My Science School

Things you need

 Lighted, candle, Funnel

What to do:

Light a candle and blow hard through a funnel whose mouth is held a little away from the flame. You will find that you cannot blow out the candle. On the contrary the flame bends towards the funnel

Why?

Blowing through the funnel reduces the air pressure inside it. The air from outside rushes into the funnel, causing the flame to bend towards the funnel in the process. The air sweeps along the inside of the walls so if the edge of the funnel is held close to the flame it will be blown out

If you turn the spout of the funnel towards the candle and blow from the other end, that is, the mouth, the flame will be extinguished. In this case the air is compressed in the narrow spout, and blows out the flame as it exits.

Picture Credit : Google

While Jupiter is known for its four large Galilean moons (so named because they were observed by Galileo with his 17th century telescope), Saturn has two moons that have drawn astronomers' attention: Enceladus and Titan.

Both Enceladus and Titan are ocean moons, meaning they have subsurface oceans of liquid water. Titan even has surface lakes, though these are composed of methane and ethane. Enceladus is an icy moon known for spraying huge plumes of water up through its atmosphere into space; during the Cassini mission, astronomers were able to sample these geysers and that's how they discovered the ocean underneath its icy crust.

Enceladus is named after a giant in Greek mythology.

Pictures from the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s indicated that although this moon is small—only about 310 miles (500 kilometers) across — its icy surface is remarkably smooth in some places, and bright white all over. In fact, Enceladus is the most reflective body in the solar system. For decades, scientists didn’t know why.

Because Enceladus reflects so much sunlight, the surface temperature is extremely cold, about minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 201 degrees Celsius). But it is not as cold and inactive a place as it appears.

Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and is the second largest moon in our solar system. Jupiter's moon Ganymede is just a little bit larger (by about 2 percent). Titan’s atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, like Earth’s, but with a surface pressure 50 percent higher than Earth’s. Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. The largest seas are hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles wide. Beneath Titan’s thick crust of water ice is more liquid—an ocean primarily of water rather than methane. Titan’s subsurface water could be a place to harbor life as we know it, while its surface lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons could conceivably harbor life that uses different chemistry than we’re used to—that is, life as we don’t yet know it. Titan could also be a lifeless world.

Credit : NASA Science 

Picture Credit : Google

Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system (larger than the planet Mercury), and is the only moon known to have its own internally generated magnetic field.

Ganymede is the only moon known to have its own magnetic field – a discovery made by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1996. The magnetic field causes auroras, which are ribbons of glowing, hot, electrified gas, in regions circling the north and south poles of the moon. Because Ganymede is close to Jupiter, its magnetic field is embedded in, or lies within, Jupiter’s magnetic field.

When Jupiter’s magnetic field changes, the auroras on Ganymede also change, “rocking” back and forth. It was by watching the rocking motion of the two auroras, that a team of scientists led by Joachim Saur of the University of Cologne in Germany came up with the idea of using the Hubble space telescope to learn more about the inside of the moon.

Ganymede has two distinct types of terrain: large, bright regions of ridges, and grooves that slice across older, darker terrains. This suggests to scientists that Ganymede's crust has been under tension from global tectonic processes. NASA’s Juno spacecraft took the most recent images of Ganymede’s surface during flybys in June 2021.

Ganymede was discovered by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei on Jan. 7, 1610. The discovery, along with his discovery of three other large moons around Jupiter, was the first time a moon was discovered orbiting a planet other than Earth. The discovery eventually led to the understanding that planets in our solar system orbit the Sun, instead of our solar system revolving around Earth. (Jupiter now has 53 named moons and 26 provisional moons awaiting confirmation of discovery).

Credit : NASA Science 

Picture Credit : Google

Uranus’ moons are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

To date 27 moons have been discovered around Uranus, those named after characters from Shakespeare include Titania (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Oberon (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Ariel (The Tempest), Miranda (The Tempest) and Puck (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Titania and Oberon were discovered in 1787 by William Herschel, Ariel in 1851 by William Lassell, Miranda in 1948 by Gerard Kuiper and Puck was discovered by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1985.

"Sweet Moon," William Shakespeare wrote in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "I thank thee for thy sunny beams; I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright." Centuries later, the moons of Uranus pay homage to the famous playwright.

While most of the satellites orbiting other planets take their names from ancient mythologies, Uranus' moons are unique in being named for Shakespearean characters, along with a couple of the moons being named for characters from the works of Alexander Pope.

Oberon and Titania are the largest Uranian moons, and were first to be discovered—by William Herschel in 1787. William Lassell, who had been first to see a moon orbiting Neptune, discovered the next two, Ariel and Umbriel. Nearly a century passed before Gerard Kuiper found Miranda in 1948. And that was it until a NASA robot made it to distant Uranus.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft visited the Uranian system in 1986 and tripled the number of known moons. Voyager 2 found an additional 10, just 26-154 km (16-96 miles) in diameter: Juliet, Puck, Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Desdemona, Portia, Rosalind, Cressida and Belinda.

Since then, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope and improved ground-based telescopes have raised the total to 27 known moons. Spotting the post-Voyager moons is an impressive feat. They're tiny—as little as 12-16 km (8-10 miles) across, and blacker than asphalt. And of course, they're about 2.9 billion km (1.8 billion miles) away from the Sun.

All of Uranus's inner moons (those observed by Voyager 2) appear to be roughly half water ice and half rock. The composition of the moons outside the orbit of Oberon remains unknown, but they are likely captured asteroids.

Credit : NASA Science 

Picture Credit : Google

Phobos and Deimos bear more resemblance to asteroids than to Earth's moon. Both are tiny — the larger, Phobos, is only 14 miles across (22 kilometers), while the smaller, Deimos, is only 8 miles (13 km), making them some of the smallest moons in the solar system.

Both are also made up of material that resembles Type I or II carbonaceous chondrites, the substance that makes up asteroids. With their elongated shapes, they even look more like asteroids than moons.

Even from Mars, the moons don't look like moons. The more distant moon, Deimos, appears more like a star in the night sky. When it is full and shining at its brightest, it resembles Venus as seen on Earth. Phobos has the closest orbit to its primary of any moon in the solar system, but still only appears a third as wide as Earth's full moon.

Phobos orbits only 3,700 miles (6,000 km) from the Martian ground. Its surface is marred by debris that may have come from impacts on Mars. It travels around the planet three times a day, zipping across the Martian sky approximately once every four hours. The fast-flying moon appears to travel from west to east.

Deimos orbits much farther away, tending to stay 12,470 miles (20,069 km) from the red planet's surface. The moon takes about 30 hours, a little over a Martian day, to travel around its host.

Credit : Space.com

Picture Credit : Google

Venus and the planet Mercury are the only two planets that don't have a single natural moon orbiting them. Figuring out why is one question keeping astronomers busy as they study the Solar System.

Astronomers have three explanations about how planets get a moon or moons. Perhaps the moon was "captured" as it drifted by the planet, which is what some scientists think happened to Phobos and Deimos (near Mars). Maybe an object smashed into the planet and the fragments eventually coalesced into a moon, which is the leading theory for how Earth's Moon came together. Or maybe moons arose from general accretion of matter as the solar system was formed, similar to how planets came together.

Considering the amount of stuff flying around the Solar System early in its history, it's quite surprising to some astronomers that Venus does not have a moon today. Perhaps, though, it had one in the distant past. In 2006, California Institute of Technology researchers Alex Alemi and David Stevenson presented at the American Astronomical Society's division of planetary sciences meeting and said Venus could have been smacked by a large rock at least twice.

Credit : Phys.org 

Picture Credit : Google

Tu Youyou, (born December 30, 1930, Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China), Chinese scientist and phytochemist known for her isolation and study of the antimalarial substance qinghaosu, later known as artemisinin, one of the world’s most effective malaria-fighting drugs. For her discoveries, Tu received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Irish-born American parasitologist William Campbell and Japanese microbiologist Omura Satoshi).

Tu studied at the department of pharmaceutics of Beijing Medical College. After earning a degree there in 1955, she was chosen to join the Institute of Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (later the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences). From 1959 to 1962, she participated in a full-time training course in the use of traditional Chinese medicine that was geared toward researchers with knowledge of Western medicine. The course provided a foundation for her later application of traditional Chinese medical knowledge to modern drug discovery.

She was promoted to a Researcher in 1980 shortly after the Chinese economic reform began in 1978. In 2001 she was promoted to academic advisor for doctoral candidates. Currently she is the Chief Scientist in the Academy.

As of 2007, her office is in an old apartment building in Dongcheng District, Beijing.

Before 2011, Tu Youyou had been obscure for decades, and is described as "almost completely forgotten by people".

Tu is regarded as the "Three-Without Scientist" – no postgraduate degree (there was no postgraduate education then in China), no study or research experience abroad, and not a member of either of the Chinese national academies, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. Tu is now regarded as a representative figure of the first generation of Chinese medical workers since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Credit : Britannica 

Picture Credit : Google

In 1969, during the Vietnam War (1954–75), Tu was appointed to lead Project 523, a covert effort to discover a treatment for malaria. The project was initiated by the Chinese government at the urging of allies in North Vietnam, where malaria had claimed the lives of numerous soldiers. Tu and her team of researchers began by identifying plants with supposed activity against malaria on the basis of information from folk medicine and remedies described in ancient Chinese medical texts. Her team identified some 640 plants and more than 2,000 remedies with potential antimalarial activity and subsequently tested 380 extracts from about 200 of the plant species for their ability to rid malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites from the blood of infected mice. An extract obtained from the sweet wormwood plant (qinghao), Artemisia annua, showed particular promise. In 1971, after refining the extraction process, Tu and colleagues successfully isolated a nontoxic extract from sweet wormwood that effectively eliminated Plasmodium parasites from mice and monkeys. Clinical studies were soon thereafter carried out in malaria patients, in whom sweet wormwood extracts were found to quickly lower fever and reduce parasite levels in the blood. In 1972 Tu and colleagues isolated the active compound in the extracts, which they named qinghaosu, or artemisinin.

Although Tu had relied on information from ancient texts, the works said little about the plant known as qinghao, and many of her team’s early attempts to reproduce their initial findings on the plant’s antimalarial activity failed. Eventually, however, Tu discovered that the leaves of sweet wormwood contain artemisinin and that the compound is extracted optimally at relatively low temperatures. Tu initially was prevented from publishing her team’s findings, because of restrictions on the publication of scientific information that were in place in China at the time. The work finally reached international audiences, to wide acclaim, in the early 1980s. In the early 2000s, the World Health Organization recommended the use of artemisinin-based combination drug therapies as first-line treatment for malaria.

Tu continued to investigate artemisinin and developed a second antimalarial compound, dihydroartemisinin, which is a bioactive artemisinin metabolite. In 2011 she received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions to the discovery of artemisinin.

Credit : Britannica 

Picture Credit : Google

Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) is one of the best-known early evolutionists. Unlike Darwin, Lamarck believed that living things evolved in a continuously upward direction, from dead matter, through simple to more complex forms, toward human "perfection." Species didn't die out in extinctions, Lamarck claimed. Instead, they changed into other species. Since simple organisms exist alongside complex "advanced" animals today, Lamarck thought they must be continually created by spontaneous generation.

Lamarck was the youngest of 11 children in a family of the lesser nobility. His family intended him for the priesthood, but, after the death of his father and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Lamarck embarked on a military career in 1761. As a soldier garrisoned in the south of France, he became interested in collecting plants. An injury forced him to resign in 1768, but his fascination for botany endured, and it was as a botanist that he first built his scientific reputation.

Lamarck gained attention among the naturalists in Paris at the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi (the king’s garden and natural history collection, known informally as the Jardin du Roi) by claiming he could create a system for identifying the plants of France that would be more efficient than any system currently in existence, including that of the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. This project appealed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who was the director of the Jardin du Roi and Linnaeus’s greatest rival. Buffon arranged to have Lamarck’s work published at government expense, and Lamarck received the proceeds from the sales. The work appeared in three volumes under the title Flore française (1778; “French Flora”). Lamarck designed the Flore française specifically for the task of plant identification and used dichotomous keys, which are classification tools that allow the user to choose between opposing pairs of morphological characters (see taxonomy: The objectives of biological classification) to achieve this end.

With Buffon’s support, Lamarck was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1779. Two years later Buffon named Lamarck “correspondent” of the Jardin du Roi, evidently to give Lamarck additional status while he escorted Buffon’s son on a scientific tour of Europe. This provided Lamarck with his first official connection, albeit an unsalaried one, with the Jardin du Roi. Shortly after Buffon’s death in 1788, his successor, Flahault de la Billarderie, created a salaried position for Lamarck with the title of “botanist of the King and keeper of the King’s herbaria.”

Between 1783 and 1792 Lamarck published three large botanical volumes for the Encyclopédie méthodique (“Methodical Encyclopaedia”), a massive publishing enterprise begun by French publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke in the late 18th century. Lamarck also published botanical papers in the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences. In 1792 he cofounded and coedited a short-lived journal of natural history, the Journal d’histoire naturelle.

Credit : Britannica 

Picture Credit : Google

In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of minute liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may compose the droplets and crystals. On Earth, clouds are formed as a result of saturation of the air when it is cooled to its dew point, or when it gains sufficient moisture (usually in the form of water vapor) from an adjacent source to raise the dew point to the ambient temperature. They are seen in the Earth's homosphere, which includes the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. Nephology is the science of clouds, which is undertaken in the cloud physics branch of meteorology. There are two methods of naming clouds in their respective layers of the homosphere, Latin and common.

In the stratosphere and mesosphere, clouds have common names for their main types. They may have the appearance of stratiform veils or sheets, cirriform wisps, or stratocumuliform bands or ripples. They are seen infrequently, mostly in the polar regions of Earth. Clouds have been observed in the atmospheres of other planets and moons in the Solar System and beyond. However, due to their different temperature characteristics, they are often composed of other substances such as methane, ammonia, and sulfuric acid, as well as water.

Tropospheric clouds can have a direct effect on climate change on Earth. They may reflect incoming rays from the sun which can contribute to a cooling effect where and when these clouds occur, or trap longer wave radiation that reflects back up from the Earth's surface which can cause a warming effect. The altitude, form, and thickness of the clouds are the main factors that affect the local heating or cooling of Earth and the atmosphere. Clouds that form above the troposphere are too scarce and too thin to have any influence on climate change. Clouds are the main uncertainty in climate sensitivity.

Picture Credit : Google

The term algorithm derives from the name of Muhammad in Musa al’Khwarizmi, a ninth-century Persian mathematician. His latinized name, Algoritmi, meant “the decimal number system” and was used in this meaning for centuries. The modern notion of algorithm emerged in English in the nineteenth century, and became more commonly used since the 1950s, triggered by the emergence of first commercially available computers.

The first algorithms were captured on paper in Ancient Greece. Scholars such as Nicomachus of Gerasa or Euclid were then creating the building blocks of modern mathematics. To ease understanding and applicability of their ideas, they expressed many of them as step-by-step actions.

Nicomachus of Gerasa introduced the Sieve of Eratosthenes. The Sieve is used to this day by students learning to write efficient computer code. It helped simplify the process of identifying prime numbers. Prime numbers are natural numbers, greater than one, that cannot be formed by multiplying two smaller natural numbers. For instance, four is not a prime number because it can be formed by multiplying two by two. Five, in contrast, is a prime number, because no natural numbers, smaller than five, can be multiplied to form five. While it is not too hard to identify the first few prime numbers (for instance 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 and 29), finding large prime numbers takes a lot of time. And large prime numbers are essential in cryptography. The Sieve of Eratosthenes gives step by step instructions for quickly removing all non-prime numbers from a defined set of numbers (for instance between 1 and 10,000) until only prime numbers are left. Today, there are numerous algorithms available, that simplify the task of identifying such numbers. The Sieve of Eratosthenes started a whole family of algorithms that have the same goal and are becoming better (quicker, or requiring fewer steps) at detecting prime numbers.

Euclid, the other scholar mentioned above, much better known than Nicomachus these days, introduced an algorithm for identifying the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Again, not always an easy task, but essential in many situations. Euclid’s algorithm helped to make this calculation easy. Why is Euclid’s algorithm helpful? Imagine you have a room with the exact size of 612 by 2006 centimeters that needs a new floor. Euclid’s algorithm will help you find the size of the largest square tiles that would neatly cover the floor. The answer, given by the algorithm, is 34 cm by 34 cm, resulting in a layout of 18 by 59 tiles. Of course, every tiler will tell you that the answer is wrong and that you have no idea what you’re doing because the algorithm doesn’t consider the grout width and leaves no space for it. Fear not: this can be calculated too, and neatly expressed as an algorithm.

Credit : Towards Data Science 

Picture Credit : Google

Tu Youyou is a Chinese scientist, known for her isolation of the antimalarial substance artemisinin. She won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Irish-bom American parasitologist William Campbell and Japanese microbiologist Omura Satoshi).

Tu was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, in 1930. A tuberculosis infection at 16 interrupted her education for two years, but inspired her to pursue medical research. In 1955, Tu graduated from Beijing Medical University School of Pharmacy and continued her research on Chinese herbal medicine in the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. After graduation, Tu worked at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing.

In 1967, during the Vietnam War, North Vietnam requested China to help battle malaria, which was affecting its soldiers. Tu was appointed to lead Project 523, a secret effort to discover a treatment for malaria. Tu and her team pored over ancient Chinese medical texts to identify plants with appropriate medicinal value. Out of 640 plants identified. 380 extracts from about 200 plant species were zeroed in. The target was to rid malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites from the blood of infected people. In 1971, after refining the extraction process, Tu and colleagues successfully isolated a nontoxic extract from sweet wormwood that effectively eliminated Plasmodium parasites from mice and monkeys. In 1972, they isolated the active compound in the extracts, which they named ginghaosu, or artemisinin. Tu and two colleagues tested the substance on themselves before testing them on 21 patients in the Hainan Province. All of them recovered.

Her work was not published in English until 1979. The World Health Organisation invited Tu to present her findings on the global stage in 1981. It took two decades, but finally the WHO recommended artemisinin combination therapy as the first line of defence against malaria. In 2011 she received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions to the discovery of artemisinin. When she won the Nobel in 2015, Tu became the first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first female citizen of the People's Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category.

Picture Credit : Google

What you need:

A coin, a plate, some water and a glass tumbler

Here's how you do it:

1. Place a coin on a plate and pour just enough water to cover the coin. Set fire to a piece of paper.

2. Drop it in a glass tumbler.

3. Quickly invert the tumbler in the plate next to the coin

4. When the paper has burnt out the water, in the plate rushes up into the glass and the coin is left outside. As soon as the coin dries, pick it up without getting your fingers wet!

How does it work:

When the paper burns inside the inverted glass tumbler, the oxygen inside the tumbler is used up for burning. As the tumbler is inverted, fresh air cannot rush into the tumbler to occupy the space vacated by oxygen. Hence water from all around the glass on the plate rushes into the empty space created inside.

Picture Credit : Google

What you need:

A balloon

A wooden skewer (a slim pointy stick)

Vegetable oil

Marker

What to do:

1. With the marker, draw about ten dots on the surface of the uninflated balloon. These dots need to be large, roughly 2 cm in diameter. Make sure you cover the surface of the balloon evenly, and include its bottom and top areas too.

2. Now, inflate the balloon until it is almost completely full of air. Then carefully, let out about one third of the air. Knot its mouth.

3. Rub a few drops of vegetable oil over the wooden skewer.

4. You may notice that the dots you drew have been stretched out in a few places. But in other places, the stretching is not so pronounced. Keep your eye on any one of the lesser stretched dots.

5. Push the skewer in gently into the bottom of the balloon where the rubber is thick (be slow about this: don't poke the balloon hard) and then gently, push it out of the lesser-stretched dot you chose.

What happens:

If all goes well, the balloon does not pop! It does gradually deflate though once you (slowly!) remove the skewer because the air leaks out from the holes.

Why?

The points on the balloon where the dots are less stretched out are the points of least strain.

Balloons are made of long chains of molecules known as polymers. These chain structures are elastic and allow the balloon to stretch. As the balloon is filled with air, the polymer chains stretch out. The more air you fill, the more stress these chains undergo. The slightest tear at one point can cause the entire chain to break and try to rush back to its original shape. That's how a balloon usually pops.

But there are areas on the balloon (shown by the dots you drew) where these chains are not so stressed. Those are the areas you pierce. And the polymer chains do not break with a bang because they are not stretched too hard. This prevents the air from rushing out and the balloon from rupturing.

Picture Credit : Google

What you need:

A one-litre plastic bottle

Water

A drawing pin

What to do:

1. Fill the bottle with water. Screw on the cap.

2. Using the drawing pin, poke five evenly spaced holes in the side of the bottle, close to the bottom. The holes need to be close to each other though.

3. Loosen the cap so the water can start flowing out of the bottle through the holes.

4. Now pinch the five streams of water together with your finger and thumb.

What happens:

The five streams of water merge into one stream!

If you run your finger through the stream again, it splits once more.

Why?

The reason behind the joining of the streams is known as 'cohesion. Cohesion means 'stickiness and it happens when the molecules of a substance are attracted to each other. In water, this happens, because the water molecule is slightly uneven.

Each water molecule is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (remember the chemical formula, H20?). The oxygen atom has a weak negative charge and the hydrogen atoms have a weak positive charge. And because of the uneven number of oxygen and hydrogen atoms, these electrical charges are unbalanced. So, when two water molecules are close to each other, their opposite charges pull them to each other and they stick. But these bonds are weak and can be broken easily which is why the cohesion can be done away with by simply running your finger over the stream.

Picture Credit : Google