Daily Gyan

Cramming for a test? Trying to get more done than you have time to do? Stress is a feeling we all experience when we are challenged or overwhelmed. But more than just an emotion, stress is a hardwired physical response that travels throughout your entire body.  In the short term, stress can be advantageous, but when activated too often or too long, your primitive fight or flight stress response not only changes your brain but also damages many of the other organs and cells throughout your body. Your adrenal gland releases the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, and norepinephrine. As these hormones travel through your blood stream, they easily reach your blood vessels and heart. Adrenaline causes your heart to beat faster and raises your blood pressure, over time causing hypertension. Cortisol can also cause the endothelium, or inner lining of blood vessels, to not function normally. Scientists now know that this is an early step in triggering the ...

What makes a story good? Sure, you could throw in some hideous monsters, fountains of blood, and things jumping out from every corner, but as classic horror author H.P. Lovecraft wrote, "The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." And writers harness that fear not by revealing horrors, but by leaving the audience hanging in anticipation of them. That is, in a state of suspense.   The most familiar examples of suspense come from horror films and mystery novels. What's inside the haunted mansion? Which of the dinner guests is the murderer? But suspense exists beyond these genres. Will the hero save the day? Will the couple get together in the end? And what is the dark secret that causes the main character so much pain? The key to suspense is that it sets up a question, or several, that the audience hopes to get an answer to and delays that answer while maintaining their interest and keeping them guessing. So what are some techniques you can use to achieve...

Your hands, up close, are anything but smooth. With peaks and valleys, folds and rifts, there are plenty of hiding places for a virus to stick. If you then touch your face, the virus can infect you. But there are two extraordinarily simple ways you can keep that from happening: soap and water, and hand sanitizer. So which is better?  The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is one of many viruses whose protective outer surface is made of a lipid bilayer. These lipids are pin shaped molecules whose heads are attracted to water, and tails are repulsed by it. So in water-rich environments, lipids naturally form a shell like this, with the heads outside and the tails inside. Their shared reaction to water makes the lipids stick loosely together— this is called the hydrophobic effect. This outer structure helps the molecular machinery of the virus break through cellular membranes and hijack our cells. But it has thousands upon thousands of weak points where the right molecules could pr...

In the early 20th century, it led Austrian logician Kurt Gödel to a discovery that would change mathematics forever. Gödel’s discovery had to do with the limitations of mathematical proofs. A proof is a logical argument that demonstrates why a statement about numbers is true.  The building blocks of these arguments are called axioms— undeniable statements about the numbers involved. Every system built on mathematics, from the most complex proof to basic arithmetic, is constructed from axioms. And if a statement about numbers is true, mathematicians should be able to confirm it with an axiomatic proof. Since ancient Greece, mathematicians used this system to prove or disprove mathematical claims with total certainty. But when Gödel entered the field, some newly uncovered logical paradoxes were threatening that certainty. Prominent mathematicians were eager to prove that mathematics had no contradictions.  Gödel himself wasn’t so sure. And he was even less confident that ma...

After the California Gold Rush of 1848, white settlers streamed west to strike it rich. In addition to precious metals, they unearthed another treasure: dinosaur bones. Two wealthy scientists in particular— Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope— competed to uncover these prehistoric monsters. Marsh and Cope were first to describe iconic creatures like Brontosaurus, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus. But they also showcased the destructive whirlwind of profiteering and ambition that fueled American science during the late 1800s. Their rivalry, one of the most notorious scientific feuds in history, became known as the Bone Wars. Marsh was ill-tempered and had a knack for debunking falsehoods. One woman said that getting to know him was “like running against a pitchfork.” Cope, on the other hand, was charismatic and given to bold theorizing. But he was also sarcastic and temperamental. By his own admission, he wasn’t “constructed for getting along comfortably with the general run ...

'Snoopy', a member of the dog squad at Delhi Airport, retired on 29th June 2021 after completing 10 years of service. She was a specialist in carrying out explosives' detection on the cabin of aircraft due to her small size: Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) official. 'Snoopy', a member of the dog squad at Delhi Airport, retired on 29th June 2021 after completing 10 years of service. She was a specialist in carrying out explosives' detection on the cabin of aircraft due to her small size: Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) official pic.twitter.com/huxP7bvyLh — ANI (@ANI) July 19, 2021 Thank You 

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic rocked economies worldwide. Millions of people lost their jobs, and many businesses struggled to survive or shut down completely. Governments responded with some of the largest economic relief packages in history the United States alone spent $2.2 trillion on a first round of relief. So where did all this money come from? Most countries have a central bank  that manages the money supply and is independent from the government to prevent political interference. The government can implement many types of economic policy, like decreasing people's taxes and creating jobs through public  infrastructure projects, but it actually can’t just increase the money supply. The central bank determines how much money is in circulation at a time. So why can’t central banks authorize the printing of unlimited money to help an economy in crisis?  They could, but that’s a short-term solution that doesn’t necessarily boost economic growth in the long-...

The ocean is really, really deep, deeper, in fact, than most of us realize. If you were to shave off all of the land from the tops of every continent and island in the world and fill up the ocean's deepest points with that land, then the entire earth would be covered in an ocean 2 miles deep.  Three fourths of our planet is already covered in water though, and it goes a lot deeper than just two miles. Let's start with a sense of scale. This dot right here is the size of an average human. This slightly larger dot is the size of an elephant. And this is the size of the largest ship ever built, the Knock Nevis. With that in mind, let's start going under water and see what we find out. The first milestone is at 40 meters below the surface, which is the maximum depth allowed for recreational scuba diving.  A little further down at 93 meters is where the wreck of the Lusitania was discovered, which is interesting because the Lusitania itself is 240 meters long, which means t...

2018 was a rollercoaster year for Apple. In August, its stock hit two-hundred and seven dollars, making it the first trillion dollar company in history. Then, in a dramatic few months, it lost $450billion as Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet passed it by. And for the first time in fifteen years, the company announced it would make less money than expected.  The problem? Fewer people buying iPhones. The reasons are many: China’s slowing economy, sticker shock, market saturation. But there’s also another big factor: Apple has a new competitor. Not Samsung. Not Google. Not Huawei. …Apple! The iPhone is increasingly competing with itself. One, because we’re all holding on to them longer. But also because it doesn’t cost what you think it does. As the price of an iPhone goes up, something new is happening to its value, and it’s shaking up Apple’s entire business model. To understand what’s really going on, we need to calculate the actual, hidden price of the iPhone.  Generally s...

In the early hours of August 13, 1961, East German construction workers flanked by soldiers and police began tearing up streets and erecting barriers throughout the city of Berlin and its surroundings.  This night marked the beginning of one of history's most infamous dividing lines, the Berlin Wall. Construction on the wall continued for the next decade as it cut through neighborhoods, separated families, and divided not just Germany, but the world.   To understand how we got to this point, we have to go back to World War II. America, Britain, and France joined forces with the Soviet Union against the Axis Powers. After they defeated Nazi Germany, each of the victorious nations occupied part of the country. The division was meant to be temporary, but the former allies found themselves at odds over their visions for post-war Europe.  While Western powers promoted liberal market economies, the Soviet Union sought to surround itself with obedient Communist nations, inc...

The cabinet gathers for a conference with President Truman. With the divided city located a hundred miles inside the Soviet controlled zone of East Germany, there's no way for American food and fuel the lifeline of its undernourished populace - to get through. The city only has 36 days worth of food remaining and only 45 days of coal. Allied troops are surrounded, outnumbered 62 to 1. The cabinet lays out three options: One, American forces could withdraw. But that would signal that Western democracies are unable to counter Soviet aggression. Two, they could stay in Berlin until the starving population forces them out and accepts Soviet rule out of desperation. Or 3 they could send an armed convoy to open the roads, but that would start another World War. They advise Truman to withdraw. Truman says, "We stay in Berlin. Period." You remember that series on Hiawatha we did a while back? Those episodes were sponsored by the folks at Domi Nations. And we enjoyed doing those s...

If someone asked you who the richest people in history were, who would you name? Perhaps a billionaire banker or corporate mogul, like Bill Gates or John D. Rockefeller. What about African King Musa Keita I?Ruling the Mali Empire in the 14th century CE, Mansa Musa, or the King of Kings, amassed a fortune that possibly made him one of the wealthiest people who ever lived. But his vast wealth was only one piece of his rich legacy. When Mansa Musa came to power in 1312, much of Europe was racked by famine and civil wars. But many African kingdoms and the Islamic world were flourishing, and Mansa Musa played a great rolein bringing the fruits of this flourishing to his own realm. By strategically annexing the city of Timbuktu, and reestablishing power over the city of Gao, he gained control over important trade routes between the Mediterranean and the West African Coast, continuing a period of expansion, which dramatically increased Mali's size.  The territory of the Mali Empire was ri...

The year was 1776. In Bavaria, new ideals of rationalism , religious freedom, and universal human rights competed with the Catholic church’s heavy influence over public affairs.  Across the Atlantic, a new nation staked its claim for independence on the basis of these ideas. But back in Bavaria, law professor Adam Weishaupt’s attempts to teach secular philosophy continued to be frustrated. Weishaupt decided to spread his ideas through a secret society that would shine a light on the shortcomings of the Church’s ideology. He called his secret society the Illuminati. Weishaupt modelled aspects of his secret society off a group called the Freemasons. Originally an elite stoneworkers’ guild in the late Middle Ages, the Freemasons had gone from passing down the craft of masonry to more generally promoting ideals of knowledge and reason. Over time, they had grown into a semi-secret, exclusive order that included many wealthy and influential individuals, with elaborate, secret initia...

There’s this group of nerds called ICANN—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and they have handed out seven keys to seven individuals spread across the world, and with those keys, you can shut down, and reboot, the internet.  Now normally, this is where I would make a bunch of bad jokes, and call them stuff like the Fellowship of the Keys, or the Key-I Joes, or You, Key, and Dupree, but we don’t have time for that, because to understand these keys, you need to understand a bunch of complicated internet stuff that was very confusing for me to figure out, starting with DNS. In case you don’t know what DNS is, because, I dunno, you had friends in college, I’ll explain: all the computers that make up the internet are identified via long numbers called IP addresses; but when I want to go to, for example, Twitter, because I want to scroll through an endless mix of hot takes, anger, harassment, product placement, and videos of Kanye West saying problematic ...

In medieval times, alchemists tried to achieve the seemingly impossible. They wanted to transform lowly lead into gleaming gold. History portrays these people as aged eccentrics, but if only they'd known that their dreams were actually achievable.  Indeed, today we can manufacture gold on Earth thanks to modern inventions that those medieval alchemists missed by a few centuries. But to understand how this precious metal became embedded in our planet to start with, we have to gaze upwards at the stars. Gold is extraterrestrial. Instead of arising from the planet's rocky crust, it was actually cooked up in space and is present on Earth because of cataclysmic stellar explosions called supernovae. Stars are mostly made up of hydrogen, the simplest and lightest element. The enormous gravitational pressure of so much material compresses and triggers nuclear fusion in the star's core. This process releases energy from the hydrogen, making the star shine. Over many millions of year...

Whale is not even close to being the largest organism by weight, which is estimated to equal about 40 whales. The organism name is Pando, whose name means “I spread out.” Pando, a quaking aspen, has roughly47,000 genetically identical clone trunks.                Those all grow from one enormous root system, which is why scientists consider Pando a single organism. Pando is the clear winner of world’s largest organism by weight— an incredible 6 million kilograms. So how did Pando get to be so huge? Pando is not an unusual aspen from a genetic standpoint. Rather, Pando’s size boils down to three main factors: its age, its location, and aspens’ remarkable evolutionary adaptation of self-cloning. So first, Pando is incredibly expansive because it’s incredibly old. How old exactly? No one knows. Dendro chronologist estimates range from 80,000 to 1 million years. The problem is, there’s no simple way to gauge Pando’s age. Counting the rings of a single...

Noor Inayat Khan was in the midst of a desperate escape. She had been imprisoned for her activities as an Allied spy, but with the help of a screwdriver and two other prisoners, she was back under the Parisian stars. As she began to run, her thoughts leapt to the whirlwind of events that had brought her here… Born in Moscow in 1914 to an Indian Muslim father and an American mother, Noor was raised in a profoundly peaceful home. Her parents were Sufi pacifists, who put their faith in the power of music and compassion. They moved to Paris, where Noor studied child psychology and published children’s books. But all this changed with the advent of the Second World War. In May 1940, with the German army ready to occupy Paris, Noor and her brother were faced with a difficult choice. As pacifists, they believed that all disputes should be settled non-violently. But witnessing the devastation across Europe, they decided that standing on the sidelines was not an option.  Traveling to Englan...

What happens after death? Is there a restful paradise? An eternal torment? A rebirth? Or maybe just nothingness? Well, one Chinese emperor thought that whatever the hereafter was, he better bring an army.  We know that because in 1974, farmers digging a well near their small village stumbled upon one of the most important finds in archeological history: vast underground chambers surrounding that emperor's tomb, and containing more than 8,000life-size clay soldiers ready for battle.  The story of the subterranean army begins with Ying Zheng, who came to power as the king of the Qin state at the age of 13 in 246 BCE. Ambitious and ruthless, he would go on to become Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China after uniting its seven warring kingdoms. His 36 year reign saw many historic accomplishments, including a universal system of weights and measures, a single standardized writing script for all of China, and a defensive barrier that would later come to be known as the Great ...