Tag: scientists

A Simple and Elegant Cloaking Device

By Anupum Pant

In the year 2011, UTD NanoTech unveiled their carbon nanotube invisibility cloak, making us move one more step closer to realizing a piece of magical cloth which fictional characters often use to turn themselves invisible. And then there was a 3D printed invisibility cloak too.

A few researchers at the University of Rochester have now created their own elegant version of an invisibility cloak. It’s, in principle, a fairly simple optical device which uses just four lenses to cloak objects behind it, keeping the image behind it still visible.

In fact, whatever it does, it does it in 3 dimensions. That means, the viewer looking through the device can actually pan to change the viewing angle and can still see the image of the background, undistorted, as if there were no lenses in between, in real-time. And it is probably the first ever cloaking device to be able to do that.

The device has a blind spot (sort of). In a way that It doesn’t cloak anything that lies in the axis of the lens system. The cloaking area is in the shape of a dough nut. Any part of the object that accidentally enters the axis area becomes visible and conceals the background. The device is simple and cheap enough to be easily scaled to cover greater area, as long as lenses of that size can be made. The video explains it better.

via [Quarks to Quasars]

Bizarre Starfish Wasting Syndrome

By Anupum Pant

Up in the Washington state a videographer and also a diver, Laura James noticed a couple of  dead Starfish on the coast one day. The dead bodies looked like something mysterious had happened. There were broken bodies and splats all over the place as if the fish had been zapped by a laser.

Laura videographed some of the tens of thousands of starfish bodies all over the north america’s pacific coast. No one was sure what was actually happening. And then there were reports of these mysterious starfish deaths from all over the west coast of North America.

For some time, only the sunflower starfish were thought to be affected by this. However, on further investigation, it was found that almost 12 different species of starfish were dying mysteriously all over the west coast (and some on the east coast too). When this was confirmed to be an epidemic of some sort, they started calling it the sea star wasting syndrome and notified the scientists.

Ben minor, a western Washington university professor of biology started collecting sea stars at the coast. They found a number of normal sea stars. Later when the search continued a pile of sea star arms and twisted parts of them were found at different places. Some of the live starfish were collected and were studied in the laboratory.

It was confirmed that the starfish which were affected by this epidemic experienced twisting arms and lesions first and then the arms crawled away in different directions, tearing the body of a starfish apart. All of it in under 24 hours. This bizarre disease then left a spill of inside parts of the fish and broken body parts all over the place.

No one knows for sure what causes this bizarre disease among the sea stars.

The Weissenberg Effect

By Anupum Pant

Remember the time we talked about a boiled egg spinning on a pool of milk? If you don’t then it’s good to know that if you do spin a hard-boiled egg on a pool of milk (or any relatively viscous liquid) the milk mysteriously climbs the side of the egg, reaches the equator, and then sprinkles around beautifully. It’s fun to see it happen. This is something similar…

The thing we see today is called the Weissenberg effect and this is how it works.

You take a spinning rod and put it into a solution of liquid polymer (which is usually very viscous). And when you do that, you see that the liquid polymer magically climbs the walls of the rod.

Some liquids reach a little high and never beyond. While others can climb up really high. The difference in heights to which different liquids can climb to is demonstrated in the following video very clearly. The three liquids used in it are as follows:

  1. Guar gum solution crosslinked with sodium tetraborate
  2. Pancake batter
  3. and Dyed glue crosslinked with sodium tetraborate.

[Read more]

The Leaping Shampoo Trick – Kaye Effect

By Anupum Pant

This is really interesting and I can’t explain why. You’ll have to see it for yourself.

Long time back, researchers at the University of Twente in The Netherlands thought of something very weird. They decided to drop a thin stream of shampoo from a height of about 20 cm, ended up discovering an absurd physical effect and winning great accolades for it – The Kaye effect.

The seemingly weird effect can fairly easily be achieved at home by dropping a thin stream of shampoo on a relatively hard surface. In individual steps, this is what happens when you do it:

  • As the stream gets collected, it forms a little shampoo heap.
  • Amazingly, and counter-intuitively, a secondary stream ejects off the heap.
  • The mythical secondary stream becomes bigger, shoots further.
  • And finally hits the incoming stream – this collapses the Kaye effect.

Of course, everything happens really fast. But, if you look at it on extremely slowed down film, you’d see the individual steps happening one after the other.

True, the secondary stream collapses too quickly, scientists weren’t happy about that either. So, they tried tilting the hard surface slightly to achieve a stabler version. Lo! And they had a stable Kaye effect.

This happens because due to certain physical forces the viscous liquid becomes slightly less viscous temporarily – they call it shear thinning. As a result, it causes a new stream to emerge. May be the same effect could be achieved with other thicker liquids like lava, ketchup, whipped cream, blood, paint, and nail polish. But, then lava is too dangerous, and others (barring blood and paint) seem to be too thick. I’m guessing, dropping thicker ones from a higher place could make this happen.

If you find this interesting,you’d definitely love the egg and milk effect, also the chain of beads defying gravity.

Here, watch it on video.

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 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.

A Book That Filters 4 Years of Drinkable Water

By Anupum Pant

I’ve written a lot about water in the past. No wonder drinking water is such a precious commodity. Still, not many have access to clean water. About a 7th of the whole world’s population don’t have clean water to drink. Every year about 3.4 Million people die out of water borne diseases.

A group of people who go by the name WaterisLife are putting in everything to change that. By working with a group of scientists from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia, they have been able to come up with a novel idea that could change this. They call it the drinkable book. 

Drinkable book is a book full of cards that have been coated with silver nanoparticles. These cards bear the ability to filter dirty water and reduce the count of bacteria in it by about 99.9%. It can kill the bacteria that causes diseases like cholera, typhoid and E. coli., producing drinkable water that is as pure as tap water used in the US. Each page of this book can filter about 30 days of drinkable water. In fact, each page contains the instructions to filter water properly too. The whole book can provide 4 years of potable water. Definitely a boon to the developing countries.

Do Not Paint Your Walls Pink

By Anupum Pant

Like I’ve told you once, there is no pink. Still, we do see the colour pink and there’s no denying that. Don’t call me a sexist for saying this, but it’s true that the colour pink is associated with femininity. Otherwise the colour is also known to generate feelings of caring, tenderness, and love. If everything we know about pink is somewhat positive, then why isn’t it a good idea to paint your walls pink?

Let me start with a little story.

Hayden Fry and the Pink room

Hayden Fry was an American football player and later he went on to become a coach. In the late 70s he started coaching the University of Iowa football team. Now, the particular thing to note about Fry was that in the year 1951 he had graduated from Baylor with a degree in psychology.

Since he had graduated in psychology, Fry probably knew some good ways that he could use to mess with the opposing team’s brain. And then he decided to paint the walls of the visitor’s locker room at Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium, with the colour pink. The walls, floors, toilets, ceiling and everything else in the locker room was painted pink. As a result, the home team started doing significantly well at football games (later the practice of painting locker rooms pink was outlawed).

Some say, he used pink to paint the visitor’s locker room because he knew that the colour pink had a calming effect on people. But I think he was relying on something deeper. He was probably trying to cash on the results of a study that was done by Prof. Alexander Schauss in the year 1979.

The Effect of Pink Colour

Prof. Alexander Schauss started a study with a couple of volunteers. He divided the group into two equal halves. All of their strengths were measured by asking them to use their arms against a counter-force and by asking them to squeeze a device called a dynamometer.

After this, for a minute, the first half had to stare at a dark blue colour and the other half stared at pink. Their strengths were recorded again.

A remarkable decrease in physical strength was recorded among the people who were given the colour pink to stare at. The participants were not aware of the effect it had on them.

Probably it were those pink walls and pink floors at the visitor’s locker that made the opposing team physically weaker and helped Iowa win.

Conclusion

Colours certainly are one of those subtle forces which change the way we think, feel, and behave. Pink has been proven to make you weaker physically. So, unless you wish to be weaker, you wouldn’t want to paint your walls pink! How about blue? It is a simple choice.

Now I think even writing an article about pink and having your brain think about the colour makes you weaker. Seriously, I feel like I need rest after writing this. Phew!

Hit like if you learnt something.

Drink it Right and Coffee Can Help You Remember Well

By Anupum Pant

With our ever-increasing hours at work, coffee is what keeps most of us running at office. While some revel in the ability to stay hyper active by taking in no dose of caffeine whatsoever, others just can’t live without it. A few days without coffee can turn them into irritated, stressed out and cranky colleagues.

Caffeine in coffee, coke and other energy drinks basically works by tricking your brain into thinking it isn’t tired, even when it badly needs rest. In short, it messes with your brain by creating an artificial brain chemistry to keep you alert. So can it really be good in any way?

Obviously, at such a stage, still keeping up with the intake can harm your brain (up to some extent) without it showing any clear signs. Lack of sleep (at the time when it is needed) can mean, starving brain of the time to perform several essential processes – Memory consolidation being one of them. As a result, lack of sleep means, you are not forming strong memories.

So, how does it help you remember well when it doesn’t let you form strong memories?

According to Michael Yassa, assistant professor of psychological and brain science at John Hopkins University, and his team, caffeine can indeed have positive effects on your memory. The trick lies in limiting your intake of coffee. In a study, they have been able to show that caffeine intake can enhance certain kinds of memories even when tested after a day.

Study in short: In a double-blind trial where subjects were given caffeine tablets or placebos and were shown images of a few objects. It was found that people who were given caffeine doses showed a deeper lever of memory retention on the other day than people who were given placebos.

Since caffeine isn’t very effective after about 6 hours, people feel a need to replenish their bodies with more of it. It seems as if it is addictive, but as Hank says, technically, it isn’t. You can positively keep on drinking red bulls for the whole day and not get addicted to it. It will make you cranky for a day or two, but you won’t experience any long-lasting effects. The thing is, if you drink a lot of it, you’ll not sleep well and give your brain enough time to consolidate memories. So, since it isn’t really addictive, a good idea would be to limit the intake.

Solution: The crux of it comes down to keeping your intake of coffee to about 200 mg a day. That means, a cup of strong coffee or 2 small cups of normal coffee every day, is actually good for your brain.  As the recent research shows, it helps you remember well. That much, will help you consolidate memories during sleep (at the same time, it won’t mess with your sleep). Anything more than that will probably mess with your activities and anything less than that will have no effect on your memory. [Video]

The Evil Lunar Dust

By Anupum Pant

Space exploration is a tough job. Besides a myriad of challenges that have to be dealt with, space equipment and astronauts travelling to places like the moon or mars, have to deal with a peculiarly wicked foe – The dust.

This isn’t the kind of normal dust we deal with here on earth. ‘Downright evil’ is the phrase that describes the dust on moon! We may not realize it, but lunar dust is a filthy thing and causes a lot of problems. Of course, the dust on mars is no better.

Back in 1972

For instance, let us see how moon dust makes things complicated for engineers and astronauts.

Most of the upper surface of the moon is covered with a mixture of loose material comprising of dust, soil, rocks and pebbles (and other random stuff too). Normally, at places, this layer of mixture ranges from 4 to 6 meters in thickness.

The fine part of this mixture is called the lunar soil and is significantly different from the soil found on earth. It is present almost everywhere on the surface of the moon and is a result of breaking of rocks into small particles by meteorite and micrometeorite impacts; also there is no wind and rain to soften the pieces. This is the part of that loose stuff which is known for causing immense troubles.

The dust is super-fine and extremely hard. You can think of it as collection of little shards of glass. Despite being completely dry, it sticks to everything it touches and as it is super-fine, it can get into tiny creases. If inhaled, it can be toxic; like millions of tiny sharp shards piercing into the inner walls of your respiratory system. A tiny amount of it can eventually kill a full grown man.

Back in 1972, the Apollo 17’s crew learnt this as soon as they stepped out. The dust started clogging their air vents and started dropping the pressure. When returning to their space capsule, Jack Schmitt and Eugene Cernan forgot to brush off the dust. They were stuck with it for the whole time during their journey back home. Some of the dust went airborne in the craft and Schmitt started complaining of congestion. Fortunately, the amount was too small to hurt them a lot. Soon the symptoms subsided and space agencies learnt a lesson – Find a way to deal with the lunar dust.

On mars: Dust on mars can travel places due to dust storms and cause more problems.

Solution

Scientists at NASA found a great way to deal with this dust using an electric zap. They were able to develop electrical fields which can clear about 99% of the dust from the equipment. These dust shields will be tried on in the year 2016.

Blood Falls – A Strange Place Home to Strange Creatures

By Anupum Pant

Red colored water, which gives it name blood falls, emerges continually from the edge of a glacier in east Antarctica. The source of this red-colored-water is said to be a lake that is buried 400 meters under a glacier. The water of this lake is extremely salty and is about 3 times saltier than sea water. It is so salty that even at temperatures that Antarctica experiences, it doesn’t freeze. The lake is estimated to be around 5 million years old!

5 million years ago, this part of Antarctica was under sea water. Gradually glaciers started collecting around and over the lake. This made the water body isolated from the main sea and it became a lake eventually. Over time, as it got separated – like the Taal lake – it grew saltier (Taal lake got isolated too, but it turned less saltier). With this lake, the organisms living in it got trapped in this natural time capsule too.

What gives it the color red?

The falls are not red due to some mysterious spores that were found in the red rains of Kerala. What gives it that color, is a popular chemical phenomenon – iron rust.

The lake gets its supply of iron from the bedrock below it. As the water leaks out from the edge, the iron present in water gets oxidized. This oxidized or rusted iron gives the water its red color.

And since the lake has almost no supply of oxygen from around it, the water underneath is probably still like…water – not red (I’m not sure about it).

But that isn’t even anything interesting I’ve talked about the blood falls yet. The most incredible thing is the creatures that have been found living in those waters.

For millions of years, in the extremely salty waters of the lake with almost no oxygen or sun light, scientists have found a kind of micro-organism that has survived there. The kind of process they use to live has dazed scientists.

The microbes living there have been surviving on iron and sulfur! By breaking sulfates to get oxygen. And iron has been restoring the sulfates. It is a beautiful cycle that has never been seen anywhere else. This strange cycle has widened our view on how life could exist on other planets without oxygen in native state.

Source – SciShow by Hank Green.

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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.

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.

Mpemba Effect – Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water

By Anupum Pant

In the past, we have seen that when it comes to estimating temperature, we are not so smart. Once again seeing the Mpemba Effect defying all known logic, reminds me to be careful about applying logic to most of the natural phenomena which are seemingly simple but in reality are extremely complicated.

By applying simple logic, a 7-year-old could tell you that cold water should turn into ice quicker than hot water would. It should, because a hot liquid contains a lot more heat as compared to a colder liquid, which [the heat]  has to be removed in order to freeze it. Yes, it is what anyone who is unaware of the Mpemba Effect would think. But, that isn’t the case with water. It turns out that a very common substance – water – is not as simple as it looks.

Mpemba Effect

Since the time of Aristotle and Descartes, scientists have noted that hot water can freeze faster than cold water (and yet the effect is not popularly known among us today). Although the effect was noted back then, the actual mechanism which caused it remained a mystery all along…until the year 2013.

All this time this effect must have been known by some other term because, it was not until the 1960s it was named “Mpemba effect”. It was named that after a Tanzanian cookery student Erasto Mpemba when he observed that hot ice cream mix froze faster than the cold mix.

Several theories have tried to explain the mechanisms that cause the Mpemba Effect. Not even one of them was convincing enough. Probably this is what propelled the geniuses from Singapore who could finally solve this mystery during the month of October this year.

What causes it?

In simple words, Hydrogen bonds cause this effect – faster freezing hot water. Normally, individual water molecules are connected by this bond called the Hydrogen bond. Think of the water molecule as a string with two bullies – hydrogen bonds – one on either side. These Hydrogen bonds pull this string from both sides. As a result, the string stretches. We’ve all fought with rubber bands and know that a stretched string has a butt load of energy stored inside it. The same thing happens with water. Energy is stored in stretched water molecules at normal temperature. This extra energy has to be removed to cool water.

At a higher temperature, the heat kind of weakens these bullies. So, the weak bullies aren’t able to pull the string as much. Now, individual molecules sit apart. They are no longer stretched. Thus, not much energy is stored in these strings anymore. They have given up energy. There is no longer any extra energy that needs to be removed. Hence, cooling is faster.

Sorry: Today I don’t have my buddy – the internet – with me. So, you won’t see any outgoing reference links today. I have a just a bit of internet (a slower 2G connection) which I’m using up to publish this.