My Science School

A dusty box of fantasy horror fiction books that belonged to his father, who had left his family, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Stephen King. The young author quickly devoured the entire set and hankered for more. Soon, he began writing his own stories and got started on the path to becoming one of the world's most acclaimed horror fiction authors.

Born on September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine, King worked as a high school English teacher for many years, before he found success as a writer. In 1974, his first published novel "Carrie", about a friendless girl, who uses her telekinetic powers to take revenge on those who bully her, became an instant bestseller and was adapted into a big budget Hollywood film a couple of years later. The works that followed - "Salem's Lot", "The Shining" and "IT cemented his reputation as a bestselling writer.

The mysterious Richard Bachman

Wanting to know if his books could sell without riding on their authors fame, King started writing a few books under the alias Richard Bachman in secret.

He adopted the alias for four books ("Rage", "The Long Walk", "Roadwork", and "The Running Man"). They remained relatively obscure and no one suspected that their author was one of the most well-known and successful writers of the 20th century!

But Brown a bookseller, who had read many of King's books, was surprised to see the similarities between the two writer's styles. He was shocked to read Bachman's latest book, "Thinner' as it read like a classic King! Intrigued, he dug up further to discover that it was indeed King who held the copyright to the title of one of Bachman's books. He wrote a letter to King's agent, informing him about his discovery. And that's how he blew the lid on what may have been the biggest literary ruse of the century! Following the controversy, King decided it was time to say goodbye to his pseudonym. He announced that Bachman had died from 'a cancer of the pseudonym.'

Oh really?

• Before becoming a teacher, King worked at an industrial laundry, and later part-time as a high school janitor.
• On June 19, 1999, King was hit by a van while walking along a road near his summer home in Maine. He had to undergo multiple surgeries to repair his broken leg and shattered hip.

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James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physicist best known for his contributions to electromagnetism. His works in physics also ushered in the major innovation of 20th-century physics such as the quantum theory and Electrical engineering. He is considered one of the greatest scientists of all time, next only to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh. As a child Maxvell was bright and curious. He wrote his first scientific paper at the age of 14, in which he had described the properties of ellipses, Cartesian ovals and related curves with more than two foci. At age 16, he entered the University of Edinburgh, where he published two more scientific papers in 1850 he went on to study at the University of Cambridge under William Hopkins, who is known for nurturing mathematical geniuses.

In 1854, Maxwell graduated from Trinity with a degree in mathematics and was made a fellow of Trinity in 1855 sooner than was the nom. He presented lectures on hydrostatics and optics in 1856, he left Cambridge to accept the professorship at Natural Philosophy at Marischal College. Aberdeen Here, he set out to unravel a mystery that had eluded scientists for two centuries. He studied the nature of Saturn’s rings. It was unknown how the rings of Saturn could remain stable without breaking up drifting away or crashing into Saturn After two years of research. Maxwell concluded that the rings were not made of solid or fluid, but of numerous small particles each independently orbiting Saturn.

 In 1860, he was appointed to the professorship of natural philosophy at King's College. London and it was here that Maxwell came up with his conceptual model for electromagnetic induction consisting of ting spinning cells of magnetic flux Maxvells work in electromagnetism was inspired by his analysis of work by scientists Michael Faraday, Andre Marie Ampere and Hans Christian Oersted. He then formulated the Jour Maxwells Equations which laid the foundation for Albert Einstein's work on the special theory of relativity in producing these equations Maxvell was the first scientist ever to define electricity, magnetism, and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxvell’s equations play the same role in electromagnetism that Newton's laws of motion do in mechanics. We have to thank Maxwell for paving way for the inventions of devices such as radio, TV, microwave radar, microscope and telescope Colour vision, Kinetic theory and thermodynamics, and theory of the Electromagnetic Field are some of his other major contributions Maxvell died of cancer at the age of 48.

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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.

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Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1964. Can you believe that it was made out of wood then, instead of plastic? Rectangular in shape, the wooden mouse had a small button on top right. Engelbart called it a mouse as the cord coming out of its back reminded him of small rodents.

The basic idea for the mouse first came to him in 1961 while sitting in a conference session on computer graphics, his mind mulling over the challenge of making interactive computing more efficient. It occurred to him that, using a pair of small wheels traversing a tabletop, one wheel turning horizontally, one turning vertically, the computer could track their combined rotations and move the cursor on the display accordingly. The wheels could function something like the wheels on a planimeter – a tool used by engineers and geographers to measure areas on a map, blueprint, drawing, etc. – but in this case, rolling the wheels around on the tabletop would plot the x,y coordinates for a cursor on a computer screen. He recorded the idea in his notebook for future reference.

Since 1951 Doug had envisioned intellectual workers sitting at high-performance interactive display workstations, accessing a vast online information space in which to collaborate on important problems. When pondering the question of pointing devices in 1961, he was in the midst of an in-depth study of how teams and organizations might become much more effective in solving important problems. In 1962 he published his findings in "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," which in 1963 garnered him some modest funding from ARPA to begin to hire a very small research team, and set up a basic lab with computer resources, teletypes, and finally, a display workstation.

By now there were several off-the-shelf solutions for moving a cursor and selecting something on a display screen, but no good data about which would be most efficient to meet Engelbart's "high-performance" requirement. He applied for and was awarded a small grant from Bob Taylor at NASA to explore that question.

Doug and team rounded up then best-of-breed pointing devices to compare, and rigged up some in-house prototypes to add to the mix, such as a foot pedal and a knee-operated device (see Mouse Alternatives below). He also reviewed his earlier notes with his lead engineer Bill English, who built a prototype of the hand-held device with perpendicular wheels mounted in a carved out wooden block, with a button on top, to test with the others. This was the first mouse (pictured above and below). Watch Doug and Bill (above right) discussing this study and the first mouse.

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Did you know George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the U.S., was a cheerleader? He was a cheerleader in high school and continued to be one when he attended Yale University in the 1960s.

In 2000, Bush decided to run for president of the United States, an office his father held from 1989 to 1993. He ran against the sitting vice president, Al Gore. Their contest ended with a hotly disputed debate over how to count votes in Florida, a state governed by Bush’s younger brother Jeb.

After the first tally, Bush led by a small margin in the Sunshine State. But then some people stepped forward and said they’d voted for the wrong person by accident because the ballots were hard to read. The presidency would now be decided by recounting some of the ballots in Florida.

For 36 days, the world waited to see who would become the next president. Finally the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, decided by a 5-4 vote that Bush was not receiving equal protection and due process (or fair treatment) under the Constitution, and they stopped the recounts. Bush had won Florida.

In many countries, the candidate with the most votes wins. But citizens of the United States participate in a more complex, two-step process. After individual citizens across the country vote, a group called the electoral college chooses the president. Based on population, each state has a certain number of delegates, or voters, in the electoral college who vote for the president according to how people in their state voted. The candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all the state’s delegates.

Winning Florida gave Bush enough electoral college votes to win the presidency, even though Gore received some 500,000 more votes than Bush, winning the popular vote. Bush became the first president in more than a century to reach the White House without carrying the nation’s popular vote. Only John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison before him did the same. (Unlike these previous presidents, Bush was reelected four years later.)

Not since John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams (the second and sixth presidents) had a father and his son each become president of the United States.

Credit : National Geographic

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Ludwig van Beethoven, born in Bonn in 1790, was one of the world's greatest. composers. He began to lose his hearing at the age of 26, and by 1823 he was completely deaf. Beethoven never heard his nine symphonies or piano concertos, or any of his other compositions during the last ten years of his life.

Like many men of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, he suffered from a plethora of other illnesses and ailments. In Beethoven’s case, the list included chronic abdominal pain and diarrhea that might have been due to an inflammatory bowel disorder, depression, alcohol abuse, respiratory problems, joint pain, eye inflammation, and cirrhosis of the liver. This last problem, given his prodigious drinking, may have been the final domino that toppled him into the grave. Bedridden for months, he died in 1827, most likely from liver and kidney failure, peritonitis, abdominal ascites, and encephalopathy. An autopsy revealed severe cirrhosis and dilatation of the auditory and other related nerves in the ear.

A young musician named Ferdinand Hiller snipped off a lock of hair from the great composer’s head as a keepsake — a common custom at the time. The lock stayed within the Hiller family for nearly a century before somehow making its way to the tiny fishing village of Gilleleje, in Nazi-controlled Denmark and into the hands of the local physician there, Kay Fremming. The doctor helped save the lives of hundreds of Jews escaping Denmark and the Nazis for Sweden, which was about 10 miles across the Øresund Strait, the narrow channel separating the two nations. The theory is that one of these Jewish refugees, perhaps a relative of Ferdinand Hiller, either gave Dr. Fremming the lock of Beethoven’s hair or used it as a payment of some kind.

At any rate, the doctor bequeathed the lock, consisting of 582 strands, to his daughter, who subsequently put it up for auction in 1994. It was purchased by an Arizona urologist named Alfredo Guevera for about $7,000. Guevera kept 160 strands. The remaining 422 strands were donated to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California.

Guevera and Ira Brilliant, a real estate developer, collector and university benefactor, then pursued the question of how Beethoven became deaf.

Credit : PBS News Hour 

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His real name was Erik Weiss and he was the most famous escapologist of all time. He could escape from locked handcuffs, straitjackets, even sealed, underwater boxes.

In his later years Houdini campaigned against mind readers, mediums, and others who claimed supernatural powers. He argued that they were charlatans who produced all of their effects through natural means and various tricks. He wrote Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920) and A Magician Among the Spirits (1924). Houdini and his wife, however, agreed to conduct an experiment in spiritualism: the first to die was to try to communicate with the survivor. His widow declared the experiment a failure before her death in 1943.

Houdini took his stage name from the name of the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, but he later wrote The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (1908), a debunking study of Houdin’s abilities. Houdini wrote the article on conjuring for the 13th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He died of peritonitis that stemmed from a stomach injury.

Credit : Britannica 

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This magazine has been blessed in recent times thanks to the number of teenagers who have been hogging the limelight in various spheres of activities around the world; it always gives us an opportunity to write about them and also serves as an inspiration for the readers of this youth magazine. The latest teenage sensation has been Emma Raducanu; winner of the U.S. Open and even more sensational was her victory in straight sets in the women's final of the tournament.

If coming events cast their shadows before then Emma's U.S. Open win should not surprise ardent tennis followers. After all, at Wimbledon, the Grand Slami event preceding the U.S. Open during the calendar year, Emma was a wildcard entry as a consequence of being Britain's number one ranked player and she managed to reach the fourth round at Wimbledon. The U.S. Open was even more surprising as she came through the qualifying rounds to wrest the title, beating Leylah Fernandez 6-3, 6-4.

Emma's rise as a player has been awe-striking. She entered the WTA Tour only in June this year and had a ranking somewhere in the 300s. Due to her exceptional performances in a short period of just three months, she has climbed to the 22d rank. In the Open era of tennis, she is the only person ever to enter as a qualifier and lift a Grand Slam trophy.

Emma Raducanu is a good example of international integration. She was born in Canada on 13 November 2002. Her father has a Romanian ancestry while her mother is Chinese. Emma was just two years old when her family moved to Britain, so she is now a British citizen but holds dual citizenship of Canada, as well. As a consequence of her ancestry, she is fluent in Romanian, Chinese and English; surely a rare combination in every sense of the word.

Emma took to tennis from the age of five years and all her upbringing was in London but one would scarce believe that many of her younger day success came on Indian soil. She participated with considerable success in various girls' tournaments in Chandigarh, New Delhi, Pune and Solapur. Emma turned professional in 2018. However, as with many sports personalities, Emma's career too was punctuated by the Covid-19 year of 2020. However, she kept herself up in competitive tennis by participating in a few exhibition matches and some minor tennis tournaments.

Although the year 2021 began with some disappointment for Emma due to her first-round loss at the Nottingham Open to compatriot, Harriet Dart, at Wimbledon, she became the youngest-ever British tennis player to reach the third round of the tournament. Subsequently, she broke into the top 200 rank in women's tennis when she beat Sorana Cristea to enter the fourth round at Wimbledon and in the process become the youngest-ever British woman in the Open Era to reach the fourth round. An entry into the final of the WTA 125 final at Chicago assured Emma a place among the top 150 women players and then her breaking into the top 25 rank after her victory at the U.S. Open is now a well-known history.

There have been some noteworthy things that happened in Emma's march to the U.S. Open title and perhaps the most significant among them is the fact that she did not drop a single set in her crusade. Twenty two years after Serena Williams and Martina Hingis clashed in the finals, the U.S. Open 2021 finals featured the first all-teenager clash between Emma and Leylah Fernandez.

Basically a baseline player, Emma has an ideal height of 175 cm which is good enough to help her have a strong first serve. Even her second serves are as good as the first serve of several women players but her real strength lies in her down the-line shots, especially the ones that come from her two-handed backhand. Like all top players, she has a good and fast court coverage and her sliced forehands are good enough to change the pace of the game to her liking.

Although Emma prefers to play on hard courts, there is very little doubt that with her type of grasp over the basics of the game, the day isn't far, as she gains in physical strength, when she will be a hard nut to crack for the others who as of now are more versatile on the grass and clay courts. The tennis world has just about seen the rise of a new tennis star.

Credit : Gp Capt Achchyut Kumar (The Teenager Today)

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Ambi Subramaniam is such a master fiddler that it is nearly impossible to choose his best fiddling performance. The breakneck speed with which he plays, sometimes simple and at times powerful, leaves the listener breathless, it's so intense. The Bangalore-based 29-year-old Ambi is very down-to earth, simple and just like any Gen X youngster, until he picks up his violin.

Hailed as "India's Itzhak Pearlman" by Ozy Magazine, Ambi has been trained by his father and guru Dr L. Subramaniam since he was three years old. He gave his first public performance at the age of seven. He received the Ritz Icon Annual Award, the Rotary Youth Award, two GIMAs (Global Indian Music Award for Best Fusion Album and Best Carnatic Instrumental Album) and Big Indian Music Award (Best Carnatic Album). In 2007, he released his first album and two years later he received a Golden Violin from Sri Jayendra Saraswati.

Ambi also co-wrote India's first series of textbooks for teaching the Indian violin.

Ambi has performed extensively with his family and collaborated with Larry Coryell, Ernie Watts, Corky Siegel, Shankar Mahadevan and many others. His first album, released in 2007 when he was just 16, won both BIMA (The British Interactive Media Association, which annually gives British awards for excellence in the digital world) and GIMA (Global Indian Music Academy Award), Ambi is truly "the new king of Indian classical violin".

Ambi and his sister Bindu manage the Subramaniam Academy of Performing Arts (SaPa) in the field of music education, with the aim of creating a music ecosystem to teach students not only Indian music but also global music, and trying to make sure that students have access to some of the best musicians around the world. The duo is also part of the contemporary world music band SubraMania, a space to collaborate with different artists.

In a freewheeling interview with Verus Ferreira, Ambi shares his story.

Let's start at the beginning. At what age did you take up learning the violin?

I started learning the violin when I was three years old, and that time you had smaller violins. I think it didn't really start formally, like somebody going to a class, or sitting down in front of a teacher and taking lessons. My dad obviously was playing a lot of music at home, practising and perfecting that kind of thing. I think it started very informally where I had the violin in my hand and I would try and imitate what my dad was doing. Of course, it became a bit formal once I started enjoying the instrument. Then my brother, my sister and I learnt to sing, how to play the piano; we learnt Carnatic and western violin.

What would you say your style of music is?

It's a very interesting question. Like I mentioned, we learnt a lot of different things, because for me I tried to be as versatile as I could. That means, sometimes you don't want to label all that you are doing, and you keep trying different styles so you can keep growing. Of course, I was initially taught Carnatic music and western classical music. When I played with my mom, Kavita Krishnamurthy, that would be a complete Bollywood set. Then it was a challenge for me to figure out how I would play in those situations to suit that style of music, or suddenly if I am in a situation when I am with a set of musicians. For example, in Spain playing Flamenco music, how to bring out my individuality. I'd play something that suits that style of music. But I think style is something that keeps evolving.

Do you still learn from your father, L. Subramaniam?

Of course, I think there is so much to learn from both my parents, and I think my dad is just incredible, obviously not only in terms of his musical skills and him being a legendary musician, but there are so many things that you learn from him as a person as well, so that he never stops. He would play phrases and I would try to repeat, and then there was a stage where we were performing a lot together. I learnt a lot by playing with him onstage and now the way I learnt is very different. So sometimes he will hear a piece I have done and he will give me feedback. That learning process is always there, but the way you learn changes over time.

Do you also sing and play the piano?

Yes, I do enjoy singing and playing the piano a lot, think, you have to make a choice if you want to really go deep into anything. I do sing and play the piano, but it's mostly for myself.

When did you first start your concert playing?

I think the first time I was on stage was when I was six years old when my brother and I were singing for something. My first violin performance was when I was seven and I think it is very important to have very positive experiences when you are on stage. When I say that, it's completely different from being skilful on stage. I'm sure I wasn't that great at age seven, but I went on stage and came off the stage feeling very good. I think that was very important for me, because from that age 1 enjoyed going on stage because of that.

Is the violin you play different from violins played in Carnatic music?

I play a five-string violin. Normally violins have four strings; there's an extra string at the bottom which is the viola string, and it gives a bigger range, but that also makes it harder to play. Apart from that, the violin is very similar; it also has an electric pick up.

What brand of violin do you use?

There are many violins that are made in India, and it's really nice to see the violin skill-making really improving in India in the last decade or two. It's something that hasn't traditionally been made in India. I use a violin from the U.S. I generally try not to use too many violins, unlike a guitar, as a violin doesn't have frets like a guitar, so every violin has its own uniqueness, it has its own challenges as well. For example, if I pick up a new violin, the spacing will be completely different. So all of sudden if I try to play the same way that I play on my current violin, it would be completely out of tune.

Who are your music idols?

There are a number of them. There are many violinists like Israeli violinist Maxim Vengerov, Joshua Heifetz who are incredible violinists. I also take inspiration from a lot of composers because a big part of what I do is composition.

What are your plans for the year 2022?

I hope by then we would be able to have some more live performances. I think given the situation in the last two years, we've been extremely lucky and we've been able to make studio work, make a lot of albums, and I think that process will continue. But I think for the entire music industry and for music in general, it would be great if we can open up once things are safer.

Well, to be honest, I really enjoy cricket as well and I had a flair for Maths, so probably, I would've been a cricket statistician or something like that.

Your message to the readers of The Teenager Today

What anybody does, whether it's music or anything else, it's good to keep working on skills that interest you, even if you think that this doesn't go with something else that you also like. One thing that we always talk about at SaPa is that you don't have to be just in one thing. We have a lot of very talented kids who are interested in coding and also in music. They also like doing music, but they also like painting or design. It's very nice to pursue all these things that you like. None of us know what jobs are going to exist in five, ten or fifteen years, so you could be creating something special, and at some point of time you'll be having skill sets that other people don't have.

Credit : Verus Ferreira (The Teenager Today)

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The current Indian cricket team has had the luxury of two genuine all-rounders in the shape of Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. However, more often than not they have been competing for the same spot in the team specially whenever the Indian team is on an overseas tour and the pitches are not very conducive to spin. Ever since the exit of Kapil Dev, the Indian team has lacked an all-rounder who can form a part of India's pace battery. For some time, Hardik Pandya seemed to be a bright prospect, but somehow, he has not been able to carry his limited over heroics to the longer version of the game.

The advent of Shardul Thakur, however, has brought in high hopes as one who can be accommodated in Kapil Dev's rather oversized shoes. This rather fresh entrant to the Indian Test team has proved his worth on foreign soil and his two half centuries in the crucial fourth Test against in the recently concluded Test Series against England have established beyond doubt that this lad can handle pressure at the highest level of the game.

At the time of our going to press, Shardul in his short career of just four Tests has a batting average of 38.00 and a bowling average of 22.7 which clearly gives an indication of him being a genuine all-rounder. He has a very similar ratio in T20 Internationals although he needs to prove an equal versatility in One Day Internationals. However, in terms of economy Shardul's performance is far from being impressive. While conceding more than three runs in an over in Tests is not of much consequence, his conceding close to seven runs per over in ODIs and over nine runs an over in T20Is can be worrisome for any team captain.

Born at Palghar, Maharashtra, in October 1991, Shardul Narendra Thakur has had several misfortunes in his cricketing career. While he made his first-class debut for Mumbai in 2012, he had a poor start to his career but came into the limelight a few years later when in a Ranji Trophy final match against Saurashtra, he took eight wickets to carry Mumbai to victory. Very soon, he was included in the sixteen member Test team for a tour of the West Indies but did not play a single Test. He had to wait till February 2017 to make an international debut when he was included in the first eleven to play a One Day International against Sri Lanka.

Appearing in coloured clothes with the number 10 behind his shirt, Shardul created quite a furore for a number which till then had been worn only by Sachin Tendulkar. In fact, Rohit Sharma has even said to have chided Shardul for his temerity as a consequence of which Shardul has now chosen number 54 as his jersey number. Shardul had to wait for another six months before he could make his T20 International debut against South Africa and then another eight months for making his Test debut against the West Indies.. The latter may have been probably the shortest debut as a groin injury put him out of play.

Even in the Indian Premier League, Shardul has been far from impressive. He was bought initially by Kings XI Punjab, then Pune and now finally by the Chennai Super Kings. Believe it or not, Shardul has one of the most unimpressive records in the IPL. Having played in 52 IPL matches, he has just 51 wickets at an average of 31.5 and an economy rate of 9.13 runs per over. What is even worse is that he has a batting average of just seven.

However, his failings of the past should now be consigned to a pack of bad memories. His performance in the very last segment of the Australian tour and now once again in the last segment of the English tour have finally exposed his true mettle and of what he is capable. So let us now keep our fingers crossed to watch him in action in the last segment of IPL 2021. With such an impressive Test record, Shardul Thakur is bound to be a changed player in the IPL; while he would be performing with confidence his opponents will definitely be facing him a sense of awe.

With a versatile performance in Tests, India can remain comforted that it has finally found a genuine all-rounder who is a pace bowler but there is also a sad part to the whole story; with Shardul Thakur turning 30 this month, India may have exhumed an all-round talent just a bit too late.

Credit : Gp Capt Achchyut Kumar (The Teenager Today)

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