Tag: things

Space Oddities – Part II

By Anupum Pant
pat on the back self
Self-administered pat on the back to me.

A few days back, in the month of December I had compiled a list of 6 space oddities that really interested me. At that time, I was pretty sure I would stumble upon a few more odd/interesting things about space within a month or two. With that in mind, I had decided to suffix the heading with “Part – I”. Four months have passed. That was a very thoughtful thing I did – thinking 4 months into the future. I have to appreciate my forethought (with a self-administered pat on the back) for doing that because today I’m back with a few more of these odd / interesting things about space and I’m still not embarrassed about the heading for the post.

So, here is the part II of space oddities (read the part I here):

1. A Hole in the Universe

Space Dust Image Gallery

About 7 years from now, researchers from University of Minnesota found out about a really huge void in our universe. The abnormal hole measures approximately sixty billion trillion miles. In easier words, it is about 10 Billion light years wide. Imagine! A beam of light would takes 10 Billion years to travel through that empty place. How lonely would it be at the centre of it. The void is bigger than anything else scientists have ever seen in space.

The whole volume of space shows no sign of any stars, planets, asteroids, gases, clouds, dust. The volume doesn’t even have any signs of dark matter (95% of our universe is dark matter) too. [read more about it]

2. Costliest thing ever built

Think of a huge 5 bed room house floating in space that can be seen moving from the surface of the earth with the naked eye! Yes, I’m talking about the International Space Station. It is a whooping 200,000 kg object that is 171 feet long, 240 feet wide and 90 feet high.

When it comes to the price of building something this huge in space, it beats everything from the most lavish sky scrappers to the most largest dams  ever built. The price of building it is estimated to be about $160 Billion and fortunately the cost is shared by Canada, the European Union, Japan, Russia and the US. It is officially the most expensive object ever constructed, and it is NOT on earth! – Guinness book of World Records.

3. The Cosmic Smile Continue reading Space Oddities – Part II

Cute Aggression – Hugging The Life Out of Your Puppy

By Anupum Pant

Don’t you feel like pinching the cheeks of a chubby little baby or hugging the life out of your puppy? Even if a kid might find it unpleasant you pinching its cheeks really hard, or even if you’d not want to hurt a little kid, you’d still be bubbling to do it. What is it that forces you to vent out a physical reaction towards cuteness?

Most of us do and science proves that intense cuteness can often manifest itself as aggression. Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, has coined the phrase cute aggression for this feeling. Scientists are not yet sure on what causes this. According to them:

“It might be that how we deal with high positive-emotion is to sort of give it a negative pitch somehow”

Or probably you, in some way, want to take care of something by ensconcing it in your arms. And when you see and are not able to do it, you vent it out on bubble wrap?

Researchers carried out a study involving bubble wraps. It was found that people who were shown slides/videos of cute animals popped higher number of bubbles than the people who were shown something not so cute, funny or neutral videos.

A YouTube channel, SoulPancake, actually recreated the experiment in their studio and recorded positive results. It was found that cuteness evokes a physical reaction in most people.