Wonders of science
The Internet is full of mind-boggling stuff. And it's free
OTHERS :
Every weekday I get a mail from Alexis Madrigal. The subject of the mail is “Five intriguing things".
Madrigal is the deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com, where he also oversees the magazine’s technology channel. He picks up five assorted articles from the Net, condenses them into a paragraph each, and sends out the mail (www.tinyletter.com/intriguingthings) with links to the articles.
It’s an eclectic mix of topics: “What caffeine does for plants"; “Teaching computers the little white lie"; “Psychotherapy in China"; “How filmmakers present texting on screen"; “Measuring blood sugar with lasers".
Since I often use my leftover coffee to fertilize plants, I clicked on the link for caffeine, and this is what I discovered: Scientists have sequenced the coffee genome and found that caffeine in coffee leaves deters plant-eating insects. Also, when the leaves fall, the caffeine gets into the soil and prevents the seeds of other plants from germinating. And three, says one of the study’s authors, “caffeine habituates pollinators. It kind of acts on them in a similar way that it does to us—keeps them coming back for more." Quite an amazing defence system.
The mail comes in the evening. Sometimes I read it at night, or keep it for the next morning. I subscribe to several online newsletters. Some I just glance through and delete because the topics don’t interest me.
Once a week I get a mail from the science magazine Nautilus (Nautil.us). I simply adore their incredibly beautiful website, and, of course, their superb writing. Science apart, what I also look forward to in Nautilus is their fiction where I recently read an interesting story about time travel titled, “Two-Stroke Toilets".
Imagine you have just moved into a house in the wilderness and across the fence you see a decrepit gate. You are curious. You enter it, and you find yourself in a setting back in time in the late 1940s. You see a petrol pump that’s selling gas at 1940s prices. You decide to fill a can, pay a pittance for it, come out of the gate, and you are in the present. You are in a daze. Was it a dream? You look down at your hand, and there’s a filled can of petrol.
I also have a list of bookmarks for blogs and websites that I like to read as often as I can. It’s a mix: news, design, books, travel, ideas, and quite a bit of science. There’s Carl Zimmer, eminent science blogger and author whose work also appears in The New York Times, and Maryn McKenna, whose articles on antibiotic resistance I have shared with several friends.
Ed Yong is an award-winning British science writer whose blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science, is hosted by the National Geographic magazine. One of his recent posts was titled, “You almost certainly have mites on your face", and he writes: “They live in our hair follicles, buried head-down, eating the oils we secrete, hooking up with each other near the surface, and occasionally crawling about the skin at night. They do this on my face. They probably do it on yours." Next time you look in the mirror, you pause, look again, and wonder what’s stirring on your face.
When I am on NPR (National Public Radio) for books, music, science or just news, I also check out “Krulwich Wonders" where Robert Krulwich, a science correspondent and also a co-host of the programme Radiolab, brings you the wonders of science in a language that you can understand: “Which is bigger: the human brain or the universe?"; “How to cross five International borders in 1 minute without sweating"; “If you’re born in the sky, what’s your nationality?"; and one of my recent favourites: “How to marry the right girl: a mathematical solution".
Krulwich builds it through the story of an astronomer in 1611 who needs a wife. What he needed, writes Krulwich, “was an optimal strategy—a way, not to guarantee success, but to maximize the likelihood of satisfaction". And there is an equation for this called “optimal stopping". “It works any time you have a list of potential wives, husbands, prom dates, job applicants, garage mechanics."
And then there are a few like-minded friends who send me mails with interesting links: “the Dunning-Kruger Effect—our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence," with a link to an article in The New York Times. “In simpler words," writes the friend, “(it means) too stupid to know that we are stupid."
It’s a disorder and there’s a word for it: anosognosia. Look it up on the Net. There’s a lot of mind-boggling stuff out there. And it’s free.
Shekhar Bhatia is a science buff and a geek at heart.
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