates on most important college events, current affairs, open courseware, student deals, campus news,  your time-table, and more, in your pocket all the time. The interface is slick and the app is neatly polished. You’ll get addicted.

[Get it here]

The Chat

Listen to what Srikant shares with us. Pay attention because “Learn and Discover” is what we do at AweSci too.

Me: Tell us about the company.

SR: We are Red Matter Tech, a relatively young product development and marketing firm started by four friends! It’s been almost 9 months all of us quit our jobs, we work out of our own office space and plugged in most of the time.

Me: Dabblr is your first product. It seems to be more than just an app. Can you tell us more about it?

SR: Dabblr prima facie, is a student companion app. If you are a student who’s looking for an application that will provide necessary information about your curricular, co & extra curricular life! Course and aptitude related gyaan. Aggregation of content from various news feeds and event information! You can even check out your college timetable on the application!

Me: Who is the team behind your first product – Dabblr?

SR: The team consists of us, the co-founders. Bhagat handles tech. Shirish product. Rohit handles operations and sales and I handle content and marketing. All of us have prior decent experience in marketing. Shirish and I studied together in MICA, Shirish & Rohit have studied from the same engineering college. 80 % of the current team have experience in the gaming industry too. Avani, Bhagat’s much better half is the coder!

Me: Why did you feel the need for this app?

SR: As we graduated from engineering and moved out of Hyderabad for further studies, we noticed a stark difference in approach towards life from students of different states. It made us realise that education is not the same across the country and we decided to create a platform of equal opportunities and information. And completely free.

Me: What is that one big lesson you learnt while developing your first product? Something which you’d have not learnt, had you not endeavored to create this.

SR: Biggest learning would be the unconditional support that your family and friends extend when you are completely focussed on creating something on your own.

Me: Where on the web and print have you been featured?

SR: We have been on Inc42, The Hindu and Deccan Chronicle so far. All of them have been real kind to us.

Me: People who inspire you, the books you love, websites and blogs you read and your favorite pastimes. Favorite music, specific songs.

SR: Inspirations:  B R Ambedkar, Rajnikanth.
Books I Love: The Foundation Series, Sandman (Graphic Novels)
Websites: Reddit, of course. Business insider. Awesci.

Me: Before you go, share with us an interesting piece of science trivia for the day

SR: Total Eclipses are possible only because the sun and moon appear the same size from earth. That’s possible only because the sun’s diameter is about 400 times larger than that of the moon – Amazingly, if you think coincidences don’t happen, the sun is also about 400 times farther away. Mind blowing!

[Dabblr Website] [Facebook Page]

The Hard Boiled Egg Sprinkler Mystery

By Anupum Pant

Background

Cracking an egg to check if it is boiled or not is not a very intelligent way. While many know that spinning an egg can be used to determine whether an egg is a boiled one or not, I’m amazed by the sheer number of people who aren’t still aware of this trick.

Just in case you are one of those who don’t know this, it works like this –  try spinning an egg on a smooth surface. If it spins well and stands up vertically, it is a boiled egg. If it doesn’t spin properly, you can say that it isn’t cooked….as simple as that.

Tip: There’s a way to check if your eggs have gone bad without risking opening it up to take in the nasty stench. [Here]

Boiled Egg Sprinkler Experiment

Now that I’m sure you know about the boiled egg spinning trick I can tell you about this simple experiment you can do at home. Besides dealing with an angry mom, it carries no other risks.

Here’s what you do – Get some milk and pour it on the kitchen counter. Now, boil an egg if you don’t have a boiled one already. Make sure it is hard-boiled by doing the spinning test. Next, spin it on the milk puddle you created on the counter. Nasty mess ensues…

Yes, there sure is a mess afterwards. But something amazing happens when the egg spins on the milk puddle. When it spins, the egg first stands up and then the milk starts rising on the surface of the egg till it reaches the equator and then the milk gets sprinkled at the equator in a very beautiful manner. It’s like a skirt of milk. Different sprinkling effects can be obtained with different spinning speeds.

Until now, no one knew why this happened. The rotating egg would suck up milk like magic and create a fountain of milk. The exact physics part of it wasn’t known until some researchers at Brigham Young University decided to figure out why this happens. I, on the other hand didn’t even know this sprinkling thing could be done. Nice to know.

Turns out, there’s nothing peculiar about milk and eggs that creates this effect. The same thing can be done with an 8-ball or any other ball for that matter. On the other side, it works with other liquids too. For instance, if you use a liquid with a higher viscosity (glycerine and water mix), the rotating ball could create not just sprinkles, but whole sheets of liquid getting flicked off at the equator. Some times if the fluid is viscous enough and the ball is spinning fast enough, sheets spanning several feet can be seen getting flicked off the equator of the spinning balls! It’s like a motor.

Here is an amazing hi-speed video of this happening in the laboratory and the elegant physics behind has been explained too. Watch it here:

After having watched the explanation, I can say one thing for sure: There’d be no sprinkling if this was done on Superfluid Helium because superfluid helium would have no viscosity and it wouldn’t rotate with the ball!

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.

The Mystery Light Bulb Has Been On For 113 Years

By Anupum Pant

There are a handful of different reasons that may make an incandescent bulb blow out. Improper sealing, rough handling and electrical surge are some of them which may blow out a bulb prematurely. Still, bulbs are not for ever.

Very gradually, due to the extremely high heat of resistance, the very thin tungsten filament would evaporate making it thinner and thinner with time. Ultimately, the filament will certainly reach a point beyond which it can’t last. At a certain place in the filament where a slightly greater number of atoms get evaporated into the inert atmosphere of the bulb, the filament breaks. As a result the bulb pops and you need to replace it.

Even if everything goes right, your average incandescent bulb won’t usually last for more than a couple of years. Certainly not for 113 years! But one bulb did and it still glows. No one knows or understands why exactly it has lasted for so long. Whatever it is, it is nothing less than a miracle.

Installed in the year 1901, the incredibly old bulb (not tungsten filament, this one is a carbon filament bulb) still glows at a fire station in Livermore, California. All it’s life it’s seen ups and downs, was moved from one place to another (mostly fire stations), was protected from electrical surges and what not. With a few hours of brief outages here and there it has clocked over one million hours of burn time. And it still glows. In fact it holds the world record for being the longest burning light bulb. You can watch it here on the live cam.

[Centennial bulb live cam]
Fun fact: The bulb has outlasted 3 of these webcams which keep broadcasting its live status.

Last year, it went off for a couple of hours and created waves all over the media. Later, it was reported that the bulb was back again. It was probably “just taking a nap“.

There are a couple of explanations (theories) on what may have made the bulb last so long. A few of them being –

  • It hasn’t been switched on and off many times. Lesser cycles, longer life.
  • It is a 60 watt bulb turned on to about 4 watts, which probably prevents it from going too hot.
  • Since a lot of extra care and money was spent on making this bulb, it was not one of those mass manufactured bulbs. It has probably been sealed perfectly. So, there’s no chance of air leaking into the bulb.

Please hit like if you learnt something today. It will help this honest effort of mine to reach more explorers out there.

Mind Controlling Fungus Turns Insects into Zombies

By Anupum Pant

If you have played the game Last of Us on PS3, you’d know that the game is set in a time 20 years after a fungal-based, brain-altering pandemic has taken over the world and infected nearly 60% of the world’s population. Sounds too fictional. Right? Well, of course the game is fictional, but the brain-altering fungus parasite is not very far from reality.

The real fungus, Cordyceps isn’t really fatal to Human beings. However, there’s always a chance. In a very absurd way they kill insects. In fact their life cycle is totally dependent on insects. And a there are more than 1000 different kinds of these fungi, each one of which specializes on one kind of insect. What these fungi do to insects is something very incredible.

The fungus infects insect brains and turns them into zombies! Something similar to what this wasp does to cockroaches. This is how it works…

When an insect comes in contact with the spores of this parasitic fungus, they start acting in a weird manner. That is because the fungus affects its brain and turns it into a zombie, an insect zombie which takes directions from a fungus. The infected brain tells the insect to climb up. At some point, high up on a tree or plant, the insect dies and the fungus hollows the body and starts growing a shoot out of the insect. It’s bizarre to watch! (see the video below)

The fungus programs the brain to make the insect move up because its life-cycle actually benefits from it. The higher the insect goes, the better its spores can spread and can have a better reach.

The fungus is like a nature’s way of saying to an insect species that your population has reached very high levels.

Hit like if you learnt something.

The Old Tale of a Boiling Frog

By Anupum Pant

Background

The Frog in a pot is a very popular anecdote and you probably know about it. Still, if you don’t, it is about a frog that rests easy in a pot of water that is warmed slowly. Frogs normally won’t go into boiling water. They’ll jump out and keep themselves away from very hot water. But, if placed in a tub of water at normal temperature that is being heated slowly, according to the anecdote, they don’t react and end up getting cooked in the boiling water.

The story is used as a metaphor to tell a cautionary point about life. The moral of the frog story goes something like this – Letting small and seemingly harmless wrongs slip, could kill (or be bad for you).  It basically tells you to not be complacent about minor changes that usually seem harmless, but add up to something big/bad.

The video proof?

Scientifically, a bizarre video (not for the faint hearted) on Youtube claims to proves the frog tale. The guy in the video initially tries to put a frog in a pot full of boiling water. Of course it resists, and doesn’t go in. Later, when the frog is put into a pot full of water at normal temperature and is warmed gradually, the frog never tries to leave. It gets cooked in the boiling water. Just like the tale suggests.

Everything looks very convincing about the video experiment. Little details like placing the frog on a piece of insulator so that it doesn’t feel direct heat through the metal base, are also taken care of in the video. Also, the narrator sounds so convincing with all the science facts referring to how cold blooded animals react to temperature. They indeed do! I totally fell for it. Watch it below…

The video cuts in between and the water which was put on flame before starts boiling suddenly after the cut. Or brains tend to skip video cuts. In the boiling water is something that looks like a dead/cooked frog. If you watched it till the end, the video shows you that the dead frog wasn’t a real one. No frogs were harmed in the making of the video. Good.

But, that completely nullifies the point this experiment tries to make. A fake rubber frog being cooked in boiling water doesn’t scientifically prove the tale.

The Science

Unlike us, who maintain a constant body temperature, the frog being a cold blooded animal, its body will react to its surrounding temperature and will try to match it. But real scientific experiments have never been able to prove it. According to a very old experiment that was done in the 1800s, where water was heated at 0.002°C per second, the frog was found dead at the end of 2½ hours. Why do you think would the frog sit still for 2½ hours?

Modern scientists reject the old experiment which seems to prove it. You could place your trust in the words of a Harvard professor, Professor Douglas Melton. He says:

If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don’t sit still for you.

Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma also said, “The legend is entirely incorrect!”

Moral: don’t believe everything you see on the internet.

Hit like if you learnt something today.

Superfluid Helium is One Strange Liquid

By Anupum Pant

Helium can’t be frozen into a solid (at atmospheric pressure) – the very property which allows it to go from a simple liquid Helium state (warmer) at minus 269 degree C – where its boiling and evaporating quickly – to a much calmer Liquid Helium II stage (cooler).

Liquid Helium  II is obtained at a temperature lower than minus 269 degree C, at about minus 271 degree C – known as the Lambda point.

Liquid Helium II is a superfluid. Superfluid Helium has no viscosity. It behaves extraordinarily. As a summary of how extraordinary superfluid Helium is, here is a list of things it can do:

  • Superfluid Helium will leak out of solid ceramic containers which have extremely tiny pores that no other liquid can penetrate.
  • If it is taken in a container and the container is spun around the central axis, the superfluid will not spin.
  • Somehow if you manage to spin it, because it has no friction, it won’t stop.
  • It can climb walls of a container by forming an extremely thin film and defying gravity.
  • It can produce an eternal frictionless fountain.
  • It can conduct electricity better than some of the best metal conductors like Copper! It’s a big thing for a liquid to be able to do that.

Here is a summary video you can watch below.

But, I’d suggest watching the whole documentary here. It explains everything that superfluid helium can do in nice detail. Also, the researcher makes sure it is in a very simple language…

The Potato Puzzle

By Anupum Pant

Some call it the Potato paradox, but I prefer calling it a puzzle. It isn’t really a paradox. It’s just that we tend to get confused easily when working with such problems and most times end up with the wrong answer. Here’s the question:

You have 100 kg of potatoes. Assume that they are made up of 99% water. Now, you keep them outside to dry for a while. When measured for water content now, they contain 98% water. What do you think is the weight of these dried potatoes now?

Answer quickly first. Then, try and calculate. It isn’t really tough.

Take 15 minutes, or more if you have to. Use papers, pens and calculators if you have to. But whatever you do, stay honest. Don’t search for the solution on the internet, or don’t read further if you haven’t done it yet. Trust me, your brain won’t like the answer.

Solution – [Wikipedia]

The answer is: 50 kg.

For the explanation, watch this visual explanation…