My Science School

Virginia Apgar was an American physician, who developed the Apgar Score System, a method employed in hospitals around the world to quickly evaluate the well-being of newborns. Apgar scoring has helped decrease infant mortality to a great degree. Virginia Apgar was born as the third child and raised in Westfield, New Jersey. Her older brother died early from tuberculosis, and her younger brother had a chronic illness. This perhaps strengthened her determination to become a doctor. She graduated with a degree in zoology in 1929 from Mount Holyoke College. Along with studies, she learnt violin, played sports, acted in plays and wrote for newspapers. Apgar graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1929 and from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933. She joined as the anaesthesiologist at Bellevue Hospital, New York City, in 1935. Anaesthesiologists are doctors who specialise in giving patients anaesthesia, a medicine which controls pain during surgery. In 1937, she became the first female board-certified anaesthesiologist.

Apgar also became the first woman to head a specialty division at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

She was appointed a director of obstetric anaesthesia, and researched the effects of maternal anaesthesia on newborns and how to lower neonatal mortality rates. In 1952, she formulated the Apgar Score as a way to assess how well a baby has endured delivery. It was published in 1953, and today is still administered worldwide.

What's Apgar score?

Apgar score is administered within the first few minutes of a baby being born. The baby is quickly assessed and scored against five simple criteria namely Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration (backronym of APGAR). A score above 7 is normal, from 4 to 6 is considered fairly low and a score below 3 may indicate that the newborn needs medical attention. Teratology Apgar was also a name to reckon with in the teratology (a study of birth abnormalities) field of medicine.

She joined the National Foundation-March of Dimes in 1959, where she remained employed until her death in 1974. In 1972, Apgar co-authored a book called 'Is My Baby All Right?' with Joan Beck. It explains the causes and treatments of a range of birth defects.

Virginia Apgar was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995.

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What you need:

• Tissues
• A pencil
• An empty toilet paper roll
• Rubber band
• Salt

What to do:

1. Place the tissue over one end of the cardboard cylinder and secure it with a rubber band.

2. Insert the rounded back of the pencil into the cylinders other end and push it through the tissue. Does the tissue tear easily?

3. Now, take another tissue and replace the torn one. Fasten it with the rubber band.

4. Set the toilet paper roll upright on a flat table. The side with the tissue should face down.

5. Pour salt into the cardboard roll until it is three-quarters full.

6. Tap the roll on the table to settle and pack in the salt.

7. Now, try to push the unsharpened end of the pencil through the salt to tear the tissue paper.

What happens:

In the absence of salt, the pencil tears the tissue paper easily. But once the roll is filled with salt, it becomes really hard to push through the tissue paper!

Why?

When you push the back of the pencil through the tissue, you apply force. This force is concentrated at the point where the pencil meets the tissue, and that's where the tissue tears. Now, fast forward to the point where you are pushing the pencil through the salt to get to the tissue. The force you apply is distributed over many, many grains of salt.

And it also gets spread out over the entire area of the tissue paper instead of being concentrated at a point. This increased surface area of the tissue, thanks to the presence of salt, is what causes it to hold strong before your pencil.

Picture Credit : Google

What you need:

• An A4-sized sheet of paper
• Scissors
• A paperclip Pencil and ruler

What to do:

1. Divide the A4 sheet into four parts horizontally. Cut off one part so you have a paper strip.

2. On the strip, copy the shape shown in the figure.

3. Cut along the solid lines and fold along the dotted lines.

4. At the bottom of the T-fold, secure the flaps using the paperclip. At the top of the T. the two legs need to be folded in opposite direction to make the rotor (the fan-like thing) on top of the helicopter.

5. That's it! Now, hold the helicopter high and let it go!

What happens:

The paper chopper whirls as it descends slowly to the ground.

Why?

When you let go of the helicopter, it falls under the influence of gravity. But its rotor (the two blade-like things) helps it stay afloat longer. This is because the air pushes against the flaps separately, causing them to lift up. When the flaps are lifted, they slant. Air hitting the slanted flaps gives them a sideways, horizontal push causing the copter to rotate and create more air movement around the flaps. This moving air helps the chopper float. In real life, airplanes achieve lift with the help of their wings. To do so, airplanes have to first move really fast so that the air can flow over their wings and lift them up. That means they cannot take off without a runway. That's where helicopters have an advantage. They use their rotors to create fast-moving air that can give them a lift easily.

Picture Credit : Google

What you need:

A partner

What to do:

1. Stand facing your partner.

2. Place your left hand against your partner's right hand so that your fingers line up. The palms need to touch as well.

3. Use the thumb and index finger of your free hand to simultaneously stroke the index finger on your hand and the index finger on your partners hand.

4. Swap roles to compare notes.

What happens:

Slowly, you start to feel that your index finger resting against your partners has gone numb.

Why?

Sometimes the brain skips certain sensory information. This is known as perceptual disjunction which simply means incomplete or inconsistent perception. In this case, the brain forgets that you are not touching both sides of your index finger because your partners finger is in the way. While stroking only one side of the index finger, it concludes that the other side has gone numb.

Picture Credit : Google

What you need:

• An A4 size sheet of paper Scissors
• Marker and ruler

What to do:

1. Divide the A4 sheet into four parts horizontally.

2. Cut along the lines so that you have four paper strips.

3. Now, take one of the strips and fold it in half.

4. At the centre of the fold, cut out two small triangles close to each other, but not touching.

5. Fold both the ends of the paper back on themselves. The flaps should measure about one centimeter.

6. Now, hold the flaps between two of your fingers and blow between them.

What happens:

Your paper shrieks like an elephant blowing its nose!

Why?

When you blow through the gap between the flaps, the air passes out on the other side through the triangles in the paper, but not before it makes the whole sheet in your hand vibrate. These vibrations give rise to sound waves and these sound waves are the shrieks you hear!

Picture Credit : Google

Back in August of 1977, a team of astronomers studying radio transmissions from an observatory at Ohio State called the "Big Ear" recorded an unusual 72-second signal—it was so strong that team member Jerry Ehman scrawled "Wow!" next to the readout. Since that time, numerous scientists have searched for an explanation of the signal, but until now, no one could offer a valid argument. Possible sources such as asteroids, exo-planets, stars and even signals from Earth have all been ruled out. Some outside the science community even suggested that it was proof of aliens. It was noted that the frequency was transmitted at 1,420 MHz, though, which happens to be the same frequency as hydrogen.

The explanation started to come into focus last year when a team at the CPS suggested that the signal might have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet—additionally, the movement of the comet would explain why the signal was not seen again. The team noted that two comets had been in the same part of the sky that the Big Ear was monitoring on the fateful day. Those comets, P/2008 Y2(Gibbs) and 266/P Christensen had not yet been discovered. The team then got a chance to test their idea as the two comets appeared once again in the night sky from November 2016 through February of 2017.

The team reports that radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal 40 years ago. To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results. The researchers acknowledge that they cannot say with certainty that the Wow! signal was generated by 266/P Christensen, but they can say with relative assurance that it was generated by a comet.

Credit : Phy.org 

Picture Credit : Google