Tag: Shopping

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.

Yes, Light Can Push Physical Objects

By Anupum Pant

Tim is a 71-year-old eccentric who has been collecting interesting toys for 50 years now. Today he has a collection of around 250,000 absurd toys in suitcases, labeled and stacked in a room from the floor to the ceiling. He shows them off in a Youtube channel regularly. I almost never miss any of his toys. Usually most the toys he displays amaze you, but do not blow off your mind. The last one did.

Before this, I had not known that light can push or move a physical object. So, I decided to investigate a bit.

The Extraordinary Toy

In his last video, he showed off a beautiful glass bulb mounted on a wooden stand, that he says has been made by some German company. The bulb has a very good vacuüm (not complete vacuüm, just enough to not create unnecessary drag for the vanes) and encloses a fan-like structure that starts rotating when a bright light is switched on near it. Some people call it the light mill – like the wind mill moves with the wind, this one moves when photons hit it. If give enough time, the mill can accelerate to really good speeds (at thousands of rounds per minute). Watch the video below. [Video]

Theories on how a radiometer really works

The device, a special kind of radiometer, was invented around 140 years back in the year 1873, by Victorian experimenter Sir William Crookes to measure the radiant energy of heat or light. It has four vanes mounted at the edge of four stiff wires to make a fan, each of which has a black side and a silvered side. All of this is enclosed in a bulb which is evacuated enough to not cause drag due to air. In complete vacuüm the vanes move in an opposite direction, but that experiment is really difficult to recreate!

  1. When light is turned on, the fan moves in a way that makes it look as if light is pushing away the black colored side. The theory of photons pushing the black side was accepted initially. But soon a problem was seen with the theory. If light is absorbed at the blackened side and reflected at the silvered side, the fan should be moving in the opposite direction.
  2. Then came in the other explanation which explained that the heated black side due to absorbed radiation rarefied the air near the black side and hence caused the gas to rush in and push that side. The greater the heat, the more this back side would get pushed and it would spin faster. Later even this theory was proved to be wrong. But, Britannica, till date decides to go with this explanation – to some extent this theory goes in the right direction, you will see why…
  3. One more theory claimed that the heat evaporated the impurities on the black side, whose force made it spin.

How the radiometer really works?

The correct explanation was given by a  prominent Anglo-Irish innovator, Osbourne Reynolds. He explained it by mentioning a porous plate, where the air inside the holes would flow from the colder sides to the warmer side (obviously) and make the vanes spin in the opposite direction. He called it “Thermal Transpiration” – makes sense and is easy to understand. But the vanes here are not porous. So…

He said that “Thermal Transpiration” in the vanes takes place at the edge of the vanes and not the faces. Think of edges as small pores, he said.

Due to a temperature gradient formed, the air starts moving along the surface from colder to the warmer side through the edges. The net pressure difference around the vane is created which pushes it in a direction that is away from warmer air and towards the colder air – makes sense for the apparatus.

This is the reason, if it is cooled, it moves in the opposite direction.

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Train Wheels are Not as Simple as They Seem

By Anupum Pant

I’m pretty sure not many of you know this about train wheels, neither did I.

Look at the picture and answer this: What do you think keeps a train moving on the track? or Which part of the wheel do you think it is that keeps the train from careening away from the track at turns?
Applying general logic, I thought that flanges at the end of the wheels  kept a train from going off rails at a turn. Turns out, I was wrong!

In fact, flanges at the end of the wheels are just a safety mechanism to keep the train on its track only if the main mechanism fails. And what is that main mechanism?

The problem with cornersTrain wheels are conical in shape. That means they have a varying diameter at different points of contact. Now, suppose the track turns right. The train’s left wheels now have to travel more than the right wheels because at the turn the track on the left is longer.

So how do the left wheels travels more than the right wheels without a differential?
Since the wheels are conical in shape, the whole wheel-set shifts a bit to the left, if the track curves right. Now the point of contact of the left wheel is at a larger diameter of the cone. While the smaller wheel Correction from the toptouches at a point where the diameter of the wheel is lesser. Therefore, if the left wheel now makes one circle it travels further than the right wheels and the train moves along the curve smoothly.

The whole beauty of this system is that the amount of shift of the wheel-set happens automatically, makes the train move on turns smoothly and keeps the train on track.

Look at how you can try this at home using 2 plastic cups and 2 similar pipes. [Experiment]

If I couldn’t explain it properly, probably the best physics teacher ever – Richard Feynman – will explain it to you better. [Video]

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Practical, Impractical and Bizarre Ways to Lose Weight

By Anupum Pant

Here are some impractical, practical and bizarre ways to lose weight scientifically:

1. Practical – Switch to Smaller Plates [Study]

While it may sound like switching plates won’t help your diet, it actually greatly affects the way you see, and consume food. In the long run it helps you lose weight effortlessly.

If you don’t believe me, I suggest you look at the following common optical illusion – Tell me which one of the circle that is filled with black color, is larger?

You know the answer. Although they don’t look equal to our not-so-smart brain, both of the circles are really equal in size. But what does that tell you?

Moral: Think of the black circle as food. Put it in a larger plate and you think it is less food, and you don’t mind adding little more food to it. Whereas, if you use smaller plates, the amount food looks like it is a lot already. As a result, if you own only small plates, you won’t add more food. Who am I to tell you that little changes give big results.

It has been proven by scientists that using smaller standard plates will reduce your consumption by around 20% every time. 20% is not less!

Note: Similarly, if you want to drink less, you could try replacing your short and stout glasses with taller glasses. This technique is based on another optical illusion known as the T-Illusion – which says that we tend to over-estimate the length of objects placed vertically. See it for yourself. [link]

Other Good Ways: In fact, before moving on to the bad ways, you must know that there are several good ways to lose weight without even trying hard. For instance:

  • Drinking good amounts of cold water can help to some extent.
  • Or, you could try making it a rule to turn away and use stairs, every single time you come across an escalator.
  • When you are travelling in a bus, make it a rule to always get down one stop before your destination.
  • An apple before breakfast everyday can help you lose weight by making you feel full due to its fiber content. – [Source]
  • Just place a mirror in your kitchen or your refrigerator door. Yes, that helps. How? See this – [Video]

2. Bizarre – Excessive Gum Chewing? [Study]

Wait! Before you try this, let me tell you, this is one of those impractical / bizarre ways to experience severe weight loss I was talking about in the first line of this post. Since excess of anything isn’t good – backed by the fact that in ancient China people committed suicide by eating a pound of salt – chewing excess gum probably isn’t a good way to lose weight. I mention it just for the sake of information.

Sugar-free chewing gums contain Sorbitol – a laxative. Chewing these in excessive amounts – about 15+ a day – can cause serious weight loss and chronic diarrhea.

You’ll end up in the hospital if you try this.

3. Impractical – Don’t get Married. [Study]

Although deciding to remain single all your life is not so impractical for everybody, you could consider it socially impractical (at least in orthodox Indian societies).

Yes, studies prove that Married men were 25% more likely to be overweight or obese than single men or men in committed relationship (i.e. dating or engaged). – Thanks to UsefulScience.org

Now, go and subscribe the budding 59 Seconds channel on YouTube and buy the book. That is what I am doing…

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Making Glow Sticks at Home is Fairly Easy

By Anupum Pant

Glow sticks or Light Sticks are so much fun and assuming you are able to get the required chemicals from a lab supply shop (online or offline), making them at home is as simple as mixing tang.
I came across this interesting video which teaches you how to make glow sticks at home. The best thing: You don’t have to worry about mixing exact measurements. An experiment definitely worth a try!

As the video tells you in the beginning, making these at home will cost you more than a ready-made glow stick. That is because the chemicals required to make it cost much lesser when bought in bulk. Nevertheless, it should be fun to try at home. If you can’t watch it, I’ve mentioned everything in detail below. [video]

1. SOLVENT: The first thing you need is Diethyl Phthalate (DEP). It is a fairly common substance because it is used a lot in detergent, sprays, cosmetics industries. Although it is clear and looks almost like water, you should avoid touching it with bare skin. In fact, none of these chemicals should be touched. Gloves are extremely important here. DEP will be your main solvent. All the magic will happen in it.

2. COLORS: The second part of making glow sticks involves the color. For this, you’ll need something called the fluorescent dyes. The ones used in the video are:

  • 9,10-bis(phenylethynyl)anthracene for Green – Orange in solid state.
  • Rubrene for Yellow – Red in solid state.
  • 9,10-diphenylanthracene for Blue – White in solid state.
  • and Rhodamine B for Red – Green in solid state.
  • Mix the blue and Yellow solutions for the white glow stick.

3. ENERGY: To make enough energy to light it up you’ll need a mixture of three chemicals. The first one is TCPO (DNPO or CPPO can also be used). It is an expensive chemical. It can be made for much cheaper [video]
The second chemical is added to keep the liquid in alkaline state. Sodium Acetate (Remember Hot Ice).
In the end, you add, Hydrogen peroxide and shake to give the final glow. It acts as an oxidizing agent, reacts to form an unstable compound, which excites the dye to an excited state. The dye emits light when it comes back to the ground state. This is the reason you need Fluorescent dyes – normal dyes won’t work.

For more of such interesting chemistry tricks do subscribe to NurdRage on Youtube.

To make a permanent Glow Stick

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Using Psychology To Get Back Your Lost Wallet

By Anupum Pant

Do you like to keep a picture of someone you love in your wallet? If the answer is no, you should probably start doing it. But, suppose you have a loved baby, adorable parents, cute puppy and grandparents at home, all of whom you love equally, whose picture do you think would be the best one to keep in your wallet?

Professor Richard Wiseman from University of Hertfordshire, a psychologist, decided to find out. He designed an experiment that would be conducted on the street and would help him figure out the answer to this tough choice.

An experiment on the street

He and his team dropped 240 wallets around the city of Edinburgh. Just to find out, how many of the wallets would be returned by the finders to their respective owners.

Not all the wallets were same. A few displayed picture of a cute baby, others had a picture of a puppy, some had a family picture and others contained an elderly couple’s portrait.

There were some other wallets dropped which contained a receipt suggesting how charitable the owner of that wallet was. These had no pictures in them.

Which one do you think won? Guess and read on…

Results!

Following were the return percentages of wallets:

  • I hope babies don’t get too much cute-aggression out of you because the ones with baby pictures – An incredible 88% of these wallets got returned!
  • Ones with the puppy pictures – 53% were returned.
  • Family portrait wallets – 48% came back.
  • With just 28% return percentage, the ones with the picture of an elderly couple fared the worst among all wallets that had pictures.
  • And only 15% of the wallets that enclosed a receipt and had no pictures were returned to their owners.

Moral (take it with a grain of salt)

If it doesn’t hurt, you could experiment with a cute baby’s picture in your wallet. Since it was tested in just one city, there is a great chance that you could get a different result in your area. If you don’t have one yet, find one on the WWW. The internet is full of them!

Getting back a lost wallet 88 times out of 100 times is big probability. What do you have to lose? A simple picture of a baby will pump up your chances of getting back the wallet by so many percentage points. Go, get one printed right now!

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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.

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.

Halo Effect – Helping You Make Poor Judgements

By Anupum Pant

Despite being well aware of the adage – “Don’t judge a book by its cover” – our not-so-smart-brains fail us on this every time. Unknowingly, humans are prone to the Halo effect. And they’ll even deny that this harmless looking effect was what led them to make a wrong judgement about someone or something.

Halo Effect: In simple terms, we create a whole fake image about anything in our minds, based on a single trait.  For instance:

  1. Don’t you thing Steve Jobs must have been a perfect human being in person? I’m not saying he wasn’t, may be he was. Assuming you never met him, what made you construct that image of his, in your mind? Probably his warm, friendly presentations. Or it is even possible that the seemingly flawless physical designs of Apple products did that trick. Often marketers use this effect to create a warm image of themselves in the audience’s mind by saying little of any substance.
  2. By the good looks of this website, which I’ve made sure are really good, you’d unknowingly judge it as a page presenting you with quality content. You might do this without even looking at the content. May be it really is good content in this case, but it isn’t always.
  3. A well known brand that releases good commercials is often believed to be a quality brand. You’d feel no pain in shelling out thousands of bucks for a simple pair of shoes, saying it is a good quality shoe and will last long. There is a chance that you’ve never really looked deeper into the quality of the shoes this company makes. You’ll simply trust them because of the world-class commercials they come out with – which of course are only a result of outsourcing of creative work to a professional company. Which is not to say that the company really does make poor quality shoes. May be it doesn’t. But you just made a snap judgement without enough information.

The name Halo effect:
Its called the Halo effect because of this general tendency among us to make a snap judgement about the overall good traits of a person by just looking at a halo painted on top of their heads (one good trait of their’s).

But here is the catch, it works both ways:

Suppose you dislike one thing about something, you’ll build an image of “bad” around it, in your mind. This has been tested widely and it is true. People unknowingly do it and don’t realize why they did it. Moreover they’ll deny that it affects them.

Suppose you go to a restaurant and see that there is nothing fancy inside – naked tables, poorly dressed waiters and shabby flooring – you’ll never expect tasty food coming out of its kitchen.

Same thing happens with poorly designed websites. The content isn’t considered credible if they don’t look good. That is one reason, I take time to muster up good-looking images for my featured section.

[Read more]

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Human Skin and Permanent Tattoos

Our skin is huge. It is so big that it is larger than any of our organs. Yes, skin is the largest organ in our body. Still, we have never heard some of the most striking things about the human skin. Let us take a few minutes to skim through them before we talk about permanent tattoos.

Weight and Area: If our skin was cut and laid on the floor, it would cover an area of about 1.5 to 2 m2. If weighed on a scale, it would independently weigh about 3.5 kg (about 5% of your body weight).
To give you a perspective about its area, the same area in some posh localities of Mumbai would cost around $35000. Anyway, it sounds senseless to compare our skin’s area with real estate. So, given that no one has been able to artificially create an exact replica of it, I can’t really put a cost on it now. Let us talk about a nice estimation of its cost in the future. In terms of many functions it performs for our body, – a personal air conditioner, heater, shield, sensor, moisturizer etc – our skin, no doubt, is an invaluable asset.

In short, it is always good to think carefully about it, when you are planning a construction on this precious piece of real estate. Because bringing it down is going to be difficult.

Permanent Tattoos

To understand how permanent tattoos work, you need to understand the basic structure of skin.

Layers: Broadly, there are 3 main layers of skin – The Epidermis, Dermis and Hypodermis. The thickness varies at different parts. For instance, it is the thinnest at our eye-lids. Thinner skin is lighter. This enables you to complete the wink, in the wink of an eye.

Why Permanent?
Permanent tattoos on skin are permanent because of the 3 different layers. To put a tattoo on your skin a mechanized needle punctures your epidermis and sends colored particles to the epidermis. The body thinks of it as a damage that has been done to the body, and sends white blood cells to capture the color particles. But these particles are too big to be eaten by the white blood cells. As a result, they stay there permanently.

Why Avoid?

  1. It is not really Permanent: Later in your life, as the pigment moves and the folds of skin change, the “permanent tattoos” lose their sharpness. They start fading or get distorted. But a hazy and pointless mark remains there permanently.  At this point, people start regretting about their early life decisions. They start looking for methods to get rid of these hazy marks. Now, an expensive laser treatment seems like the best idea.
  2. Tattoos can kill you: While itching, swelling, rashes, bumps, and other skin reactions due to tattoos are very common; it should be known that tattoos can also kill you. Poorly made tattoo ink can contain hazardous chemicals which range from potentially carcinogenic substances to the presence of lead. Moreover, a wrong needle pierced at the wrong places, like your spine, could prove to be deadly. You don’t want these pigments in your blood stream.
    HIV or hepatitis from an infected needle can be another concern. But dying from a tattoo is extremely rare.
  3. Professional career: Also visible permanent tattoos aren’t good for your professional career. Most employees think it’s unacceptable for tattoos by be visible while at work. Also it is believed that tattoos should be covered up for a job interview.
  4. Tattoo removal can be expensive. Plus most of the time these methods don’t do their job perfectly. Often, permanent coloration is left after removal.
  5. This is not an exhaustive list. So, Etc…

It is a good idea to find some other way to prove your love.

If you are wondering why I wrote this – It was a side-effect of an effort to find a few common things in the randomness that I came across today while researching for a completely different article. Although the article might seem absurd, you can’t refute that it does teach you at least one new thing, for the day.

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