Articles - Page 58 of 558 - Young World Club

Keep a sharp lookout

This picture has 10 objects hidden in it. Can you find them all? Get started now.

It’s the end of the week and let’s see how sharp you are. Can you spot all the items on the right side in the main picture? Get set, go!

Freezing point

Did you ever think the cold making you shiver may have come from the Caspian Sea, the Pacific Ocean or even all the way from the Arctic?

In January 2024, Delhi experienced five cold waves, with its nights being the coldest since 2013 and days since 2003. In contrast, in December, the city was at its warmest in six years with not a single cold wave. So, how do cold waves occur? Let’s find out.

Click on ‘turn’ to flip the card and the arrow to move to the next card.

Sewing icons – Part I

Sewing is an art that gives you the opportunity to express yourself with needle and thread.

Sewing is the craft of fastening or attaching objects by stitching it with a needle and thread. It is one of the oldest of the textile arts.

For thousands of years, sewing was done only by hand. However, with the Industrial Age came the invention of the sewing machine. This led to mass production. Hand sewing is still practiced around the world.

In this grid below are words commonly used in needlecraft. Can you find them all?

Quick and brisk

Did you know that a workout need not always be long to be effective? Find out about the seven-minute workout.

Have you heard of the seven-minute workout? It consists of a series of exercises involving high-intensity training that could be just as effective as a 60-minute run.

The workout is made up of 12 30-second workouts in the following order: jumping jacks, wall sits, push-ups, abdominal crunches, chair steps, squats, tricep dips, planks, high knees, lunges, push up slides, and side planks.

Scroll through the below images to see the steps. Remember, this article is only for educational purposes. Always consult an adult before starting any workout or fitness routine!

Through the eyes of a machine

How do you teach a machine to think like a human? Can it learn everything we know?

Can you identify these pictures?

Of course you can. How would you describe them? Pictures of humans, perhaps? And you might notice that some are smiling, and some are not. You might mentally classify them as cheerful people and grumpy people. You may instead, focus on those with glasses and those without. Or you may notice that some people are wearing jackets, and some are not.
There are so many ways of classifying a few pictures!

Let’s perform a thought experiment now. Let’s assume you are not of the human species. Maybe you’re an alien, maybe you’re a machine – it doesn’t matter as long as you’re not human – and you have no idea what a human is, what a smile is, what glasses and jackets are, what “classifying” means.

But I have to teach you all that. Where do I start? I start with what is known as “training data”. My training data for smile recognition would be a set of pictures (the more the better), and a label that explains what it is. Each picture goes into the machine, along with the label. At the end of the training, I would give this machine a completely new image, and see if it recognises a smile or not.

What about other expressions? And glasses and jackets? It’s a LOT more work, and a LOT more training data!

Specifically, I would need hundreds of thousands of images showing every possible human expression, all of them labelled correctly. I would need a variety of clothing examples, again labelled correctly. And then glasses. And every other element that I might expect to find in the environment that I am training the machine on. This is machine learning.

What is machine intelligence?

If your machine can go beyond its training data, understand images that are not part of the original data set, and, in some way, extrapolate the learning, it can be called intelligent.

This extrapolation is built using statistics-based algorithms that deploy a variety of techniques to fine-tune a model for different objectives, such as reading expressions, classifying images based on clothing, understanding indoor and outdoor pictures, X-rays, satellite images and anything that humans can make sense of.

In a similar way, models are trained to understand written texts and their styles — formal writing, casual writing, funny writing, the complete works of Shakespeare, academic text books, medical diagnoses, and anything that humans can read.

When we put all this learning together, we can come up with an AI app that can create a completely new image based on instructions such as “generate an image of a child smiling in a playground”. Or anything really, limited only by the human imagination and, of course, the training dataset.

Now, let’s pretend you are a machine that has just learnt to recognise smiling faces. Can you click on all of them?

The Raman Effect

Who is Sir C.V. Raman? What was his discovery? How is he connected to India’s National Science Day? Kakabhushundi time travels to find the answers.

(Previous episode: The world in an egg)

After his meeting with Sage Lomasa, Kakabhushundi entered the wormhole to go back to the time he saw Rama. He was thinking about the sage’s words about the purpose of his life being knowledge transfer. At the coordinate point of the time-travelling wormhole, Kakabhushundi got pulled into the future because he wanted to meet a Rama who was famous for his scientific knowledge.

Imagine his surprise when he landed in a physics conference in 1922 where a scientist called Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was talking about his research on the scattering of light.

Illustration: Sahil Upalekar

C.V. Raman: In 1921, while on a ship to England, I noticed something amazing. The colour of the Mediterranean Sea was a dark blue. I began to wonder why that was so.

Scientist: Didn’t you know that the scientist Raleigh said that the ocean reflects the colour of the sky?

C.V. Raman: Yes, I am also a fan of Raleigh’s work on light optics but I think there is something more here. If the waters were reflecting the colour of the sky, why was the sea dark blue and not sky blue?

Though none of the scientists had an answer to this question, they did not like the fact that Raman had questioned Raleigh’s work. Some even start questioning Raman’s knowledge. Kakabhushundi, sitting outside the room, listened to the heated debate.

C.V. Raman: The reason for the colour of the Mediterranean Sea is not just reflection of light but also scattering of light. I wrote to the science journals about this phenomenon as soon as the ship docked at the next port.

Having said this, Raman performed a simple experiment, using a light source with a violet filter to pass through glycerin. The spectrometer showed a blue light along with violet light. The audience was stunned.

Curious, Kakabhushundi decided to travel further into the same year, where Raman is presenting another research paper on “Molecular scattering of light in water and the colour of the sea”. After he finishes, Raman received an ovation.

Kakabhushundi is even more intrigued to see what happens next in C.V. Raman’s life and travels to 1930. That year, on February 28, C.V. Raman is awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, the first Indian to receive the award in a scientific discipline and the second to receive a Nobel Prize after Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. After watching the scientist receive the award, Kakabhushundi returns to Sage Lomasa.

Kakbhushundi: Even though C.V. Raman is an Indian, he received the award under a British flag.

Sage Lomasa: Don’t worry about that. It is all part of the process of evolution. But tell me, what was the discovery of the Rama you met?

Kakabhushundi: I didn’t exactly understand it but it seems like he has discovered the different names of the Surya’s seven horses and how they behave.

Sage Lomasa: His discovery is known as the Raman Effect and February 28, the day he received the Nobel Prize, is celebrated as National Science Day in India. Since you say you didn’t understand it, let me show you what he meant with this experiment.

Sage Lomasa: Do you see how, with the addition of milk, the light pattern changed. This is a form of light scattering. This helps understand concepts like reflection, scattering of light, both elastic and inelastic…

Kakabhushundi: This is all too much to take in. I have to give my brain some rest before I learn any more science. But I am also prepared now for knowledge transfer across multiverses.

Kakabhushundi flies off, after bidding Sage Lomasa goodbye.

The author is the founder and CEO of Vaayusastra Aerospace, an IIT-Madras incubated ed-tech startup that offers Air Science workshops for children between five and 14 years.

The dome in Rome

We all know about the Pantheon in Rome. But do you know about the importance of its dome?

Have you tried building a house using Lego blocks? What if you built a huge room, and want to put a flat roof on it? You’d probably add some walls or pillars to support it. These vertical supports take the roof’s load and transfer it to the ground. Many buildings are built with vertical columns and horizontal beams or lintels to distribute the load. Many ancient buildings use this system of post and lintel construction.

Early builders were constantly innovating to create bigger buildings to impress their friends and enemies. The Romans, famous for their architectural skills, managed to build massive rooms uninterrupted by walls and pillars. How did they do this? Enter, arches and domes. Arches were used by many early civilisations, but the Romans perfected it. They were also the first to use concrete extensively and developed mastery over it.

Concrete can be moulded in any shape and used to create curved roofs like domes. The dome blurred the lines between the roof and the wall, and could create huge rooms without any intermediate supports.

With arches, domes and concrete, some of the most impressive architectural structures were born. One such is the Pantheon, a Roman temple with a soaring concrete dome that would put modern structures to shame. Built in around 125 CE, its dome remains the largest ‘unreinforced’ dome in the world; i.e. it has no steel rods that help hold the concrete together.

Picture eight to 10 giraffes standing one above the other. That’s how high the topmost part of the dome is. The dome itself has a radius of 71 feet and the entire building is 142 feet wide and 142 feet tall. What do you think these numbers mean? Its geometry was such that you can fit a massive perfect sphere inside the Pantheon.

The walls are made of brick and concrete and a series of arches hidden inside the walls provide extra support. The concrete was extra-special and ultra-strong, and has kept the building standing for almost 2,000 years.

You know now that the Pantheon is gigantic. Guess how many doors and windows it has? Just one each! Its only source of light is a 30 ft opening — an oculus — at the centre of the dome. This has another important purpose: it is integral to keep the structure standing. If you visit Rome when it’s raining, visit the Pantheon and watch a sheet of water fall right into this beautiful building.

Arch explained

In an arch, each brick transfers the load to the next one, and finally to the wall and floor. The arch’s most important part is the central stone or ‘key stone’. An arch can allow for much wider spans than flat roofs.

Relax, unwind, and colour away

Here’s a colouring sheet for you. Let your imagination soar as you add a few splashes of colour!

Creativity meets cognition

The body’s command centre governs all cognitive and physiological functions, shaping our thoughts, emotions, and actions.