sciencecapsules

          Why should we ignite to start the fire?  Where do the blazing light and heat come from? An inquisitive mind always try to find the answers.  Now we go..     We will consider a simplest combustion or burning reaction.          2H 2 + O 2 = 2H 2 O + heat      Here hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water and release heat.   Suppose we ignite hydrogen gas in a jar, it reacts with atmospheric oxygen; burst into flames; forms water vapour; release of lot of heat and light energy.  This reaction is still used in rockets. BURNING LAID BARE:      Hydrogen molecule has two hydrogen atoms that are bonded together.  So does the oxygen molecules.  These bonds are weaker.  If we supply little heat energy -igniting-the bonds break loose.      Now the loose atoms form a new molecule -water molecule (H 2 O).  The bonds are stro...

          Why we have weakness, madness, possessiveness and soft corner for this yellow metal? SOME ANSWERS  1. It is glittering always.  It does not rust like iron. 2. It is not abundant like water or silver.  Also it is not scarce like diamond or uranium. 3. By adding little copper, you can shape it in any way you want.  One can make intricate jewelry with it. 4. It is portable wealth or property. 5. Its price usually does not nose dive.  It is stable or grows.  It is even take care of money inflation. 6. It is instantly en-cash-able. 7.  On the long run, it does not depreciate and only appreciate. 8. Gold attracts women.  May be due to female hormones. 9. Dowry in the shape of gold ornaments is the main stay in many societies. 10. People believe 'investing a portion of their income in gold' is good strategy. 11. It can be pledged, sold, en-cashed.  In emergency, nothing helps like gold. 12. Banks...

       All the physical bodies have a property called 'inertia' according to the Newton's first law.  That is, a body which is moving in straight line; a body that is rotating or a body at rest, will not change its state easily.  It will try to keep on doing what it is doing.  Even it will hesitate to change its direction.  For humans, inertia can be called laziness.  A man finds it is difficult to change his altitude, ideas, work, character.      A giant wheel that is rotating cannot be stopped all of a sudden.  It requires great effort and long time.      We are exploding atom bombs now and then, earth gets tremors and earthquake now and then.  Did they disturb the rotation of  the earth in any way.  No, not at all.  The earth is huge and heavy.  It is rotating at the speed of 1000 km per hour.  Heavier the body, greater the inertia.  Hence the man made forces is n...

          On a online store X, a product costs 200 dollars and it has 15 positive reviews.  Another online store Y features the same product for a price of 250 dollars with 32 positive reviews.  Which one to buy? Little Math:      Find the product of prices and reviews .  Then take the square root of the answer.  Do it for the both the stores. For store X:      Square root of (200*15) = 54.77 For store Y:      Square root of (250* 32) = 89.44 89.44 is greater than 54.77.  Hence go for the store Y.  These numbers called geometric mean.  This 'measure' is used to compare widely different values like 200 and 15.  Average stand best for closely related numbers like 120, 125, 101. SOME MORE USES OF GEOMETRIC MEAN 1. Making square out of rectangle:      Say, 18 cm and 2 cm are the sides of a rectangle.  Find the geometric mean of them.   ...

                     Say, a lady by name Mary makes 'home made chocolates' in a hill station called Ooty.  She wanted to fix the price.  So she begun to experiment.  At the most, she can make 10 kg of chocolates per day.  First, she put the price at 1000 rupees per kg.  No takers.  It proved costly for both locals and tourist.  She changed the price to 750/ kg.  Some 3 or 4 kg sold daily.  Then she drastically reduced the price to 250/kg.  (even though she incurred loss). The chocolates sold like hot cakes.  There was a demand for more than 15 kg a day.  She was not able to cope up with the demand.  Next, she  priced the chocolates at 600 per kg.  That included some decent profit.  Now, around 10 kg  sold everyday.  She was happy 'for ever'!.       "A thing is perfectly priced when supply equals demand".   Supply-...

A  micro story:      In a famous Indian temple, the stepping stone asked the main deity, "people are walking on me without respect but worship you with great respect. why?  Even though we came from the same stone."     The deity replied, " The artisan made just two or three cuts to make you.  But I received so many blows and cuts with chisel and hammer.  I bore them all.  My eyes, nose and all my features, dress, jewels are chiseled and carved out intricately by the artisan.  That is why I get the respect that I deserve".      Lesson 1.  The masterpiece or statue is hidden in the stone.      Lesson 2: It takes so  much hard work with devotion and patience to carve out the deity.      Every marble or stone has a beautiful sculpture.  It is up to us to carve it out.      We know 'white contains all the colours'.  So does the white paper. Usin...

          Take hot potato.  Cut it into four pieces.  Keep them on a plate.  Blow air on them using a fan.  It will cool down quickly.  By cutting potato into pieces, we increase surface area.  Since more area is in contact with atmosphere, potato can easily transfer the heat to the air in the atmosphere.  If we blow air with a fan, it will further aid the transfer of heat.     So the 'principle of cooling' is , 1. increase hot surface area. 2. blow air.      In a tropical country like India, you might have observed this scene in a tea shop. To cool the tea, the person raises the hot cup of tea as high as possible in one hand, in another hand he holds another empty cup as low as possible.  He repeats the process a number of times.  Surprisingly there is no word for this process in English.  We will see why, a little later.  But Indian languages do have.  By pouring tea fr...

          An artist may say 'black is a colour'.  But physicist says, 'black is just a absence of light.  A green leaf absorbs all the colours in the sunlight except green.  When it reflect only green light, it looks green.  A black shirt will absorb all the light and emits none.  Hence it looks'black'. Consequently the wearer will feel warm.      Flowers normally have soft petals.  Hence they have short life.  Had there been a black flower, it would absorb all the solar radiation and whither quickly.  The flowers normally have white or bright colours.      Solar panels, umbrella, solar cooker are black so that they can absorb the sun's heat fully.      There is star with infinite density, heavy mass and enormous gravity.  It attracts and absorbs everything  due to its immense gravity.  Even it swallows light.  Hence it is called 'black hole'. ...

       Why something burns?  What is happening in a chemical reaction?  How the energy is liberated?      To understand how the nature works, it has provided us some simple systems.  For example, the earth and the moon.  If we understand the mechanics of how the moon goes around the earth, we can understand the planetary system, stars and galaxies.  Similarly, the nature has given us a simplest atom, hydrogen.  It is just a single positive proton that is circled by single negative electron.      The single electron is in the first orbit of  hydrogen.  If it gets one more electron, it will be stable.  Why?  Consider a giant wheel, if weights are distributed  evenly on the wheel, it will rotate smoothly with stability.  That means, all the seats in the giant wheel should be filled up.  Similarly, first orbit has two vacancy.  But the hydrogen has only one electr...

          When two persons quarrel, their strength and weakness are revealed.  Their character is stripped bare.  When the two countries make war, their military might come into the open.  Hence, 'collision' reveals and exposes.  In sub-atomic world, collisions are common.      Rutherford bombarded gold foil with alpha-particles (Helium) and discovered the presence of nucleus.  Chadwick bombarded wax with protons and discovered neutrons.  When the neutrons strike uranium atoms, it split up; releases energy; the atom bomb is born.      The large Hadron collider-LHC is a big machine situated below the french-Swiss border. 1. It is 27 km long circular tunnel. 2. It accelerate the particles up to the speed of light and make them collide. 3. The particles are steered by powerful magnets which weighs as much as five jumbo jets and can store enough energy to melt 18 tonnes of gold. 4. The partic...

1. Why 'block chain'?      It keeps thousands of strangers honest and consistent. 2. What is block chain?  be brief.      It is the digital information-blocks stored in a public data base- chain. 3. What is a block chain technically?      It is a distributed, decentralized public ledger. 4. What are blocks?      They have three parts. 1. They store info about transactions like the date, time, amount of your recent purchase (an example) 2.  It will store info. about who is participating in transactions using unique name like 'user name'. 3. Block stores a unique code called a 'hash' that allows us to tell it apart from every other block.      A block can store upto 1MB of data. 5. How block chain works?      When a block stores a new data, it is added to the block chain.  To add a block to the chain, four things must happen. 1. A transaction must occur 2. The transaction must be...

DUBAI- WATER CITY  1. Organs:      We know organs are made up of tissues.  The tissues are made up of cells.  Today, we have 3D printers using which we can make any plastic component.  In future we will 3D print organs like heart, liver, and kidney. 2. City on the water:     We have successful 'cities in the sea' in Dubai, Kuwait and singapore, producing energy, harvesting fresh water and growing agricultural produce will be done in the ocean waters in future. 3.  Bringing back dianouser:     Any extinct species can be brought back using 'cloning' and a surrogate mother.  The word 'extinct' will get extincted. 4. Immortality:      We may not achieve 'immortality' in the near future.  But our life-span has increased and will increase further.  Medical science says 'brain is the person'.  The 'soft content' in the brain like thoughts, ideas, decisions, knowledge etc, will soon b...

          We are brainwashed to understand 'rich' means more money and money can buy anything.      Suppose you are an artist.  You can draw anything you see; anyone you see in minutes.  You enjoy doing colour painting.  You are able to appreciate the paintings done by others.  Then definitely you rich in this field.  No millionaire can buy your talent or enjoyment.     Say you are 70 years.  You have not gone to hospital for any reason.  You are still going strong.  Then you are  very rich health wise.  No rich man can buy your heart or kidney.  Say you are having ultra small car.  But you have driven the car for more than 100000 kilometers and enjoyed each ride.  Another man has BMW.  He has neither driven the car (out of fear) nor traveled in the car much (ill-health).  Who is rich?      Singer, composer, writer, software coder, archit...

    What is love? Why love? Does love only matters?  Let us explore      We are concerned with affection among homo-sapiens; But some animals also exhibit love and affection.      It seems that love is like a oil using which the human social engine works.  Let us try to grade the affection among people From weak to strong 1. Affection between strangers 2. Love between people and their pets. 3. Affection among friends (it is difficult to place) 4. Among blood relations. 5. Brotherly affection. 6. Affection between mother and son 7. Love between man and wife. The last two always compete each other.  Hence many conflicts arises in the family.  It is always safe to maintain required strength of love in each category.  If you give more or less, you will be in trouble.      The affection between man and wife is having the highest strength an should be the top most.  The man and woman ar...

         The block chain technology can help us to trust strangers.  The highlights of 'Block chain' is given below. 1. It is the blocks-digital information stored in the data base-chain. 2. Thousands of computers in a network verify a block of info.   Say a transaction.  Hence it is 100% authenticated. 3. Anybody can view the info. in the block chain.  But no-body can edit it. 4. Each block has a unique id called 'Hash'. The process:  Transaction takes place.verified. given unique id. added to chain. cannot be hacked.      Now we will see some applications of block chain. 1. Copyright:      By using block chain, musicians and content creators could access real-time and transparent royalty distribution data and would have better understanding of where and how their content is being accessed.  In this 'internet' era, content downloads can be easily monitored and the artist will get t...