GUT Bacteria!

People say we are what we eat! Based on what we eat, and the environment we are in, we develop the growth of different kinds of microbes on and in us. These are called microflora. The microbes that are in our gut help us to process the food we eat. We need to make sure to eat food items that would enable their growth. What are those food items we need to eat? Is it okay to sustain on junk food for weeks? Are we eating a balanced diet? We could always choose to eat good food, but what is good food? Please see this Ted-Ed video answering such questions and stay healthy.

ELI5?

Did you come across a subreddit called ELI5? It means explain like I am 5 (years old). If you really know something you should be able to explain it as simple as possible. Wired magazine has come up with a new series called "One concept in 5 levels of difficulty". In this series, an expert would try to explain a concept to 5 different people, usually from a kid to an expert. So far, they did Connectome and CRISPR, and they very good.

Please do watch them if you have not yet.


Connectome:

CRISPR:

Water:

Summer is approaching, we need to stay hydrated. Why should we be hydrated? How does that help us? How much water should we drink per day? Do we lose water even when we don't notice sweat?

All of the questions answered in the video below:

Attention Procrastinators:

As we are about to be done with our second midterm season, we need to focus on finals (exams, practicals, and assignments) in advance especially because we all like to delay our work and save it until the deadline approaches. We are all procrastinators one way or another. Why do we procrastinate? The video below gives you the ideology of a procrastinators head, but how do we solve this issue? There are a couple of ways of solving this issue:
1) Setting your own deadlines which are way in advance than the real deadlines. This should be constant practice and we should meet our pseudo-deadlines before the real deadlines. We can use a task managing apps like Wunderlist or notes to set these pseudo deadlines. 
2) We can also form study groups with our peers this would help us not to procrastinate and there is a peer pressure to study. 

It may seem a lot of work but remember only by hard work we can reach our goals. Stay focused, study hard, start right now. If you need help please ask.

Procrastination Video:

Sleeping:

At least half of our life we sleep, but most of the college students are sleep deprived. What happens when you are sleep deprived? You lose your memory, you become erratic, your reaction time is slow, and your learning capacity lowers. What happens during sleep that helps us overcome these issues? You will find the reasons and more details in the video below:

Biomimicking:

Artists have been inspired by nature for a long time now, whereas researchers have started appreciating the design of nature very recently. Most living things have perfected themselves over centuries of natural selection and survival of the fittest, where else could we find good design? Biomimicking is a new field where Scientists study designs of living things like insects, jellyfish, and gecko. They use these research on creating devices that would help us in different areas. See the following videos for more information.

Grafting:

Grafting is a process where tissues of plants can be joined to grow together. The possibilities are endless, one can graft an apple branch to a mango tree so that the mango tree can also produce apples. Grafting can be performed with multiple branches of different types of trees all on one tree.

Please see the following video where they have developed (through grafting) one tree which can grow 40 varieties of fruits.

Salt preserving:

Back in the old days when there were no refrigerators to store food people used salt to preserved the food. As the demand for salt has increased, people took up jobs in order to get paid in the form of the salt, hence the name salary has originated. 

How does salt preserve food? In general, when we say we are preserving something, we are trying to keep the food away from microbial growth. When food is kept in a salt solution we have made the surrounding hypertonic to any cell to survive (cells lose water in a hypertonic water and shrivel), hence there won't be any growth of microbes and thus the food in salt will be stored. The same occurs with the sugar, which we use to preserve fruits in the form jams.

For more preserving methods and more information please watch the video:

Space pen:

Can we use regular pens in space? How do we take notes in space considering the gravity is low and regular pens cannot be used? One simple solution is to use pencils, but using pencils have its problems of the pencil lead chipping and getting into some machinery. Hence we developed space pen! Who actually developed space pen? Is it NASA? More details about this and about origin of pens in the video provided:

Aversion to screeching sounds:

• Human ears are extra sensitive to particular frequency of sounds, this may be due to the similarity of these frequencies with sounds of cry or scream.
• These frequencies are generally in between 2,000 to 5,000 hertz and may also cause harm to our internal ear.
• More on this, in the video

How is skim milk made?

Skim milk is whole milk minus the fats in other words fat free milk. Does it mean the cows are fed with a fat free diet? check this video.

In real life, to make the skim milk, the whole milk is heated and any of the fats are skimmed from it (hence the name skim) to make skim milk.

Watch this video to know more about how skim milk and butter are made.

Intermittent fasting may lead to a long healthy life:

• Obesity is generally seen across the population irrespective of the wealth status. 
• People plan go on diet plans and very few work. 
• Researchers found out that intermittent fasting does not only decrease your waist line but it is also good for your health.
• Skipping meals irregularly has shown to be healthy.
• This may be due to less oxidative stress in the cells.

More on this can be found here.

Scientists use gene therapy to make deaf mice hear again:

• Scientists restored hearing ability of deaf mice by using a engineered virus to replace the defective genes in the mouse. 
• The process of using a virus to transfer a gene into an organism is called Transduction.
• Scientists are still figuring out to use gene therapy effectively in humans to cure genetic disorders, just like in mice.

Source: "Gene therapy restores auditory and vestibular function in a mouse model of Usher syndrome type 1c"

Why is sky blue?

A classic question with a lot of confusions behind the concept. Is sky blue and sun yellow? Every kid when painting a sun paints it yellow, is the sun yellow? The Sky is blue because the atmosphere splits the white light from sun into blue and other colors (kind of like a prism). This is also the reason why sun's color seems to appear yellow and why oceans are blue.

We are all connected by six degrees of separation:

• Every person in this world is connected to the other person by one person or another. 
• In this whole world we cannot try to find a person whom we cannot connect to through fewer than five intermediaries. 
• In other words you are connected to any one on this world in just 6 steps.
• Watch the video for more details.

Source: Are We Really All Connected by Just Six Degrees of Separation?

Why do we use soap?

We use a soap to clean away the dirt, but what is dirt really? Dirt can be a combination of water soluble and fat soluble components that got stuck on our skin or on our garments. Water can clean away anything that is water soluble (polar-polar), but the fat soluble dirt can only be cleaned with the help of soap. Soap has hydrophobic (has affinity to fat) and hydrophilic (has affinity to water) sides which allows it to remove any fat soluble dirt when washed along with water.

Primary Colors:

• Primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) or Red, Yellow, and Blue. (White light is made up of RGB).
• In printers, the primary pigments are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (CMY).
• When Red, Green and Blue light are shunned on a wall the resulting light would be White.
• When Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow pigments are mixed together we get Black.

Why do we drink milk to calm down the spicy feeling in our mouth?

Capsaicin is an oily substance present in chilies that cause the hot or spicy feeling (which is not actually a taste, more on this in the video). As the substance is oily it gets stuck on the tongue and the only way to wash it down is by another oily or fat substance like milk, yogurt, oil, and butter.

Why do we have water fountains in the middle of the city?

We may think water fountains are just for beauty, but in reality they are strategically placed in the cities to control the sound pollution. Imagine yourself in a quite library, even a little sound may disturb and irritate you, but when there is a constant noise on the background, the other noises wont effect you as much, this is exactly the idea behind water fountains placed in centers of busy places.

Food that affects your brain:

• In order for proper function of your brain, it needs, Omega 3 and 6 fats which must come from our diet, usually present in nuts and fatty fish
• Glucose is very important for brain function, 20% percent of glucose we consume is used by our brain for its function. 
• Foods like white bread can give initial spike of glucose and a dip, which may lead to lower attention span. Foods like oats, grains, and legumes are known to slowly release glucose thus acting as a consistent fuel source. 
• Food also decides on how our mood is, more protein intake may make you more vigilant and more carbohydrates means more calm or sleepy.
• More on what you need to eat in the video provided.

Microscopic world:

Robert Hooke coined the term cell after observing the dead cork under a lens. He found closely packed empty containers (left over cell walls of the plant) which looked like the cells that monks used to live in a monastery, hence he termed them as cells.

Anton Van Leeuwenhoek observed pond water, tooth scrapings and mouth samples of people who never brushed their teeth and found tiny living moving forms, he called them animalcules. 

Robert Hooke

Anton Van Leeuwenhoek

Robert Hooke and Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, both observed the microorganisms with the help of lenses that are developed to check the quality of clothes. Curiosity is the reason why they wanted to observed different things under the lenses and because of their inquisitiveness a new field of science has born.

General Sizes of cells and other particles:

• A grain of Salt is 0.5 mm.

• A skin cell is 30um (micrometers).

• Red blood cell is 8um.

• A chromosome is 7um.

• HIV is 130nm (nanometers)

• Ribosome is 30nm

Note: 1 millimeter (mm) is 1000 micrometer (um) and 100,000 nm (nanometer).

For more information and better visualization of the above particles please look here.

Micrographia is the book written by Robert Hooke, the scientist who coined the term "cell". When Hooke first observed a wooden cork, he found distinct separations and it looked like monastery cells, hence he termed them as cells.