Cell size and scale

Wonderful visualisation of scale of the very small, from a coffee bean down to a carbon atom.

Click here.

Refraction animation

Excellent animation of reflection and refraction here.

Floodproof rice?

They've come up with rice strains that are resistant to pests, that can grow with less water, but what do you do when you have floods? Well, here's one possibility.

The Perseids Are Coming

For night skygazers, some action

A motor tiny enough for blood vessels

Complete story here.

Are lice good for us?

From Popular Science.

Little bits for the planet

Some of the trivia I picked up in my travels around the web. Sorry, no citations, since there were too many sources.

• Imagine a PET bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.
• The net cooling effect of a young, healthy tree is equivalent to ten room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.
• Conventionally grown cotton uses approximately 25% of the world's insecticides and more than 10% of the pesticides.
• Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles. (Closer home, think of seafood and kiwi fruit that we want to enjoy in Delhi!) If you start your own garden the vegetables only have to travel to the kitchen table.

GeoEye looks at our planet

So many people mail out 'stunning pictures' of the Earth, endlessly forwarded, that my mailbox creaks with the load. So here's a link to the site of GeoEye, the new kid on the block when it comes to high-resolution images of the earth. The images are a big improvement over Google Earth, though they don't offer anything but the picture.

Enjoy your planet.

Dim Sun?

Apparently, the sun has been rather quiet, with solar activity at a record low. Read.

Shifting focus

I've just been thinking why I have been drawing the line at 'science' posts, and concluded that there is no real reason, apart from the convenience of classification. So I've decided to drop that wall, and post on whatever seems interesting and appropriate. Would welcome any feedback. I will still keep this as more of a 'clippings service', a digest, rather than a personal forum.

Showpiece for Indian democracy

One polling station, 5 EC officials, 2 policemen... one voter. Read this story about India's loneliest voter.

Simulating the brain

Many years ago, I bought my first PC emulator (for my Macintosh computer). I was astonished to learn that it consisted of a complete software simulation of the Pentium processor hardware. So every flip or flop that the processor would perform was being simulated, leading to the higher-level functions being performed. That was 1997.

Today, I read a similarly mind-boggling story about a software simulation of a section of the human brain. What the researchers have done is to build a molecule-by-molecule simulation of the neocortex, and then put it through its paces. I have no idea where this leads, but it is an astonishing achievement.

Here's the story.

Space Blob Baffles Astronomers

BBC News story

Breaking the code...

A news item from the TOI about the Indus Valley script.

Fractures

From time to time, one of you turns up at school in a cast. I wonder if you have a clear picture of just what happens if it is a bone that you have fractured. Here are a couple of videos that show different ways in which bones break.

Fractures video 1

Fractures video 2

The Inner Life of a Cell

It's not new, but it's quite stunning.

Look at this animated video of the inner structure and processes within a cell. Specifically, the response of a White Blood Cell to an inflammatory agent.

There's another version of this with a commentary explaining the processes and structures involved.

And here's the transcript, by someone who seems to understand this better than I do.

The first mechanical computer?

They call it the world's first mechanical computer. It was created some 2000 years ago. And some months ago, somebody built a working model, based on the original. Read about the Antikythera mechanism.

Water, water everywhere

While we search for water on Mars, having sent spacecraft and landers there to do our searching, we're managing to find the stuff up to 11 billion light years away. Here's how and where.

Learning about cells

I found this very good online resource on Amazing Cells. Some very nifty animations & demonstrations.

It's at the Genetic Science Learning Centre at the University of Utah.

Check it out. It gets a bit detailed as  you go along, but the first few modules are cool.

Also these:

HowStuffWorks

Biology4Kids