Hornets are wasp-like insects. Their nests are similar to the ones made by bees. Stirring up a hornet’s nest metaphorically means to stir a silent/calm situation into that filled with rage, discord or one with chaos. It also means to provoke the attack of a swarm of spiteful enemies or spirited critics. This metaphor is self-explanatory as when one ‘stirs …

It’s the world’s fastest supercomputer built by scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory for the US military. It can compute about 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. It will be primarily used for military problems, particularly to ensure the accurate functioning of ageing nuclear weapons.

RAPD stands for Random Amplification of Polymorphic DNA. RAPD reactions are PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) reactions but they amplify segments of DNA which are essentially unknown to the scientists as they are random.

Mirror image is a concept from chemistry applied to organic materials. An example of this is glucose and fructose. These molecules are mirror images of each other. Although it is possible to flip glucose and superimpose it over a fructose molecule, only in 2D (flat viewing) are they similar.

Naturally available water, after having come in contact with various salts found in soil stratas and atmosphere, contains a large number of chemicals. Some of them are calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, iron, sulphates, nitrates, nitrites, phosphates and oxygen. Small quantities of these substances are responsible for the taste and odour of natural water and are useful for essential functioning of …

Freefonix is a 40-episode, 3D animated music project created by Magnus Fiennes, Alex Tate and Simeon Warburton and produced by an Indian company and BBC. It is targeted at children and uses music and animation to tell an adventure story of three teenagers who accidentally discover the existence of The Thirteenth Note which brings them power and insight.

Burundanga is the other name of the drug ‘Scopolamine’, used for criminal activities like rape or to rob innocent victims. The drug is passed on to the victim through business cards, pamphlets, etc. Even if the skin, through touch, absorbs just a very small quantity of the drug it has the desired effect. The drug is also administered through tablets …

Trees have to be pruned to protect their health, improve their appearance or remove danger to people or property. Sometimes it is necessary to remove broken, dead or diseased branches, to restore vigour to an ageing tree by cutting back and to admit more air and light by thinning out the center. One of the most obvious reasons for pruning …

Heat and humidity are the greatest enemies of any electrical equipment, so in tropical countries, such equipment is manufactured to withstand those climatic conditions. In a radio set, tropicalized means coating the electrical windings with resin, sealing the speaker hole with acoustically transparent cloth, installing felt washers on the control knobs, and sealing openings for the antenna and earth connections.

The word ‘robot’ was coined by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek, in a play called R.U.R., which stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots. In the play, people have mechanical servants which look like people and do manual work for them. Capek called these machines robots from the Czech work robota which means labour.