Believe it or not's !!

Peruvian Amazon ants

An unbelievable number of 43 species of ant can be found on a single tree in the Peruvian Amazon, which is equal to the entire ant fauna of the UK!

The Oldest Trees

The Bristlecone Pine is the oldest known tree species in the world. It is found only in the scattered, arid mountain regions of six western states of America, in a harsh windswept environment. The oldest Bristlecone Pines grow at an elevations of 3,000 to 3,300 metres, and the oldest known tree is 'Methuselah', which is 4,789 years old!

Hybrid Animals

List of hybrid animals -

http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-cats.htm

Electric Bulb

Why is Thomas Alva Edison considered to be the inventor of the electric bulb?

The actual inventor of the very first electric lighting was Humphrey Davy. In 1809, he invented the original source of electric lighting. Since his invention, many other men had set out to improve this idea and invent their own form of electrical lighting. Many have succeeded, but none were practical or long lasting.
It was only in 1879 that Edison invented a carbon filament that would burn for at least forty hours. With his great mind and wonderful thinking, he had made a longer lasting electric light bulb in 1880. It burned for over 1,200 hours, using a bamboo-derived element.
So, though there were very many men trying to invent longer, safe, and economical electric lighting, it was Thomas Alva Edison who did the best job. He made quite a few improvements on his improvements on his invention too. Edison spent several years after this, putting together the electric industry, so that this new source of lighting would be used throughout the world, on streets, in homes, and in businesses.

Some more fun stuff

The following is for those of you who have learnt some Geometry. I wanted to show you a simple proof of Pythagoras theorem and, for that, you need to understand the following.  Feel free to ask questions if you do not understand something.

In the diagram above, PQ and XY are parallel straight lines (what does it mean?).  

And, AB=BE (that means, if you slide the green parallelogram along the parallel lines as below, you will see that the base of the green parallelogram coincides with the base AB of the rectangle).

FACT:  If you have such a set up as the green parallelogram and the red rectangle as seen here, then the area of the rectangle is same as the area of the parallelogram.

Some fun stuff

INTERESTING FACTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DID YOU KNOW THAT?
1. 4.5 pounds of sunlight strike the Earth each day.
2. A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball made of rubber. (try it outside)
3. . At room temperature, the average air molecule travels at the speed of a rifle bullet.
4. Each day, up to 150 species of life become extinct.
5. Each day is longer than the previous on by 0.00000002 seconds which is 13 seconds each century!
CHECK OUT MORE OF THESE FACTS IN THE FOLLOWING WEBSITE
http://www.funfactz.com/science-facts/

TEST POST!

HI GUYS,

This is Jayesh, Shruthi's brother. I am really looking forward in getting to know all the members from putkutti science club. If you have any questions please feel free to ask me.

Thanks, Bye Bye

Believe it or not!

Bourke's Luck

Bourke's Luck Portholes are swirling whirlpools which occur as the Treur River plunges into the Blyde River. They were named after Tom Bourke, a farmer on whose land the portholes were located. Tom Bourke correctly predicted that large gold deposits would be found at the bottom of his potholes - and he was right!

Image:

http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Africa/South_Africa/East/Mpumalanga/Blyde_River_Canyon/photo183281.htm

Testing

Hey guys this is Shruthi. I just joined joined the putkutti club. I f you have any questions please feel free to ask me anytime.

What is strange about the lakes of Keli Mutu?

Kelimutu is a small but well-known Indonesian Volcano in central Flores Island with three summit crater lakes. These lakes are startling in that they are of three different colours! The western lake, Tiwi Ata Mbupu, or Lake of Old People is blue while Tiwu Nua Muri Kooh Tai or the Lake of Young Men and Maidens is green and the Tiwu Ata Polo, or 'The Enchanted Lake', is red.

The people who live in the area believe that these lakes are the resting place of souls, of sinners, virgins and babies. What is even stranger is that the lakes have changed colour over the years. Some years back, they were black, maroon and blue, and in the 1960's, they were milky coffee brown, red brown, and blue! No one can explain the cause of such colour changes except to suppose that different minerals are dissolved in the waters of each lake at Kelimutu. Did you know that the word 'Kelimutu is a combination of words 'Keli' which means mountain and 'Mutu' which means boiling?

ಚಿತ್ರ-http://thepowerofindonesia.blogspot.com/2010/02/kelimutu-unique-lake-with-three.html
ಶ್ರೀನಿಧಿ

S Chandra

I read an article on S Chandrashekhar and I got a glimpse of how big minds operate. Check this out when you get a chance:
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/apr252000/generalia.pdf

Here is a very lengthy interview with him where he discusses his career in greater detail:
 http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4551_1.html


It surely is inspirational material!




PS: Srinidhi, you have disable comments for your posts. Try to enable comments. When you edit the post, click on "Post Options" link you see at the bottom left of edit window. This has an option to enable comments.


The comment I wanted to make is this: The fossils of tree trunks appear to be those that are neatly cut, like from a chain saw. How did that happen when this should be dating back from pre-human days?


I haven't had time to post of late. The following are coming up soon:
1. The universe may end up in a Big Crunch or a Big Freeze or a Big Rip. These are certain ideas that capture our imagination. 
2. Narasimhanna suggested that I draw pictures to depict visual proofs of such things as (a+b)^2=a^2+2ab+b^2 and Pythogoras theorem, etc. 

Amazing!

Garden Eels

Garden Eels are small eels that burrow into the of coral reefs. They moor themselves into trenches in the seabed, and get their name from the fact that they drift in the current like plants. They don't swim around at all, but stay in one place, filtering the water for fish eggs and small shell fish.

धन्यवाद

Believe it or Not !

Wood to Stone - taken from Manorama's 'Tell me why'

Arizona's Petrified Forest is not a forest at all. It is a hauntingly beautiful landscape filled with magnificent specimens of petrified wood. Petrified wood is wood that has turned into stone. How did this happen? Millions of years ago, the forests covering Northern Arizona were buried under a sea of mud, sand, and volcanic ash, and the pressure over a period of time turned the wood into stone, to create a forest of stone trees!

Image - http://www.moore-fun.net/images/Petrified%20Forest.jpg

ధన్యవాదాలు
శ్రీనిధి

Carnivorous plants

Venus fly trap, Pitcher plants (Nepanthes), Sun Dew plants (Drossera) are some of the carnivorous plants.

List of carnivorous plants available at -

http://www.pinguicula.org/pages/pages_principales/SEZNAM%202004.pdf

How these plants trap the prey and digest is available at -

http://www.ehow.com/list_5791411_carnivorous-plants-list.html

ಇಂತಿ
ಶ್ರೀನಿಧಿ

Why can't red beans grow into anything other than red bean plants?

Nagashree was talking to me about Classification of Plants and animals yesterday. The following question came up: If you look at two varieties of bean plants (say red bean and brown bean) just when they sprout, they look similar. But when they grow up they produce different varieties of beans. The red bean variety always produces red bean plants and the brown ones always produce brown bean plants. What is in the bean seed that determines what the plant grows into ? And what is the process involved?

Nagashree, try to find more on the above question.

A related question: Certain lizards re-grow their tails when their tails are cut off. Why does that not happen to most other animals?

How is information stored in hard, floppy, optical discs etc?

Srinidhi asked the question: How is information stored in hard, floppy, optical discs etc?

At a high level this is what every storage device (like floppy disks, hard disk drives, optical storage media like CDs, DVDs, BluRay disks, etc) does: They store sequences of 0's and 1's.

There are several ways of storing 0's and 1's. One way is to take advantage of magnetic properties of materials, like in floppy disks (Have you seen them? Nobody uses floppy disks these days!), hard disk drives etc. Optical drives use the method of creating microscopic "pits" to represent to mark 1's on plastic. These pits could be just markings that could be rewritten.

Have you played with magnets, Srinidhi? If you play with a couple of magnets for a while, you will notice that they have poles. You know very well that every magnet has North and South poles. You can make certain materials magnetic by subjecting them to a magnetic field. That means you can make them possess a N-pole and a S-pole simply by putting them in a strong magnetic field. You can also reverse the direction of poles in such materials(Why?). Let us look for examples of such materials.

Now imagine millions of such tiny magnets on a very small disk. And imagine a magnetic head that can provide the magnetic field necessary for these tiny magnets to change polarity. This is what a magnetic disk is, in principle. The magnetic head goes about providing the field needed to set the magnetic polarities as desired (say, N pointing up to indicate 1 and down to indicate 0, etc).

Optical disks use lasers to "burn" pits on a plastic disk. A less intense laser can be used to read the same pits.

This just to state the principles involved. The details, when the principles are implemented, can be mind boggling. Just take a look at the following article to get an idea of what is involved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

New Home to Putkutti Science Club

The website https://sites.google.com/site/putkutti/home is not quite suitable for multiple authors posting articles. I thought this would be a good one to use for discussions. We can use the earlier site for writing lengthy articles and use this blog site for discussions.

Send me an email if you have difficulties using this blog.