Little Geek Nat

Nanoparticles are extremely tiny pieces of a substance. Even though they may be tiny, they actually have far more effects to their surrounding than the normal substance. While a chunk of silver is a great bacteria cleaner and used in most infection medicines, a pinch of nanosilver is a ruthless bacteria killer that is used in urgent hospital infections and can clear up all bacteria from an injury in a few seconds. You are most likely confused now, as it doesn’t exactly make sense that a powder of a substance is better than a chunk of it. The reason has to do with the very large surface area. If you have a 2 cm x 2 cm cube, it will have 24cm ² of surface area. If you divide that cube into 8 - 1 cm x 1 cm cubes, it will h ave 48cm² of surface area. Following this logic, 1kg of silver powder would have much more surface area than a chunk of silver weighing 1kg. The surface area increase is critical, as when you have a large chunk, the center won’t  get used. However, extremely tin...

Relativity theory is one of the most famous theories to science. It was discovered by Albert Einstein. Nowadays it is used as the base for space-time and the explanation to some of the most common yet complicated questions. Here I will explain about how it works and its history and controversy. Its discovery was made in 1905 and a space probe designed specifically for the proving of this theory confirmed it. On discovery, many other scientists rejected the theory as they thought it was overly far-fetched and worthless. However, over time this theory gained popularity. After all, it still complies with all the normal laws of physics. The point of the theory is that all time and speed are relative to the person measuring it. For example, if in the USA it is midnight, then in Russia it would probably be noon. Similarly, a person measuring the speed of a tree on the ground would measure it as 0. However, if this person were on a bus instead, he would measure the speed as the inverse of...

Hello there! This time my blog will discuss about Tesla Coils, its origin and how they work in the first place. Tesla Coil was invented by Nikola Tesla in 1891 – that’s why the device has his name, and was shown in a presentation by him. Scientists were amazed by this eye-opener invention. Nikola got the idea from an 1826 invention that could amplify electricity via a wire current. He improved this idea and magnified it as to have the complete setup for a modern amplifier. To this day, it is used as an alternative for an amplifier. However, now there are other electric amplifiers that may be more effective. The Tesla Coil is very famous for being able to easily discharge massive amounts of electricity in a short amount of time. The device has the ability to reach discharges of several million volts. Many scientists use this coil to release electricity into the air for experiments, entertainment, museum exhibitions, and special effects. Some even create a mini Te...

This is part 2 of the Math Calculations: Simplified blog. Welcome back! This time I’m going to share tricks about counting squares such as 41 2 or 52 2 .  There are 2 simple methods that I am going to explain. Here is the first one: METHOD  1 For numbers that begin with 1, the formula is simple:  (N-1)²+ (2N-1).  For example, let’s calculate 51². The equation becomes (50)² + (101). It is now easy to figure out the solution, which is 2601. This method makes it much easier to do these types of calculations rather than using the traditional method of carry-multiplying. Next, we have the 2 digit numbers that begin with 9. We can figure this out by using pretty much the opposite of the method used to calculate the square of one digit numbers. The formula: (N+1)² - (2N+1). Let’s use 29² as an example. We put this into the equation, which makes it (30)² - (59). That leads to a solution of 841. This method also helps with these types of calculations. ...

In Math, calculating numbers can indeed be quite annoying for some students. For example, you are doing a math test and end up spending too much of your precious time calculating 51 ² or √67. Fear not, for I have a quick and easy solution in squaring and square-rooting numbers. Just a quick reminder, N in the methods stated below means the number you are trying to square or square root. Let’s start with squaring 2 digit numbers and the ones that end with 0. These numbers are simple to be squared because all you have to do is to square the first digit then give two zeroes in front of it. Pretty simple, right? Here’s an example: 30². We can calculate this by first giving 3², which is 9, then give two zeroes in front of it, which makes it 900. Easy peasy! Conclusion, 30 x 30 = 900   à   3 x 3 = 9 and 00 = 900 Another example :           80 X 80 = 6400 And                 ...

Hello! Nat here, and in this blog, I am going to discuss and give the solution to the famous Cheryl birthday problem. This was popular because it is a difficult logic puzzle and involving the ability of carefully tracking down hints in the conversation and working with only a small amount of data. Here’s the question: Albert and Bernard just became friends with Cheryl, and they want to know when her birthday is. Cheryl gives them a list of 10 possible dates. May 15           May 16           May 19 June 17          June 18 July 14           July 16 August 14       August 15       August 17 Cheryl then tells Albert and Bernard separately the month and the day of her birthday respectively. Albert: I don’t know when Cheryl’s birthday is, but I know that Bernard doesn’t know too. Bernard: At first I don’t know whe...

Light is an important part of our daily lives. Light is something that we humans definitely need. But a lot of us take it for granted, and only remember it in the middle of a science lesson. But what exactly is light? That is what I will explain today. I will explain about what is light, its speed, and some strange facts about light. First of all, if we want to know about light, we need to know what it actually is. Light is well known as a wave in the electromagnetic spectrum, but some people think that light is a particle. Nobody knows for sure. This causes the wave-particle duality of light. Light behaves as a wave, but in some ways also behaves as a particle. It’s sort of like the Schrodinger’s Box , where there is a cat that is both dead and alive. Does that ring a bell? For now, we’ll save that for another blog. Next, it’s speed. We all know what the speed of light is: 299,792,458 m/s. But let’s presume that we are in a car moving at 10% the speed of light. What woul...

Hello! Now I will share my knowledge about the rest of the solar system which is about the comets, asteroids, and much more! First of all, I will talk about the comets or in other words, shooting stars. The comets are big rocks made of ice and dust, which makes them some sort of dirty snowball. They hurtle through space at relatively high speeds. When a comet is close to the Sun, it moves much faster than when it is farther away from the Sun. Comets also have their own irregular orbit, which is usually oval-shaped. The most famous comet is the Halley’s comet, which makes an orbit around the Sun every 76 years. Comets mainly reside in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. The Kuiper Belt is a pack of dust, rocks, ice, and comets that orbit the Sun at 30-100 AU (Astronomical Unit), which is further from the Sun than Neptune. Just in case you don’t know, an Astronomical Unit or AU is a measure of length, which is the distance between the Earth and the Sun (150,000,000 kilometers). The O...

Hello! This is part 2 of the Solar System blog! (If you haven’t read part 1 yet, try reading that one first!) Today, I will be talking about the Jovian planets aka gas giants in our solar system! We begin with the fifth planet from the Sun, Jupiter. It’s the biggest planet in the solar system. Even though its mass is more than all of the other planets combined, it still only consists of less than 0.1% of all the mass in the solar system! Jupiter’s most famous feature is the Great Red Spot, a high-pressure hurricane region on Jupiter’s surface. It’s been occurring continuously since it was first spotted by Cassini in 1665. The Great Red Spot is as large as 3 Earths. Jupiter also has over a whopping 60 moons. The most famous are the Galilean Moons, which names are Ganymede, Io, Callisto and Europa. Ganymede is also the biggest moon in the solar system, being bigger than Mercury, having its own magnetic field and atmosphere. Io is a volcanically active moon, spewing out su...

You know about the solar system, don’t you? It belongs to our star, the Sun. The Sun's gravitational pull helps the planets have their orbit. Together, they form the solar system. I will be describing our Sun and planets. The Sun is our star. It gives our planet warmth and life for eons. Some cultures believe that the Sun is a god. It is around 1.5 million kilometers wide. Its surface temperature is around 6000°C but its core can reach temperatures of 15,000,000°C. One day the sun will explode into a white dwarf. When the sun‘s light is blocked out by the moon, it causes a solar eclipse. Plus, the Sun is the reason why there are seasons (along with the earth’s axis), equinoxes, and solstices. Coming up pretty small is Mercury. It is the smallest of the planets. Mercury has barely any gravity and a very thin atmosphere. However, it has scorching temperatures of 430 degrees Celsius and can suddenly drop to a teeth-chattering negative 180 degrees Celsius. It has a year...

When I was younger, sometimes I wonder how magnets work. I played with them a lot. Then I read a book about it and now I finally understand about the magnetic force and energy. I have decided to share this information with everyone. First, as everyone should know, magnets can attract magnetic things such as iron and steel, but not things like aluminum and plastic. Second, two magnets can attract each other as long as their poles are not the same. If they are the same, they will repel. Third, magnets don’t use magic. They use a magnetic field, which I will explain in the next paragraph. A magnetic field is a strong field around a magnet that attracts metallic objects or other magnets. A way to determine what your magnet’s magnetic field looks like is to sprinkle iron powder around the magnet and you should see that the pattern. This pattern is the same as the one in Earth’s magnetic field. There are three types of objects in terms of magnetic force. The first t...

In the beginning, about 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system did not exist. But then, the Sun formed from a collection of clouds of gas and dust in space. It later formed into a disc due to rapid rotation and gravity. At the center of rotation, the gas became dense and formed a baby star, our Sun! The leftover debris far away from the center formed the planets. One of them was Earth. It was just a big chunk of rock. More and more asteroids crashed into Earth, causing it to get bigger. It later turned into a sphere, and we went into the Precambrian Era , which was about 4.5 billion years ago. The carbon dioxide from the lava formed the atmosphere, and the water vapor in the atmosphere turned into clouds that brought rain that caused the seas to form. After the seas formed, the first microbe appeared. The microbes split to make more copies of them and evolved to get more complex and eventually turned into plants and animals. Cyanobacteria and algae helped our Earth to f...

Have you ever heard of Pluto? Not the Disney Character, Mickey’s dog, Pluto, nor the guy who was trying to beat up Popeye. That’s BLUTO. Or he is also called Brutus. So I am talking about the dwarf planet, Pluto. You might be thinking: “Hey, isn’t Pluto a Normal planet? And what on earth are dwarf planets?”Well, Pluto got demoted into a dwarf planet, which I will explain, and no, dwarf plants are not on earth. Dwarf planets are like mini-planets, but they have differences. First of all, most dwarf planets have strange orbits that are highly elliptical. They are very tiny as well. Unless you compare it with a human. Some still have moons like Pluto having the moon Charon (pronounced ‘sharon’), but others can have awkward shapes. Haumea, a dwarf planet in our solar system, is stretched to become like an egg! This is due to its rapid spinning. By the way, Eris is the biggest dwarf planet, not Pluto. Obviously, dwarf planets are in space, but not only in our solar system....

Galaxies are the huge, gassy, and massive things that fly around in space.  They are quite massive because they have a LOT of stars inside. They also hang around in groups! Now we will have a tour on galaxies and ‘talk’ to them personally! The Milky Way Hello! I’m the Milky Way and I’m the home of your precious star, The Sun! Deep in my center, I have a Supermassive Black Hole! I’m very thin like a disk and I’m only 1,000 light years (ly) thick. My bulge in the middle is 3,000 ly thick. However, I’m 100,000 ly across, which is really long! The Sun actually travels at 220,000 km/h! That’s because it’s orbiting my center! Andromeda Galaxy or M31 Good day! I’m your galaxy’s closest neighbor even though I’m still very far! However, I’m on a crash course with your galaxy because I’m a bit too close for comfort. For more information, see Colliding galaxies . Our new galaxy will be an elliptical galaxy called… ‘Milkdromeda’? Yeah, I know. It's uncreative, just comprom...

I am very sure that most people know about galaxies. But, what you (probably) didn’t know is that galaxies can emerge and form a different type of galaxies. Some can be really odd, you know! Why do galaxies collide? Because of gravity. Well, not gravity from the galaxies, it’s the gravity from dark matter. Later, they start getting nearer and nearer and nearer and finally they collide. However, this process may take billions of years. When galaxies collide together, what happens to all the planets and stars? NOTHING. Nothing happens because galaxies are actually mostly empty space. So the stars and planets never collide. The only thing that happens is that both galaxies become one and the galaxies get a new form. Oh, and also, it gets a new name. An example of colliding galaxies that will collide to each other is the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. It will collide in around 4 billion years. The new galaxy will be formed in 10 billion years. In numerals tha...

Red giants are one of the biggest types of stars. An example of a red giant is Betelgeuse (pronounced bettle juice. Ugh.) and Antares. They are made when fusion in their core actually turns helium into carbon, then carbon into oxygen, then into silicon, then they die when they fuse into iron. They are much too massive and in the end…… BOOM, we have a supernova (Now THAT’S where gold and uranium are made). The biggest red giant known (so far) is UY Scuti, located in the constellation Scutum. To imagine how big it is, UY Scuti has about 1700 times of our Sun’s radius! However it is very far from us (9500 light years away). It is really large at a diameter of 1 - 1.3 billion miles but I think it should be near the end of its life. If it were to replace our Sun, it would instantly swallow Mercury, Venus, and all the way to Saturn. Not only that, but its extremely high gravity would gobble up almost all the solar system objects, and the leftovers would take over a thousand years to...

Have you ever felt like you are being pushed forward when your car brakes suddenly? This is caused by inertia. Inertia is a tendency of an object to maintain its speed. In other words, the object wants to keep a constant speed. If you push a brick along the floor (assuming there is no friction) , then the brick will go on and on and on until someone stops it. Maybe you might want to complain: But when I move bricks across the floor in real life, then why does it keep stopping? This is because there is opposing force acting on the brick known as friction. Friction is a force that is caused by rubbing 2 objects together. It can also create heat. Long time ago, people said that objects have a tendency to stop. Then, in the 1700s, Sir Isaac Newton discovered inertia and proposed that objects actually have a tendency to maintain their speed. Eventually, this is also another of Newton’s laws. I’m quite sure that I will continue to make blogs about physics, science, theo...

TRAPPIST-1 system compared to the Solar System; all seven planets of TRAPPIST-1 could fit inside the orbit of Mercury I think aliens do exist. I mean, out of the trillions and trillions of stars and planets, how can aliens not exist?  There must be some planets that are habitable out there. There is already a search for extra-terrestrial life. And there are also a lot of movies about aliens (my favorite is “Stranger Things” series). They could be even way more advanced in technology than us. They might even visit us soon. Maybe they already visited us. For children, they know the cute little green alien. But for adults, the aliens really look like an alien from another planet. They are pretty scary. Sometimes in the movies they help mankind, and sometimes they assault us. The Great Pyramid of Giza is the only Pyramid discovered to date which in fact has eight sides. The four faces of the pyramid are slightly concave, the only pyramid to have been built this way. ...

On Christmas day, I watched a movie that I really like. The movie was titled Passengers. It was a drama science fiction movie about a journey of a spacecraft called Avalon to an Earth-like planet named Homestead 2. Since the trip took 120 years, all the 5000 people aboard must be put into cryonic sleep. The sleeping pod would awaken automatically just before they arrived in destination planet. The idea is mind blowing and I wouldn’t mind to be involved in such a quest. But at thirty years, a giant asteroid crashed and destroyed the spaceship’s bow shock. Most of the equipment has been auto repaired but one cryonics capsule is still malfunctioned and the person inside awoke. At first he was confused because nobody else was awake. A robot introduced him everywhere. Then he went into the planetarium. He asked the computer: “where is homestead 2?” the computer replied:  “90 light years away” it was then he realized that he woke up too early! He lived alone for 1 year a...