Monday, October 30, 2006

Got Milk? They make good fire bombs.

Mystery of the exploding custard factories explained.
Science experiments in school have always been boring. Uninspiring teachers and rude attenders make it real hell. I have always felt lost, bored, clueless, an intense desire to burn the place down etc etc...But in a quest to make experiments a little entertaining in school, a teacher demonstrated the hidden explosive power of innocuous looking milk powder(see pics in link). He sprinkled milk power on an open flame which made the powder explode into a big fireball several meters high.
Apart from the entertainment value and the noble agenda of attracting bright kids into science, this demonstration also explains the risk of storing of powdered material in large scale and the fact that reactivity of materials is related to its surface area. Milk (custard powder also) is not combustible in liquid form, but when dried and powdered more of its area is exposed to air making it combustible.
See the explosive experiment in the series of pics in this link

Monday, October 16, 2006

Vervet monkey and George Bush


An eariler post discussed the intricacies of the blue-balls of vervet monkeys. These monkeys have a lot more in common with humans; hypertension, anxiety and alchoholism. Their alcoholic behavior has a startling parallels to human behaviour and is being studied as an animal model for alcoholism. Some of the similarities are....

1. They don’t have to be trained to drink alcohol.

2. They drink only alcohol when they have access and won’t stop till they have are intoxicated or in comatose state.

3. When a social drinker they prefer their drink with sweetened liquid.

4. Once heavy drinkers they prefer to drink with water and drink more during the day.

5. After a period of alcohol deprivation, they come back to the bottle with a vengeance and drink in 4 hours what they drink in 24 hours.

6. They drink local rum without any pairing or with sweet taste (yeah cocktails are for wussies).

7. They prefer to drink between 4 PM to 8 AM.

8. They drink to the point of heart, liver and intestinal damage.


Watch this clip, its pretty funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYuIYNaKynI

Fold me baby one more time


I washed and hung my full-sleeved shirt to dry. The toughest part of washing ones clothes is to get them folded after the afternoon sun crisps them. I labor at it every week to get those unwieldy clothes into order, but I never get better at it. That’s when I realized that I have a folding problem.

It turns out that it’s not that uncommon at all. Proteins that run the cellular household have to be folded into intricate shape to make them active.. If they aren’t folded properly the result can be disease like Alzheimers. Likewise DNA has to be folded into a helix, so folding is that trivial afterall.

In everyday life, airbags have to be folded, large lenses have to be folded, fit into spacecrafts and sent to space. Stents have to folded and sent into arteries and unfolded at the right places to remove a clot. Parachutes have to be folded. Basically these are design problems; things have to be folded into smaller dimensions.

This is what the ancient Japanese time pass, origami does. I used to think it was a useless pursuit folding neat sheets of papers into shapes, but one physicist, Robert J. Lang formerly with Caltech has made Origami into a precise science. He has written a program, which will generate complex folding patterns and give the exact location of the folds on paper. His work puts mathematical foundations to origami, in the patterns and locations of folds, spawning new disciplines like Computational origami and Origami mathematics. His algorithm gives efficient and the best way to fold complicated shapes like a dinasaur.

Now he is a full time origami artist and also works as a consultant for many companies and research organizations on their folding problem.

Check out his website
Now I have to go and fold my starched white full sleeve monster.