To locate an object in a plane, we require four dimensions — length, breadth, height and time. We all travel frequently in the first three dimensions, but can’t do it in the fourth dimension `time’. Time machine is a device or vehicle that can potentially take us into the future or past and let us stay in that era, just …

A beam of light seems to have no colour. Actually, it is made up of coloured rays. Usually, these coloured rays combine to form the white light. But it is possible to see the different colours at certain times. For instance, when it rains and the sun’s rays pass through raindrops. Since the raindrop has many sides or surfaces, the …

Ivory tusks and teeth consist of an inner pulp cavity surrounded by dentine – a combination of connective tissues that have minerals and collagen properties. Found in tusks of elephants and teeth of mammals such as the hippopotamus, walrus, boar, sperm and killer whale, ivory forms layers. It gets strength and rigidity from inorganic components, namely mineralised tissues. The organic …

In mathematics, Buffon’s needle problem is a question first posed in the 18th century by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle onto the floor. What is the probability that the needle will lie across a line between two strips? Buffon’s needle …

About 1.9 liters. The stomach is crescent moon shaped organ situated between the end of the gullet and the entrance to the small intestine. Its walls can be distended and its size varies according to the amount of food it contains.

Blue Gene is an ambitious project to expand the horizons of supercomputing, with the ultimate goal of creating a system that can perform 1 quadrillion calculations per second, or 1 petaflop. IBM expects a machine it calls Blue Gene/P to be the first to achieve this computational milestone. Today’s fastest machine, NEC’s Earth Simulator is comparatively slow — about onethirteenth …

The British economist Kenneth Boulding used to explain many economic phenomena as similar to the accumulation or depletion of water in a bathtub due to a difference in the rate of inflow (injections) and outflow (leakages) of water. Such an explanation of an economic phenomenon popularly came to be termed by economists as the application of the Bathtub Theorem. This …

Gunnar Myrdal in 1956 said that regional differences are the natural outcome of economic development and the inevitable result of market forces. No one region can prosper, he said, without adversely affecting the prosperity of another. Economic growth takes place initially where there are such natural advantages as a source of fuel or a supply of raw materials. Once in …

The Aufbau Principle states that in the ground state of an atom, an electron enters the orbital with lowest energy first and subsequent electrons are fed in the order of increasing energies. The word ‘aufbau’ in German means ‘building up’. Here, it refers to the filling up of orbitals with electrons.

The name of the element is ‘Einsteinium’, its symbol is Es and the atomic number is 99. Named in honour of Albert Einstein, it is the seventh transuranic element and does not occur naturally in any measurable quantities. Einsteinium was first identified in December 1952 by Albert Ghiorso, with co-workers at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was examining …