Welcome to the official blog of Science Club, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata

With the advent of the lifestyle of people in past years, there has been a significant advancement in the field of science and technology to quite a lot extent. It not only fulfills our daily requirements but also enhances the quality of our lifestyle. HOW DOES SCIENCE PRACTICALLY HELP IN TECHNOLOGY? First, we take a back seat and with help of science, we try to understand how things happen, what prompts it to happen, how to change its behavior and observe it under different circumstances. Then we take the driver seat and make things to work the way we want by the help of technology. However despite all the field of science being so much advantageous, is it the only shade of it visible? The latest episode of the demise of American firefighter Willie Brown brought the topic into the limelight that "Learning to control the fire made us human but adapting its use brought us cancer." Willie Brown was an American firefighter who succumbed to cancer. The severe exposure...

For more than 1.2 million years, only us humans have used fire for our own benefits. Whether having a hot meal or lighting up a dark room, the discovery of fire has changed the course of the human civilization. But today, another species is using fire for their advantage. In Australia, three birds of the prey species: Black Kites, whistling kites, and brown falcons, use smoldering branches or twigs to spread fire in a region in order to catch their prey. These birds gather around the edges of the fire-blazing region, where their prey, like lizards, insects, or small mammals like rabbits, run towards, to save themselves from the fire but get caught straight into their talons.  Bob Gosford, an ornithologist, said “ A group of falcons or kites would collect slowly- burning branches and drop them off at an unburnt area of grass to start a fire. ” Observers reported both solo and group efforts to catch a prey in such a manner. The surprising thing is that these birds don’t ...

Do you ever think that water can have memory ??  I think we  really don’t  but a German Scientist discovered that water has memory.” Water has memory ” implies under certain circumtances ,water  can maintain a database of its own where it retains a memory of solute particles after arbitrary dilution. In other word , water molecule has the ability to retain a memory of substances which are previously dissolved in it even after a number of dilution. Scientists after examining every individual drops of water under incredibly high magnification concluded that droplets of water has its own individual pattern each completely distinguishable from the next and uniquely beautiful.The German Scientist believe that as water traverse it picks up and stores information from all  the places that it has travelled through. Hence ,we can track the journey of an individual by drinking water ,connecting people to a lot of different places.  We know human body contain...

We are all familiar with matter around us. From the food we eat, the air we breathe to living in buildings and vehicles we drive, they all comprise of matter. But have you ever wondered about anti-matter? The answer is yes. They do exist. It is often said by scientists that the big bang produced both matter and anti-matter in equal numbers. Anti-matter has all the properties opposite to matter.  Like the antiparticle of an electron would have the opposite charge i.e. positive charge and opposite rotation with the same mass. One thing to note is that if both matter and anti-matter meet then they annihilate each other i.e. they cancel out each other releasing a certain amount of energy. Antimatter is already being produced in many labs like CERN etc but to our dismay, it is only produced in minute quantities. So, it becomes difficult for the scientists to study such entities properly. Hence, not much has been discovered related to their properties. Even it remains to be see...

(Photo: oorka /Shutterstock) “Black Holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe.” Their gravity is absolute. They used to be science fiction, but we have found them. In fact, they are enormous in amount. It devours everything that manages to come across its path. Black holes are the end point of everything. It is the end point of a star, a matter, space, energy, time etc. Some astronomers think that they could be a gateway to the parallel universe. They get their power from one of the fundamental forces of nature - Gravity . The force of gravity is infinite. It sucks everything including light. Its effective force can be imagined as a waterfall and gravity is the river flowing towards the waterfall. Away from the waterfall, the strength of the current is weak and the rower can row throughout it efficiently. But towards the waterfall the strength is maximum and it is not possible to escape from falling, no matter how hard we row. Birth of a Black Hole: B...

  Part I:   In the contemporary urban world, there is no educated person who is ignorant of the meaning of the word 'computer'. Consider now the following sentence, which appears in a brief biographical sketch of L.W. Reid (1867-1961), the author of a well-known book on number theory: "....He then worked for the U.S Bureau of the Census and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, where his job title was listed as "computer"." This usage of the word 'computer' the modern reader will doubtless find rather surprising. It was in usage in the distant past when electronic computing devices had not become available, and calculational work in professional institutions was carried out by employees specially trained to do so. These men were called 'computers', i.e human computers.      In this article, I intend to discuss the mathematics of Euler and Jacobi, two of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and indeed, the two greatest human computer...

Suppose you are standing on top of the Eiffel Tower. You can see the curvature of the Earth and the hundreds of people walking below you. Then you decided to jump. What would you feel? You would be in a state called weightlessness, i.e you have no weight. Now suppose you are in a satellite, revolving around the Earth. What would feel? At a glance, you would say there is no gravity because you are in space and hence you are floating around. What if, I said, that the action of you falling off the Eiffel Tower and you being in the satellite is the same. In the year 1686, Sir Isaac Newton presented the Universal law of Gravitation in his book Principia Mathematica. It stated that objects attract each other due to their mass and explained as to why planets orbits around the Sun in an elliptical manner. Fast forward to 1915,  Albert Einstein thought it was actually the curvature of space that actually accounted for the motion of various planetary motion.  Think of it l...

Although the development of computers in its present form started around 1940s, the art of efficient computing goes back to the ninth century and we must know that the word computers was used to mean persons with expertise in computing. The word ultimately encompassed machines also. The efficiency of computing depends in many cases on the algorithm or the logical sequence followed.   The word ‘Algorithm’ comes from the name of the ninth century Persian mathematician Mohammad ibn Musa Al-Khawarizmi. Abacus helped to solve simple arithmetic in the old days. In 17 th century, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal built a mechanical device to perform addition automatically. The operation was embedded in the configuration of gears within the machine. The German mathematician Gottfried Leibnitz, the co-inventor of calculus along with Newton, argued for a universal language to calculate any problem. In early 19 th century, the French engineer Joseph Jacquard designed and constr...

The use of proteins on immune cells to manipulate the immune system so that it attacks cancer cells has led to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018. The prize money will be shared by James Allison from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and TasukuHonjo from Kyoto University in Japan. Allison, in the 1990’s, then at University of California, studied checkpoint protein, CTLA-4, that acts as a brake on immune cells called T-cells. In 1997, he along with his colleagues constructed an antibody that could bind CTLA-4 and remove the brakes on T cells and release them to attack cancer cells in mice. In 1992, Honjo, working independently of Allison, discovered a different T-cell protein PD-1 which by a different mechanism also acts as a brake on the immune system. The work of the laureates has been described to constitute a paradigm shift and a landmark in the fight against cancer. In recent past, clinical works on drugs that inhibit the CL...

All of you must have come across probability, in your life and tasted its intriguing dimensions. Now I have a question for you. Consider you have an interval of [0,1] and you randomly chose a real number from in there. Considering that all the numbers are equally likely to be chosen, what is the probability that a rational number will be chosen? Regards, Prof. Nirman Ganguly Faculty, Dept. of Mathematics, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata.

Scientists have devised a way to check how synced or out of sync, your circadian clock is; and that too from your blood samples. Yes, you heard right. For those who don’t know what circadian clock is, it is basically the clock of your body which is basically lined up with your wristwatch and pretty much decides when your body does something. Like a normal clock with alarms, your circadian clock tells the body when to feel sleepy or hungry or you need to go to the bathroom. Even the very basic cellular processes are controlled by the circadian clock. When you travel to places with different time zones, it actually disturbs the synchronization of the clock hence causing, what’s known as a jet lag. But what are the practical implications of this technique? Three scientists, Jeffery C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young jointly worked on fruit flies to isolate genes that are in charge of controlling the biological rhythm. For their discovery, they got Nobel prize in Physiolog...

Dear all, I have the following questions for you: (i) In order to check whether a positive integer is prime, we need to find the existence of a non trivial factor of the integer between 2 through square root of the integer. Why do you think checking up to square root of the integer is sufficient? (ii) Can you name some plant where the leaves follow a Fibonacci pattern? Posted by- Prof. Nirman Ganguly Faculty, Department of Mathematics, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata.