8th February 2016

How much time is taken by glass to decompose?

Glass is a solid, transparent material made chiefly of silica. Other elements such as sodium and calcium are also added. According to an estimate by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, about 13 million tons of glass waste is generated annually in the US. The decomposition of glass depends on a lot of factors such as temperature, oxygen levels and the presence of water. Most of the time, the glass is recycled into new items. The time taken by the glass to decompose is one million years.

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8th February 2016

Journey to a star

If you wish to travel from earth to the nearest star ‘Sirius’ at 99.99999999% of the speed of light, it will take you 18 hours to reach Sirius. However, when you return to earth after another 18 hours with an intention of dinner, you will find that your family and friends would have already had 6,570 dinners. The explanation lies in the concept of time dilation of the special theory of relativity.

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8th February 2016

Where is the heart of a ‘shrimp’ located?

Shrimp is a kind of crustacean that occurs in all oceans, freshwater lakes and streams. Shrimps range in length from a few millimetres to more than 20 centimetres (about 8 inches). They are an important source of food for humans. The body of the shrimp has two main parts – the abdomen and the cephalothorax (head and thorax fused together). The cephalothorax is covered with a carapace. The heart is located in the cephalothorax.

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8th February 2016

Can you burp in space?

Belching is the release of gas from the digestive system through the mouth. Every time a person swallows food or liquid, a small amount of air goes into the stomach. This air forms gas bubbles in the stomach. The muscles in the food pipe relax to allow these bubbles to escape as burps. In space, the gas bubbles cannot rise to the top as there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

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8th February 2016

Who discovered ‘calculus’?

Calculus is a branch of mathematics which studies ‘change’. Accordingly, it deals with limits, derivatives, functions and indefinite series that explain ‘change’. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz independently invented calculus. Newton used calculus fundamentally to arrive at the universal law of gravitation, and then to solve the problem of planetary motion, the shape of the surface of a rotating fluid, the oblateness of the earth, the motion of a weight sliding on a cycloid, and also to explain various other interesting phenomena. Leibnitz provided a clear set of rules for manipulating infinitesimal quantities, allowing the computation of second and higher derivatives, and providing the product rule and chain rule, in their differential and integral forms.

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