My Science School

It consists of three punishing events, a 3.9-km swim, a 180-km bicycle ride and a full marathon (42.1 km). Organized by the World Triathlon Corporation, the Ironman must be completed in 17 hours. The event begins at 7 a.m. The swim must be completed in 2 hours and 20 minutes; the bike ride by 5:30 p.m.; and the marathon by midnight. This includes the transition time, during which swimmers have to change into biking gear and then again for the marathon. The top men usually take eight hours while women complete it in nine.

The triathlon began in 1978 when a group of California athletes had an argument over whether running or swimming was more physically demanding. A member of the group called John Collins was inspired to start the first endurance triathlon in Hawaii around the island of Oahu. It combined what had been three separate events – a 2.4-km Waikiki Roughwater Swim, a 180-km Round Oahu Bike Course and the 42.1-km Honolulu Marathon.

There are Ironman races held in every continent except Antarctica, including the Ironman 70.3 which is exactly half the distance of the full Ironman. The most challenging is the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, for which athletes have to qualify by competing in 28 Ironman races held in other parts of the world. The Kona biking track is grueling as it traverses lava fields that are lashed by fierce winds.

 

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When the online community (or crowd) is asked for services, ideas or content, it is called crowdsourcing. When a project is too vast and time-consuming for an individual or a small group of individuals to accomplish, they put the proposal online and invite netizens to contribute their ideas, insights and experience to complete it. The task is then divided among those who volunteer to work on the assignment either online or offline. Some projects pay the participants.

Crowdsourcing is essentially social networking used to gather scientific data, to locate missing persons, to raise funds for charity and to finance promising innovations and start-ups (also called crowdfunding).

The American Human Genome Project that mapped the sequences of all the 3 billion base pairs of human DNA was one of the major scientific projects to use crowdsourcing. The manmoth project took the help of researchers across Asia and Europe and managed to finish its task within ten years!

The term was first used in 2006 in an article by Jeff Howe for Wired magazine.

 

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The rumbling sound that you hear originates in the stomach and the small intestine. The wall of the digestive tract is lined with smooth muscles. When food enters the system, these muscles contract to propel the food forward and mix it with the gases and juices. These contractions produce vibrations and the rumbling noise.

These muscles also contract when the body senses the absence of food. Hence the rumbling sound occurs not only after you have had a meal but also when you feel hungry. But the sounds are louder when the stomach is empty. It is like shaking a carton of juice that is full versus one which is almost empty – the empty carton makes a louder sloshing sound.

Ancient Greeks had a name for this rumbling – they called it borborygmi.

 

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Yes. The blueprint is a technical drawing of an architectural or engineering design. It is a large drawing with white lines on a white background.

The process of blueprinting was invented in the 1800s. It was a cheap and simple method of reproducing large drawings.

The design is drawn on tracing paper and placed on a paper that is chemically treated with a mixture of ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferrocyanide. The double paper is exposed to bright light for several minutes as a result o which the treated paper turns a brilliant Prussian Blue except in the parts covered by the drawn lines. The paper is then washed and dried, yielding a blue-coloured negative of the original drawing.

Nowadays, newer and more sophisticated methods are used to produce blueprints, but they are not blue like the traditional prints.

 

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You might still be too young to ride your own motorcycle, but that surely wouldn’t have stopped you from riding along with elders in your family, older cousins and friends. The feeling of the wind gushing against your face (do wear your helmet!) could well have you fantasizing the days when you would be allowed to ride these vehicles yourself. While that might not be too far away in the future, we will have to be content now with learning about how the first such ride panned out.

Gottlieb Daimler, a German mechanical engineer, is a huge figure in the early history of the automotive industry. After studying engineering and learning about engines while working with various firms, he started to work for Nikolaus Otto, a German engineer who had invented the four-stroke internal combustion engine, in 1872.

Experimental workshop

A decade later, Daimler left this company along with his co-worker – another German engineer – Wilhelm Maybach, to start their own experimental engine building workshop. They were successful in developing a compact, high-speed single-cylinder engine that they called grandfather clock engine and patented it in 1885.

Once they had their engine, it was important for Daimler and Maybach to offer proof on wheels and show that an engine was capable of powering a vehicle. Even though their objective was not to build a motorcycle, they ended up designing one as the engine prototypes at their disposal wasn’t powerful enough for a full-size carriage. The result was the Daimler Reitwagen or “Riding Car”, which was patented in August 1885.

Paul rides it

The design included a wooden bicycle frame with the pedals removed and a single-cylinder Otto cycle four-stroke engine mounted on rubber blocks. Apart from the two iron tread wooden wheels, there were two outrigger wheels to help its stability. With an engine output of 0.5 horsepower at 600 rpm, the Reitwagen could attain a top speed of about 11 kmph.

It was in November (some accounts say November 10, while others say November 18) 1885 that the Reitwagen made its first journey of real length in public. It was Daimler’s son Paul who rode the vehicle and he covered the distance of around 5 km between Cannstatt to Unterturkheim in Stuttgart, Germany, achieving speeds of 5-12 kmph during the process. The ride not only showed that such an engine could power such a vehicle, but also that a human being could completely control it.

Is it the first motorcycle?

Not everyone agrees with the notion of Reitwagen being the first motorcycle as there were other steam-powered vehicles that also lay a claim. The fact that the Reitwagen sports auxiliary wheels for stabilisation further dents its case. What the Reitwagen has going for itself, however, is that it is the first gasoline internal combustion engine motorcycle and a forerunner of all vehicles that came after it and used this common engine type.

Daimler and Maybach went on to use their engines on a four-wheeled carriage and a boat, before eventually building a four-wheeled vehicle that was designed from scratch as an automobile. Even though building the Reitwagen was never his ultimate goal, inventing it meant that Daimler is often called “the father of the motorcycle.”

 

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The scrolls are believed to contain mostly Greek philosophy. They may also provide insights into the lives of ancient Romans.

The hot ash and gases from the volcanic eruptions have charred and carbonized the scrolls, turning many into impenetrable log-like cylinders. The scrolls are also too fragile to unfurl and various attempts at unrolling the scrolls and deciphering the texts over the last 270 years, have mostly failed. Many scrolls have been damaged in the process.

Further, in the Herculaneum scrolls, the script has been written with carbon ink, unlike many ancient texts that were written with metal-based inks. The use of carbon ink is one of the main reasons these scrolls have evaded deciphering. Unlike metal-based inks, its density is similar to that of the carbonized papyrus on which its sits, and therefore appears invisible in X-rays.

Other challenges: Even if a scroll is successfully opened, the original ink – exposed to air – would begin to fade. In addition, this form of unrolling often leads to pages getting stuck together or damaged.

Scientists use the X-ray beam at Diamond Light Source and a virtual unwrapping software to detect the carbon ink on the scrolls. The technology is similar to a CT scanner where one would take a three-dimensional image of a person and then examine different organs.

Scientists will shine very intense light through the scroll, which will deliver three-dimensional images on the other side. From that, a three-dimensional image of the text will be constructed. The idea is to read the text in a non-destructive manner. But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process.

The research team is building a machine-learning algorithm that will go through the digital scan of the scrolls to detect evidence of ink. The text will have to be later deciphered.

 

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Scroll is a roll of paper or papyrus usually with official writing on it. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time. The remaining pages are usually rolled up to the left and right. In Roman usage, the scrolls were written latitudinally.

Between 1752 and 1754, about 1,800 blackened unreadable papyrus scrolls were recovered from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. The Villa of the Papyri belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, but the ownership of the scrolls per se is unknown.

These scrolls became known as the Herculaneum papyri or scrolls, the majority of which are today stored at the National Library, Naples. But a handful of them ended up in England and France, as gifts from Ferdinand, son of Charles III and King of Naples and Sicily. The Institut de France has six scrolls in its possession. Two of those scrolls, in hundreds of pieces after past attempts to open them, have been taken for the current study.

 

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Between 1752 and 1754, an excavation was carried out at the Herculaneum site in Italy. They recovered an astonishing collection of 1,800 scrolls from a house believed to have belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator who was assassinated in 44BC.

A pair of unopened scrolls from the collection belonging to the Institut de France will be virtually unwrapped using sophisticated technology in the Diamond Light Force, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, which houses a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun.

But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process. There is a long way to go before a complete recreation of the text is ready.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Pompeii and Herculaneum were busy wealthy Roman cities located in Campania region in southern Italy. But in 79 AD, the nearby Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted. The ensuing smoke and gas spread 32 km into the air. While the molten lava ravaged the city of Pompeii, a thick blanket of ash entombed the town of Herculaneum.

Herculaneum and Pompeii were basically lost and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1709 and 1748, respectively.

 

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Snuggled in the southern region of the Western Ghats, the Periyar Tiger Reserve sprawls over an area of 777 sq. km of forest land and is home to thousands of different species of flora and fauna, including rare and endangered ones. Thick, evergreen forests form about 360 sq. km of the total area of the valley.

The valley derives its name from one important river - River Periyar - that originates in the reserve’s remote forests. The river, which is 244 km long, is the longest in the State. One of the few perennial rivers in the region, it meets the drinking water requirements of a number of towns in Kerala. Moreover, the Idukki dam on the river generates a big share of the State’s electrical output. On account of these reasons, the river has been rightly named the ‘Lifeline of Kerala’.

There are alternate claims for a Tamil Nadu origin, indicating that the Periyar originates in the Sivagiri peaks of Sundaramala, Tamil Nadu. However, the Supreme Court of India in its judgement on the Mullaperiyar issue in 2014, made it clear that Tamil Nadu is not a riparian state of the river Periyar but the river itself is an inter-State river.

 

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Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve (STR), which is created in 2013, is adjudged as the best performer in the country for its ability to increase more tigers between 2014-18 compared to any other tiger reserve in the country.



The award, instituted by National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), was received by STR Field Director V Naganathan from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday during the release of 4th cycle of All India Tiger Estimation results, which coincides with the Global Tiger Day.

"Forest dwellers dependence on fuelwood and cattle grazing has been reduced by providing LPG connections to all 28 villages, including 9 in the core area and 19 in the buffer. Awareness was created to use agricultural waste as fodder. Besides, tribal youth were recruited in anti-poaching squads which ensured there is no illegal hunting happening from their hamlets," Naganathan said.

This apart, controlling vehicular movement within tiger reserve and minimizing the human footprint in name of pilgrimage were the biggest takeaway points.

 

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Namdapha, a National Park and Tiger Reserve, a true wilderness and enchanting beauty of lush green vegetation, impenetrable pristine and virgin forests covered an area of 1985.23 square kilometres having diverse flora and fauna lies in the international border between India and Myanmar (Burma) within Changlang District in the state of Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast India.

The beautiful forests possess great biodiversity of Flora and Fauna. A details study of its species and genetic variation has not yet been thoroughly done. Namdapha is Botanist’s dream and it may take as long as 50 years to complete a comprehensive survey of its botanical resources. There are more than 150 timber species. The Pinus merkusi and Abies delavavi are not found elsewhere in India. One of the rarest and endangered orchids, the Blue Vanda found here. The most famous local medicinal plant Mishimi Teeta (Copti teeta), which is used by the local tribal for all kinds of diseases is available here but its export has been banned.

The inaccessibility of greater part of the park has helped to keep the forests in their pristine and virgin state in its natural form. Moreover, the park possesses great bio diversity of flora and fauna. The lush green under growths are thick and intertwined like cobwebs of canes, bamboos, wild bananas and variety of vegetation The grandeur of the wet tropical rain forest is breeding ground for varieties of animals and birds which is remarkable and worth seeing.

 

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A little known fact is that the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh provided the inspiration for this iconic book. Rudyard Kipling drew inspiration from settings and surroundings of the Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. The character 'Mowgli' was created based on a true story narrated by Sir William Henry Sleeman, about a boy raised by wolves. Many of the Jungle Book's location's including Seoni, Mowgli's birthplace and village, can still be visited today.

Madhya Pradesh lies at the heart of India - a region which will surprise even the most seasoned traveler. Travellers can discover mighty mountain ranges, meandering rivers and miles of verdant forests - showcasing 25 sanctuaries, 10 national parks and 6 tiger reserves. This includes almost 20 percent of India's tiger population.

The state is also home to 3 UNESCO World Heritage sites - the 10th century temples of Khajuraho, covered in ecstatic erotic sculpture, is a reminder of India's ancient artistic heritage. Millennia old Buddhist monuments can be found at Sanchi and Paleolithic cave paintings at Bhimbetka– so much of the subcontinent's unimaginably long history compressed into a single, vastly unexplored region.

 

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Telangana has two Tiger Reserves-- Amrabad Tiger Reserve in Nagarkurnool and Nalgonda districts and Kawal Tiger Reserve, encompassing Nirmal, Mancherial, Adilabad and KB Asifabad districts.

According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, management effectiveness evaluation (MEE) is defined as an assessment of how well protected areas are being managed – primarily the extent to which management is protecting values and achieving goals and objectives.

Both tiger reserves in the state, Amrabad Tiger Reserve and Kawal Tiger Reserve, scored 71.09 per cent and 60.16 per cent in MEE ranking with a ‘good’ rating. In the previous year’s rating, both tiger reserves were rated ‘fair’.

 

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Manas Tiger Reserve, situated amidst the gentle slopes at the foothills of the Himalayas in India's northeastern state of Assam, is the only tiger reserve of its kind in the entire northeast. Apart from the rising population of tigers, Manas is also the home of the rare golden langur, the hispid hare, the pigmy hog, the one-horned rhinoceros and at least twenty other species of animals and birds that are listed as highly endangered.

Nameri National Park is a national park in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas in the Sonitpur District of Assam, India, about 35 km from Tezpur. Nameri is about 9 km from Chariduar, the nearest village.

Nameri shares its northern boundary with the Pakhui Wildlife Sanctuary of Arunachal Pradesh. 

In a major boost to tiger conservation in northeast India, and Assam in particular, Orang National Park has been declared a tiger reserve, making it the fourth of its kind in the state and 49th in the country. Wildlife conservationists — who have long been demanding this in order to protect the big cat in Orang and in the forest corridor that connects it to the better-known Kaziranga reserve — hailed the decision. Its tiger population — estimated at 24 — is equally healthy. Experts say the big cat often swims from one riverine island on the Brahmaputra to another and gets to Kaziranga on the southern bank.

 

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The Nagarhole ecosystem supports the highest density of herbivores anywhere in south-east Asia. Large herbivores found in the park are Muntjac, Chital, Sambar, Four-horned Antelope, Gaur, Wild Pig, Asian Elephant, Common Langur and the Bonnet Macaque. The density of herbivores in Nagarhole, rivals that of the Masai Mara in Africa when taken on a per sq kilometer basis. Because the availability of prey is not a limiting resource, selective predation has facilitated large carnivore co-existence in the park and the predominant large predators found here are the Tigers, Leopards and Wild Dogs.

The Nagarhole National Park, also popularly known by the name Rajiv Gandhi National Park is situated in the districts of Mysore and Kodagu in the state of Karnataka. The park was accorded the status of a National Park in 1983. It encompasses the area where the Western Ghats integrate with the Deccan Plateau. It is flanked by the Bandipur National Park to the south-east and the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary to the south-west. Together with these parks, it forms part of the larger Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, which has a total area of around 5500 sq km. Nurtured by the Kabini River, Nagarhole is blessed with unmatched bio-diversity, though elephants and tigers are the most popular inhabitants.

 

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