Category Science

Have you ever seen water crossing a bridge on its own? Let’s find out by an experiment.

What you need:

Thick tissue paper towels, three glasses, food colours or poster colours

What to do: Arrange the three glasses in a row.

Fill the glasses on both ends with water, leaving the middle one empty.

Add lots of blue colour to the glass on the left, and to the glass on the right, add yellow.

Fold one of the tissues in half lengthwise and place one end in the first glass and the other end in the second. Make sure the tissue touches the bottoms of both glasses without having its middle stuck up too high in the air. If that happens, you can trim the length of the tissues.

The next tissue is placed in a similar manner between the second and the third glasses.

Leave the arrangement, but make sure to keep checking on it intermittently.

What happens:

In a few minutes, we start seeing the coloured water from both the glasses on the edge, climb up the tissue papers. In an hour (maybe more, depending on the thickness of the tissues), the water crosses the paper bridge and starts dripping into the empty glass. In another hour or so, the water level in the middle glass rises as more water from the other two glasses crosses into it. The water in the middle glass is greenish-a mix of yellow and blue colours.

Why?

Water travels up the tissues through a process called 'capillary action’. Capillary action is the movement of a liquid against gravity, through narrow spaces. This is the same principle that allows water to be absorbed by a tree's roots and transported to its leaves.

In this case, the narrow spaces or capillaries are present in the tissues that absorb water, pull it upward and allow it to flow into the middle glass.

Picture Credit : Google 

Can sound travel through empty space? Let’s find out by an experiment.

What you need:

Empty glass bottle with a cap, small bell, short firm wire, adhesive tape, matches, and paper

What you do:

  • Attach the bell to the piece of wire. Fix the opposite end of the wire to the inside of the bottle cap with tape. Check if the bell rings when you shake the wire.
  • Screw the cap onto the bottle. Shake the bottle to ensure that the bell jingles inside without touching the sides of the bottle.
  • Unscrew the cap. Tear the paper into shreds and drop the pieces into the bottle.
  • Light two matches and drop them into the bottle. As soon as you do this, quickly screw on the cap with the bell. (Take the help of an adult to do this step.)
  • Wait till the matches and the shredded paper burn out and the bottle cools.
  • Shake the bottle. Can you hear the bell?
  • Open the cap to let in some air and screw it on again. Shake the bottle again. Can you hear the bell now?

What do you observe?

You can hear the bell faintly immediately after the matches extinguish. After you open the cap and screw it on again, you can hear the bell ring louder.

Why does this happen?

Sound needs a medium like air or water to travel through. Sound waves vibrate the particles of the medium. When these vibrations reach our eardrums, we hear sound.

In the experiment, the burning paper and matches used up the oxygen in the sealed bottle, creating a partial vacuum. As sound cannot travel in a vacuum, you cannot hear the bell well until you let in some air into the bottle.

Picture Credit : Google 

How does the Great Pacific Garbage Patch affect the environment?

At the great pacific Garbage patch, crabs, anemones, and plenty of other creatures have turned floating plastic debris into their homes, say researchers

The study

A team of researchers revealed that dozens of species of coastal invertebrate organisms have been able to survive and reproduce on plastic garbage that's been floating in the Ocean for years at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The scientists said that the findings suggest plastic pollution in the ocean might be enabling the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that are not normally able to survive in the open ocean.

Unlike organic material that decomposes and sinks within months or, at most n few years, plastic debris en float in the oceans for a much longer time. giving creatures the opportunity to survive and reproduce in the open ocean for years, says the new study published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal

"It was surprising to see how frequent the coastal species were They were on 70% of the debris that we found" Linsey Haram, a science fellow at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the study's lead author, said.

Picture credit : Google 

What is stylometry?

Stylometry is a powerful tool that helps one figures out who wrote what based on their unique writing style.

Stylometry is a field of study that uses statistical methods and computational tools to analyse and identify patterns in how people write. In simpler terms, stylometry can be understood as a detective tool for words, used to figure out who wrote what.

Finding the author

Authors have been able to write anonymously for centuries, with the belief that their true identity would never be revealed. However, in the past few years, advancements in machine learning methods have increased the effectiveness of identifying different patterns in an individual's writing. Every person has a distinct writing style, similar to a fingerprint. Stylometry analyses a text's word selection, sentence construction, and even punctuation to examine those literary fingerprints to determine the author of a written piece.

One famous example of stylometric analysis is the study of English playwright William Shakespeare's plays. Researchers have used computational tools to analyse the writing style of the bard and compare them to other works from the time period. Through this analysis, they have been able to identify which plays were likely written by Shakespeare and which ones might have been collaborations or even written by someone else entirely.

This kind of analysis was also used to reveal American statesmen James Madison and Alexander Hamilton as the writers of the anonymously published Federalist Papers (also known as The Federalist), as well as link British writer J.K. Rowling to the anonymous author of the book The Cuckoo's Calling. Stylometry can also be used in more serious situations, such as when researchers want to figure out who wrote a particular document or when law enforcement is trying to track down a suspect. By analysing the writing style in different documents, they can look for patterns that might help them identify the author.

Picture Credit : Google 

Antarctic sea ice matters

"One of the largest seasonal cycles on Earth happens in the ocean around Antarctica. During autumn and winter the surface of the ocean freezes as sea ice advances northwards, and then in the spring the ice melts as the sunlight returns. However, of late, the area of this sea ice has been shrinking dramatically. And this is of grave concern. But then, Antarctica is so far away. So, does the size of the sea ice surrounding the continent really matter to us? Oh yes, it does. Here's why.

Since the 1970s, we've had satellite records to measure Antarctic sea ice cover. "At the winter maximum, sea ice covers an area more than twice the size of Australia (roughly 20 million square kilometres), and during summer it retreats to cover less than a fifth of that area (about 3 million square km). But then, the record for 2022 showed that the summer minimum was not even 2 million square km. In 2023, this has been a worrying 1.7 million square km.

When the yearly freezing happens, the cold salty water is pushed down into very deep parts of the ocean. The water then flows towards the northern direction. "About 40 per cent of the global ocean can be traced back to the Antarctic coastline." When waters between the surface and the deeper regions are exchanged so, heat and carbon dioxide are trapped in ocean depths. Not just that Nutrients from the deep reach the surface, and since the water moves northwards, these nutrients help support ocean life across the world.

So, when sea ice cover decreases, this exchange suffers, affecting ocean life. Also, without adequate sea ice cover, oceans tend to absorb more heat from the sun, which can lead to increased ocean warming. This can prevent the expansive formation of sea ice during winter, and the deadly cycle would continue. Again, warmer oceans negatively affect the growth of certain marine creatures. This can impact the lives of organisms that consume or are consumed by these creatures, which can have a bearing on marine and terrestrial life the world over.

Picture Credit : Google 

What is the difference between a code and a cipher?

Codes and ciphers are different ways of encrypting a message to ensure secrecy and security. How do they work?

Codes and ciphers are both techniques used to transform messages into a seemingly illegible form so that only selected people can understand them. thereby ensuring secrecy and security

A cipher is a more basic form of encryption. It involves the rearrangement or substitution of the letters of the alphabet in the message. On the other hand, the code works on a higher level of encryption. It replaces entire words or phrases with secret words or numbers.

Consider a simple message: ‘The ship has left the port.’

Now, if each letter is replaced by a number, for example.

 A=1, B-2, C-3 and so on, the message will become

20-8-5  19-8-9-16  8-1-19  12-5-6-20  20-8-5  16-15-18-20. This is a cipher.

Now, if the ship' is replaced by the word Alpha' and the phrase 'has left the port’ by the number '1', then the code would be 'Alpha 1'.

Picture Credit : Google