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
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.
Today is pi day. Pi day is celebrated on March 14 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (March 14 is 3/14) at 1:59 PST which is 3.14159.
Since pi day is today’s date written in the mm.dd (03.14) format, it could not be a pi day for most of you because dd.mm is the format used for writing dates in most countries around the world. In fact, those countries where more than half of the world’s population resides, will never have a pi day because you know, we can’t have a 14th month! Pi day is a valid celebration for people living only in the United States (including the 49th and northernmost state, Alaska and Hawaii of course) and Belize. Everywhere else people get zilch today?
Only the purple parts in the map use the mm.dd.yy format to write dates
Firstly, there is always the pi approximation day, which is celebrated on 22nd July (22/7) and uses the dd.mm format. Talking about March 14th, there is much more to pi day than just the date format itself. Let’s see…
Birthdays
I know, Eugene Cernan – The NASA astronaut who was the last man on the moon, and the one you can hear speaking in a popular Daft Punk Track – is one famous man who was born on pi day, 79 years from now, is an American too.
But guess what? Albert Einstein, one of the most genius men of recent times, was born on pi day too. He was a German born physicist (He did live in the US for more than 15 years and in fact, even took his last breath in New Jersey)
Left to Right: Albert Einstein, Gene Cernan and the commander of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, have their birthdays on March 14, Pi Day.
So, you see there is a little bit of pi day for every one around the world today. It is not just an American thing. Now moving on the most amazing things about pi.
Irrational pi
Firstly, pi, unlike what we all are taught in school, isn’t 22/7. 22 divided by 7 is just an approximation of pi – it is only 99.95975% accurate. As we all know, pi is actually the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. A slightly better approximation of pi would be 104348/33215 – which is 99.99999998944% accurate. But, since it is an irrational number, it can never be written in the form of a fraction.
Exact Value
The exact value of pi is impossible to write in digits because the number of digits needed to write it would be infinite and could never be fit inside the known universe.
To think of it in another way, if you divided the whole universe into the smallest possible volumes (plank volume), you’d end up with a mind bogglingly large number of volumes. Suppose you started writing the digits of pi inside these little volumes, you’d finish up the universe and would be still left with infinite more digits to write.
The Digits of Pi
The latest record for the maximum number of known digits of pi is 12.1 Trillion digits (December 28, 2013), as calculated by Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo. They have run out of disk space to store more numbers. Here you can have a look at the first 100,000 digits of pi. And One million digits, if you need more than that.
In these first one million digits, the sequence 12345 occurs 8 times!
The Feynman Point: If you’d like to hear what pie would sound like if you mapped a couple of pleasant sounding notes to each of the digits of pi, try listening to this. If you kept listening for a while and made it till the 762th digit, you’d hear a series of (6 of them) high frequency notes (the ones mapped to the digit nine) that get played continuously. This place in the digits of pi is called the Feynman point where six 9s occur one after another. Isn’t it incredible for six same numbers to be there consecutively in a random irrational number!
The Feynman point – series of six consecutive 9s highlighted in red.
Practically useful pi
Pi can be used in real life to make a couple of things easier. For instance, if you were to find the size of your hat (usually measured in diameters), you’d have a hard time measuring the diameter of your head. This is what you can do to get a good approximation:
Measure the circumference of your head and divide it by π.
Another one trick is used by forest guards: To estimate the height of an elephant the Diameter of an elephant’s foot is multiplied by 2 π.
Pi Jokes, facts and Coincidences
It is an impressive coincidence that 3.14 if horizontally flipped, looks like the word “Pie”. You can check this in the mirror.
Pi looks lie pie in the mirror
Another one is that, the 16th Greek letter is ‘Pi’ and the 16th letter in the English alphabet is ‘P’.
The famous comedian John Evans once made a joke: “What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o’-lantern by its diameter? Pumpkin π.
There is a cologne named pi and is sold with the following marketing mantra: “highlighting the sexual appeal of intelligent and visionary men.”
The height of the Great Pyramid of Giza multiplied by 2 π is equal to the perimeter of its base.
The 90841th place in pi is 122189 – which is also my birth date in the mmddyy format. Find yours here and tell me in the comments below.
Do share with me in the comments, other facts about pi you know and I haven’t covered them here.
If you liked this and would like to be updated on the stories I post here, go to the sidebar on the right side. Like my page on Facebook and subscribe to the newsletter. It will mean a lot to me.
Several years back large colonies of cute little rabbits were being maintained by pharmaceutical companies. These rabbits were used to find contamination in solutions that would be used to treat human beings. If the rabbits fell sick due to fever after being injected, the solutions were labeled as contaminated and were not injected into humans. If the rabbit had no fever after 2 days, the solution was deemed clean and could be used on humans.
However, pharma companies hated this process – not because they felt bad about harming cute bunnies, but the process was expensive and took about 2 days to give results.
A new discovery
A few years later, a scientist named Fred Bang was studying the circulatory system of a horseshoe crab – half a billion year old specie. He accidentally discovered some amazing properties of the horseshoe crab’s blood when one of his crabs died because its whole blood turned into a semi-solid mass.
He found that when the crab’s blue colored blood came in contact with a certain kind of bacteria, it got clotted into a semi-solid mass and completely trapped the bacteria.
And ultimately with the help of a scientist, Jack Levin, he developed a process that could be used to detect bacteria contaminated solutions (contaminated with endotoxin). This process proved to be a boon to us humans.
The replaced test
Today the old bunny test has been completely replaced. Pharmaceutical companies love the new test because it takes about just 45 minutes to complete and costs much lesser.
Every year thousands of live Horseshoe crabs are made to bleed blue to take advantage of their blood’s unique properties. About 30% of these crabs die. The miracle blue liquid can detect contamination in solutions that are extremely tiny (even if the contamination is as tiny as some parts-per-trillion).
The several liters blood extracted from these live crabs is used to save human lives by protecting them from contaminated solutions.
Every single person who has ever had an injection, has been protected because the blood of a horseshoe crab ensured that you got clean injections. Had there been no horseshoe crabs, we’d have been killing bunnies. Salute to the crab.
The marathon is one of the most popular long-distance running events and is followed by people from around the world. An athlete, to even finish the ~42 km race, has to go through a training that lasts several months (or years).The training is designed to develop the slow twitch muscle fibers which enables athletes to run for a long distances without getting tired. But, lacking access to all the hi-tech training equipment, there are people who can run fifteen times that in one session.
Tarahumara people or ‘Running people’ are a group of Native American people living in the north-western Mexico who can run 400+ miles in around 50 hours! Sounds impossible, but it is true. Astonishingly, the entire tribe consisting of men, women, old and young, every one of them is capable of running at least 250+ miles in a single run, without shoes. Such extreme feat of endurance has never been seen among humans anywhere else in the world.
They are the kind of people who run to live. They have running events lasting more than 200 miles regularly. They run to send messages and they run for food; Like Michael Stevens from Vsauce says, as hunters humans who can run persistently, can outrun even horses.
In fact, I thought about writing this after I watched a very interesting video on Vsauce and was feeling uneasy that Michael had missed the Tarahumara people. – [Video]
Where do they get the energy? – Unlike athletes who last on energy gained from Gatorade (or other drinks), these people run on copious amounts of a beverage made from corn, to keep up with the amount of calories they burn in a single event – around 43,000 calories. A great workout indeed!
One thing that has confused me: If they can run 400 miles with ease, why don’t they take part in the marathon events? I’m guessing that they run for long but don’t run as fast as a marathon runner. If you know why, tell me in the comments section below.
Donating = Loving
A small donation worth a single cup of coffee from you can be the difference between this website existing or not. If you like this, please consider buying me a cup of coffee:
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.
If you like to secretly surf the /r/aww page at work, well, science says, it no longer has to be a secret activity. An experiment conducted by researchers at Hiroshima University is a perfect scientific document to convince your boss to allow you a dose of cuteness at work. So here’s a picture of a bunny with a backpack.
According to the study conducted by scientists at Hiroshima University, looking at cute pictures could make you work better. More specifically, cute pictures inspire fine tuned attention and careful behavior.
The study conducted three experiments to check the effects of cute pictures on tasks performed afterwards:
1. A few university students were asked to perform tasks which required a careful coordination of small muscular movements (eg: small finger movements), before and after viewing images of baby or adult animals; performance was measured. It was found that performance measured using the number of successful trials increased after viewing cute images. A performance increase of about 45% was measured. “Less cute pictures” had a positive effect too. But this was found to be much lesser than the performance increase measured after watching cute pictures – around 12% increase.
2. The second experiment was conducted on the same lines, except that the performance task was changed. This time subjects were asked to perform counting tasks. For example, they were given an array of numbers and were asked to count the number of times the number 3 appeared in it. Again, cute and less cute pictures resulted in a performance increase of 15% and 2% respectively.
3. In the third experiment a global-local letter task (more about it here) was given to the subjects. The results showed that the students performed tasks requiring focused attention more carefully after viewing cute images.
Explanation
The study propelled the lead researcher, Hiroshi Nittono, to find an proper reasoning for this effect; he implies that since humans are hard-wired to speak & deal slowly & carefully when they are around little babies, they are inclined to do the same with other tasks after looking at cute things.
Today we meet a 12-year-old ‘man’ who has been on an invention spree since he was just 8 years old. If I may use a pop-culture reference, this adorable boy is a Sheldon Copper in the making.
A case (box) to maintain a resting golf ball’s temperature – Peyton loves golf. And on one cold day, when he observed that his golf balls weren’t bouncing the way they should have been, he, instead of sleeping on the problem, thought of finding a solution.
Retractable training wheels: This one is a pair of retractable training wheels connected to a lever mechanism on the handle of a bicycle – you press the lever and the training wheels rise up. A perfect solution for kids who want to experience the joy of biking while they are learning to ride. He invented this to help his sister when she was learning to ride a bicycle. Today, bike manufacturers are flocking around him to buy his idea.
A sand-less sand bag: When the super-storm Sandy struck 24 US states in October last year, the entire eastern sea-face from Florida to Maine suffered great losses. It caused a damage of around $65 billion. Peyton saw this and figured that the sand bags that were being used for flood defense contributed to a lot of inefficiency. These bags were 40 pounds each; moving them from one place to another was tough. But they had to be heavy to stop the water. Besides that, the bags when stacked left undesirable gaps in between, which caused a leakage. Peyton felt a need to contribute to make people better equipped for floods in the future.
His solution – A sand-less sand bag – is better than the traditional bag in two ways. Firstly, weighing around 4 pounds, it is significantly lighter than the sand bag. It contains a mixture of, a polymer that expands when it comes in contact with water, and salt which makes it heavy when it wets. Secondly, this bag comes with an interlocking fastener which keeps the bag in place when it expands – Removing any gaps which could create a leak during the floods. Moreover these bags can be dried later to be reused.
Failure is progress and a normal part of the process. Whether it’s science or life, you have to start, fail and just keep pushing. In a football game, time runs out, and a golf match ends after the last hole. But when you are working on something and it doesn’t work, you just extend the game – and give your experiment or your prototype another go.
It was a delight to watch the charming boy speak on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Sadly, that video no longer exists, here’s a replacement with the guy’s own pitch:
Benford’s law is a fairly simple law to grasp and it will blow your mind. It deals with the leading digits of numbers.
So, for example, you have the number 28 – The leading digit for it would be 2. Similarly, the leading digit for 934 would be 9. Just pick the first digit. Now…
In a data set you’d say – it is common sense to assume that the probability of leading digit one (1) appearing would be more or less equal to that of leading digit nine (9).
As there are 9 possible leading digits, you’d think that the probability of each leading digit would compute to something around 0.11
You’d imagine that it would be normal to assume a nearly straight graph of probability vs. leading digit. But this isn’t true.
Benford’s law says
Your common sense fails. What actually happens is that the likelihood of 1 appearing as the first digit in a data set is around 0.3
For the following digits, the probability keeps decreasing. And the following graph appears. You’ll see that the numbers rarely start with nine!
When does it work?
This counter-intuitive result applies to a wide variety of natural data sets. It works the best if your set spans quite a few orders of magnitude. Natural set of data like stock prices, electricity bills, populations, which could range from few single digit values to several digits work the best. Other data like the heights of people doesn’t work because it does not span “quite a few orders of magnitude”. Also, artificially tampered data fails to comply because the person who tampers does the same mistake everyone does. Therefore, Benford’s law is also used to detect frauds in data.
Example:
Count the number of data points in a data set which have the leading digit 1 and write the number next to the number 1 in a table.
Then, keep repeating it for all the numbers 2, 3, 4 and so on.
Calculate the probabilities for each. In the end you’ll be left with a table that would look something like this. (Probability = Number of Data Points for that digit / Total Data Points)
If you are here to judge me because you think you clicked on a completely nonsensical headline, well that is what headlines are for – To get you to open the link and read.
However, I have to tell you that this headline isn’t complete nonsense. There is more to the word blind than just the word alone. The word Blind in itself doesn’t completely define the exact state of a person’s visual ability. So the blind can see, or not, depending on the kind of blindness they are affected with.
Functionally Blind or Legally Blind
First, there is this thing called functional blindness. The functionally blind can see a bit, but not enough to do everyday tasks without hindrance.
Then there is legal blindness which classifies people having visual acuity below some point as blind. Even people with poor peripheral vision are labeled as Legally blind.
Some people might even have something called partial vision loss due to eye related ailments like glaucoma or cataract. The vision in such cases could be blurred or narrow.
In short, despite being classified as “blind”, people with functional, partial or legal blindness can see at least something. They can perceive light. But not all kind of blind people can perceive light.
Total Blindness
People who are totally blind cannot see. They see nothing. It is called NLP (No Light of Perception). For the people who can see naturally without making any conscious effort, the concept of being able to see nothing can be a very profound concept to grasp. Explaining the meaning of nothingness to a not-blind person is exactly the same as explaining the concept of color to a totally blind person. Experience of one sense can in no way be explained by referring to some other sense. It is a subjective experience.
Some totally blind people are able to map out a 3D image of the world through their eyes. They literally see through their ears. And this can be learnt. – Read more.
There are also some cases where even totally blind can perceive light to some extent. – Source
Is Black = Nothing?
Contrary to what most of us assume, the color black is NOT nothing. You’d assume that a person who is totally blind would see black, like you do when you close both your eyes. But seeing black is not seeing nothing.
Suppose, if you’d ask a totally blind person to describe the color black because you’d assume he always sees it, he’ll not be able to describe it. To experience nothingness to some extent, you can do this:
Close your left eye. Now you are seeing through your right eye. Focus of things with your right eye. But, what you are seeing with your left eye is nothing. It is not black. You see nothing.
Meet Tommy
Probably the most popular person here on the internet who can talk to you about total Blindness is, Tommy, who runs a splendid YouTube channel.
Tommy has been blind all his life. He makes great videos. If you haven’t subscribed to his channel, you must do it right now. The channel, on the whole, will give you quite an insight into the concept of No Light of Perception from a first person account of a Totally blind person. Here is one video of his which I loved. He talks about what colors mean for completely blind people.
First, think of something that is 1,200 km in length, 3000 m in height and yet it is complete buried under the Antarctic ice. A whole mountain range called the Gamburtsev Mountain Range in Antarctica has remained unexplored, buried for centuries under a 2 to 4 kilometer thick sheet of ice. The range is named after Grigoriy A. Gamburtsev – a Russian geophysicist.
It amazes me how something of the size of European Alps, right here on earth, has remained unexplored for decades. Scientists estimate that these mountains are several millions of years old. But, till date they have no concrete idea on how they were actually formed.
In the words of Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University:
Amazingly, we have samples of the moon but none of the Gamburtsevs’.
Discovery: year 1958
In the year 1958, these mountains were discovered by a Soviet expedition. For exploration, this expedition investigated the surface using seismic sounding at around 10 points. During this time, not much detail was known.
Year 2000: It was only in the year 2000 that a project by British Antarctic Survey was able to produce a fairly detailed 3D map of Antarctica to date. As a result, some more information about these mountains was gathered. Still, it wasn’t enough for finding out their origins.
To solve the mystery of their origins, in the year 2011, aircrafts equipped with radars, lasers and various other meters were sent out by researchers to image the last unexplored mountain range on earth. They flew a distance of around 3 times the earth’s circumference over Antarctica – about 120,000 kilometers.
In the end, this flying around returned good results.
This Image gives you a rough idea about how deep these mountains are buried. [PDF]
I hope that in the coming years, scientists will be able to drill through the ice that has accumulated there for millions of years. And then, probably they’ll be able to retrieve real Gamburtsev rock samples for detailed investigation.
Note: Pardon me if I’ve been writing too much in the “Earth” category for the past few days. Trust me it is just a coincidence. In my defense, It is completely possible that a truly random die roll can land 6 consecutive 6s.
The Feynman point is one such example. It is a sequence of 6 nines somewhere in the decimal digits of pi. In short, you cursing me for writing under the same category for the past few days is not justified, logically.
Geologically this is quite a phenomenon and might get a bit confusing to grasp if you stop paying enough attention. Here we go…
Island in a lake on an island in a lake…
Taal lake is a freshwater lake on the Luzon island of Philippines. Almost at the center of this lake, is an island called the volcano island. At the center of this island is another lake called the main crater lake. And in this lake is a small landmass called the Vulcan point. [map]
Now take a deep breath…in short, it is, Luzon island > Taal lake > Volcano island > Main crater lake > Vulcan Point.
The main crater lake: Even though the crater lake isn’t a very big lake, it is still claimed as the world’s largest lake on an island (Volcano Island) in a lake (Taal Lake) on an island (Luzon). Of course it is, where else in the whole world would you find a lake on an island in a lake on an island?
Vulcan point: On this world’s largest lake on an island in a lake on an island, is a tiny land mass called the Vulcan Point which is the world’s largest volcano in a lake (Main Crater Lake) on a volcano (Taal Volcano). It isn’t even big enough to support a small house.
Home to Unique Species
But all that is just a part of what is interesting about the Taal lake. Ecologically it is another marvel in a way that it is home to a few species of animals that are found nowhere else on earth. In this lake you’ll find the only varieties of fresh water sardines, sharks and sea snakes.
Reason: This lake was not a lake several thousands of years back. Then, due to volcanic eruptions, it got separated from the sea. Now the only thing that connected this water mass and the sea was Pansipit river. Gradually, several hundreds of years of precipitation converted this lake from a saltwater lake to a freshwater lake. For centuries, animals living here have remained isolated and have evolved into unique species to adapt to this desalination.
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.
You should know: Meteor vs. Meteoroid vs. Meteorite
Meteor: The streak of light that we see in the sky is “Meteor”. When debris enters earth and gets burned up while entering, it leaves a streak of light. Unlike what is popularly believed, meteor is not the debris itself rather the word “meteor” refers to only the flash of light.
Meteoroid: A meteoroid is a mass that is small – ranging from a kilometer to only a few millimeters in diameter. Most meteoroids that enter the Earth’s atmosphere are so small that they vaporize completely and never reach the planet’s surface.
Meteorite: If the Meteoroid survives and reaches the earth’s surface, it becomes a Meteorite.
Hoba the Meteorite
About 80,000 years back, a ridiculously huge mix of Iron and Nickel entered the earth. It was so large that what was left out of all the burning through the atmosphere, measured 66,000 kg in the end. About half ton of this meteorite has gone to laboratories for research. Even after accounting for losses towards laboratories and vandalism, it is still the largest single mass of natural Iron on the Earth’s surface. It is the largest meteorite ever discovered till date and is called “Hoba”.
This meteorite was discovered by a farmer in Namibia in the year 1920. Since then, due to its mass, it has never been moved. The meteorite and the site has been declared as a national monument by the Namibian government and several tourists visit it every year.
Farmer’s Story:
One winter as I was hunting at the farm Hoba I noticed a strange rock. I sat down on it. Only its upper part was visible. The rock was black, and all around it was calcareous soil. I scratched the rock with my knife and saw there was a shine beneath the surface. I then chiselled off a piece and took it to the SWA Maatskappy in Grootfontein, whose director established it to be a meteorite.
If that was hardly interesting…
The most puzzling thing about this meteorite is probably not that it belongs to a very rare class of meteorites (Ataxite), but the fact that it has no crater to be seen around it. Normally, a meteorite of this size should have left a crater hundreds of meters wide.
The best theory that explains the absence of any preserved crater around it is that, this piece of rock must have hit the earth’s surface at a very low angle. As a result, it must have skipped on the surface like a flat stone on water surface. And in the end, must have landed at the place where it lies today.
It is yellow/gray, smells really bad and can make you rich [image]. Ambergris, or commonly known as whale vomit is a waxy, hard, flammable substance that sells for several thousand dollars a pound. Although it is known as whale vomit, it is usually excreted (not vomited) by the sperm whale. It is formed by the lumping of Bilary Secretions in a whale. They can’t be digested and are often excreted by whales. These lumps can float for years and might get washed to the beach or are found in whale abdomen.
A fresh lump would be black and slowly a lighter colored coating forms on it with age. Generally, lighter colored pieces have a sweeter smell because they have cured in the ocean for a longer time.
What makes it so costly?
Firstly, it is rare to find a lump of Ambergris. Secondly, as this substance ages, it leaves the stink and starts emitting a sweet, musky odor. Not all people like this smell. Other than its unique scent, the perfumes made of this substance last much longer than other scents that tend to evaporate. Both these reasons make it a substance in high demand.
Although the scent can be mimicked by using chemicals, there is nothing like using the real substance. Thus, whale vomit will always carry a premium price.
This year, Ken Wilman, while walking his dog on the beach, spotted a 6 lb lump of whale vomit that turned out to be worth £100,000. Note to self: So, the next time you are going out for a walk on the beach, take your dog with you. And go on walks more often.
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.
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)
