Simplified Science

If you had watched the movie, Inception, you would have came across a never ending stairs made by Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt). In the dream, he creates an endless stairs that goes in circles. It is a Penrose stair, and such a stair can only depicted in two dimension, but cannot exist in three dimension. Strange right? Lets dive into the world of mind twisting paradoxes. We will start by understanding what a paradox is. Paradox is a statement or proposition that seems to be logical, but becomes self contradictory on further investigation , or the other way around. They can be invalid in certain cases too. Each paradox will create numerous possibilities on critical thinking. There are paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy etc. I handpicked a few that is quite strange and mind boggling. 1. Grandfather Paradox This paradox comes under time travel paradoxes . It is one among many, that is put forth to prove time travelling to the past is hard to achieve and is logically impossible...

Why we don’t see bacterias every day? We know microorganisms are everywhere, its in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Its in-front of our eyes. Then why can’t we see them? Why can't we see small things? To understand that, first we have to know how we SEE things. Everyone knows, we see things when light from an object falls on our eyes. But how that image reach us? Does light carry information of that image? Yes, in the sense, each photon in the light ray have a different wavelength that matches the colour of the object where it is emitted or reflected. Each photon acts like a pixel of an image . When this light ray reaches our eyes, the signals are detected by the cones and rods in the retina. Cones detect the colour and the rods detect the brightness. The brain will then formulate the image using this information. Now lets see, what’s the problem while viewing smaller objects.  The photons that can be detected by our eyes has a limit. A typical human eye is capable of d...

Credit : ESA ESA's mission to the comet 67p (Churyumov-Gerasimenko) is pictured as a kid friendly cartoon animation series. It tells a brief real life story of the Rosetta mission . No doubt, its not only for kids, but for us adults too. So much informative and with a heart warming storyline to make it understandable for all the ages. ESA released the cartoon in 5 languages (English, Italian, French, Spanish and German). Here I'll provide the playlist in English. For other videos you can check out ESA's Youtube channel. Rosetta Philae cartoon Wake up Rosetta Are we there yet? Comet landing Living with a comet Here is the playlist -  ESA Rosetta and Philae Cartoon The journey is still continuing and we have to wait for the next event to happen in the mission, to watch the next episode.

You might have heard about the Zika outbreak in Latin America. WHO (World Health Organisation) declared Zika virus as International public health emergency . Do we need to afraid? Let’s have a closer look. Zika virus is transmitted through mosquito bites of infected Aedes genus, Aedes aegypti mosquitos. They are found in tropical regions. They can’t survive in cold temperatures as in Britain. It was identified for the first time in Uganda in Rhesus monkeys in the year 1947. Later in 1952 it was identified in humans. The disease is so hard to find as it is symptomless. Only 20% of the infected people had some symptoms like a mild fever, skin rash and red eyes . This silent infection affects the highly vulnerable individuals, the pregnant women. This leads to small heads and brain damage to babies. No vaccines found out yet for this disease. There is no specific treatment. People who are affected is advised to get plenty of rest, drink enough fluids and treat the pain and fever with us...

Credit : NASA / WMAP/ Wikimedia Commons How the universe began? The answer is universe popped out from nothing. Yes. It just came out from nothing. That is what, the great ‘Big Bang’ theory suggests (not the TV show). 'Nothing' means there was absolutely nothing. No space and no time. Time itself started from Big Bang. But what in the world, triggered the Big Bang?  First thing you should know is, there is no OUTSIDE for our universe. The space and time exists within our universe itself and they came into existence after the Big Bang. So, the question what caused the Big Bang posses a serious issue of causality. There was no BEFORE to the event, Big Bang . The word Big Bang misleads the public as it was an explosion in space. But it's not true, it was actually the appearance of space everywhere in the universe. It was a rapid expansion of space , analogous to the inflation of a balloon. Now lets see the events happened in the beginning. The first event, modern physics is ca...

Last time we checked out the Orion constellation . Now its time for Canis Major. Canis Major is located in the southern celestial hemisphere. The name literally means, " The big dog ". Canis major, beside the much smaller constellation, Little Dog, is commonly portrayed as accompanying the legendary hunter, Orion. It contains largely of young blue stars. The most important stars within the constellation are, Sirius, Adhara, Wezen and VY canis Majoris . Sirius , the brightest star in the night sky, is a Spectroscopic Binary star . It is twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star. It appears bright because of both Sirius's intrinsic luminosity and proximity to Earth. Sirius is twenty five times additional luminous than the Sun, however features a considerably lower brightness than other bright stars like Canopus or Rigel. Sirius system is one of Earth's near neighbours.It is approx. 9 light years from Earth. The sky location for Sirius is :  RA 06h 45m 08s, Dec...