Category Science

OCEANS AND SEAS ARE DIFFERENT?

The difference lies in their depth, area and variety of marine life. An ocean is deeper and covers a greater area as compared to the sea. On the other hand, a sea has more diverse plant and animal life. There are fewer plants in an ocean as there are large areas where sunlight does not penetrate. The deep-sea creatures found in the darkness of oceans are unique.

 

                          Sea

Ocean

Sea is also made up of salty water but is smaller in size compared to oceans.

Ocean covers approximately 70% of the earth’s total surface. Ocean is made up of salty water.

The largest sea is the Meditteranean Sea. The area of Meditteranean sea is approximately 1.14 million square miles.

The largest Ocean is the Pacific Ocean with an area of approximately 60 million square miles. The smallest Ocean is the Arctic Ocean covering an area of 5.4 million square miles.

Seas are usually located close to land.

Oceans are not necessarily located close to land.

Aquatic life exists in abundance in seas as seas are usually located close to the Land.

Oceans have reduced aquatic life as it is far away from the land and deeper than the Seas.

There is a large quantity of marine life in the Seas as sunlight is able to penetrate deeper into the seas, allowing photosynthesis.

The marine life in oceans is usually confined to bacteria, shrimp, microscopic planktons. This is due to lack of penetration of sunlight deep into oceans thus not giving much scope for photosynthesis.

Some of the major seas are Mediterranean Sea, Carribean Sea, South China Sea, Black Sea etc. The deepest sea is Carribean Sea with an approximate depth of 6900 metres.

The Deepest Ocean is Pacific Ocean which is around 10,000 metres deep and the Arctic Ocean is around 5600 metres deep.

Credit: BYJU’S

Picture Credit : Google

What is Xbox console?

The Xbox is a home video game console. You knew that already, didn’t you? When it was launched a little over 20 years ago in November 2001, it was a gamble for Microsoft as it was a piece of hardware from a company known more for its software.

As a product that blurred the lines between a gaming machine and an entertainment device, the original Xbox was highly successful and continues to have devotees till this day. If this device had been running long enough without active usage, then it is likely that the owners of the Xbox might have heard some eerie chit chat that almost feels like it is from outer space.

That, in fact, is the truth. In a tweet in 2014, Lawrence Hryb, Director of Programming for the Microsoft gaming network Xbox Live and known commonly by his Xbox Live Gamertag “Major Nelson”, revealed that the ambient sounds in the original Xbox were actually from NASA! Hryb added that the background sounds were created by tweaking public domain audio from NASA transmissions during the Apollo days. How cool is that?

When Sony Computer Entertainment first announced the PlayStation 2 in 1999, the company had positioned the console as a centerpiece for home entertainment, as it not only would play video games, but also could play audio CDs and video DVDs. Microsoft, whose business had been primarily in supporting the personal computer (PC) business with its Windows operating system, software, and games, saw the PlayStation 2 as a threat to the personal computer.

Four engineers from Microsoft’s DirectX team—Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley, Ted Hase and DirectX team leader Otto Berkes, began to envision what a Microsoft console to compete against the PlayStation 2 would be like. They designed a system that would use many hardware components in common with PCs, effectively running a version of Windows and DirectX to power the games on the console.This approach would make it easy for developers on Windows to build games for their new system, differentiating itself from the custom hardware solutions of most consoles. Numerous names were suggested for this console, including “Direct X Box”, and the “Windows Entertainment Project”. Microsoft’s marketing team conducted consumer surveys of the name, using the name “Xbox” as a control believing this would be least desirable, but found that this had the highest preference from their tests, and was selected as the name of the console.

Credit : Wikipedia 

Picture Credit : Google 

Which is the first computer virus?

The Creeper program is regarded as the first virus. The idea of a computer virus- a metaphor derived from biological viruses for a computer program that when executed, replicates itself to affect machines-was discussed in a series of lectures in the late 1940s by mathematician John von Neumann.

The Creeper program created by Bob Thomas of BBN in 1971 is often regarded as the first vinus Designed as a security test, it was an attempt to see if self-replicating programs were possible. It had no malicious intent and simply displayed the message: TM THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN Viruses have come a long way in half a century and are no longer a laughing matter.

Estimates suggest that 3.50,000 new pieces of malware are discovered every single day in a world that is more connected than ever before, the damaging costs of these are also spiraling out of control with conservative estimates placing a figure of $55 billion in annual costs.

An experimental computer network, ARPANET, was created in 1969 and was the precursor to the internet. It was designed to send communications from computer to computer over long distances, without the need for a dedicated phone connection between each computer. To achieve this required a method of dividing and sending data that is now known as packet switching. It’s few early users were mostly computer scientists. Imagine theirsurprise when one day in 1971, connected teletype computer screens displayed the phrase: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Although they didn’t know it at the time, they were the first computer virus victims. But what did the mysterious message mean, and who sent it? It turns out it wasn’t a hacker who coded the first computer virus, and it wasn’t sent with malicious intent. Bold, Beranek, and Newman* (now Raytheon BBN Technologies) were pioneers in packet switching networks like ARPANET and the internet. One of its researchers, Bob Thomas, had created Creeper as an experimental computer program.

Creeper was a worm — a type of computer virus that replicates itself and spreads to other systems. In this case, its targets were Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers which were linked to ARPANET. But it wasn’t malware like we associate with today’s computer viruses; displaying its enigmatic message was all Creeper did. It didn’t encrypt files, demand a ransom, destroy data, steal Social Security numbers, or render centrifuges inoperable. It only displayed its taunting challenge.

Credit : Exabeam

Picture Credit : Google 

A single google query uses 1000 machines in 0.2 seconds

What do you do when you want to check something online? Most of us will likely enter a search string in the Google search bar and wait for it to come up with its results. There’s hardly any “wait” these days as the tumaround for most searches are nearly next to nothing for practical terms.

Did you know that a single Google query actually uses 1000 machines in just 0.2 seconds? Even though Google is usually secretive about their search infrastructure, they revealed certain details in 2009. During a keynote talk at WSDM 2009, a Google Fellow revealed Google’s exponential growth during the decade from 1999 to 2009. As compared to 12 machines that were used earlier, 1000 machines were employed by 2009 in order to hold the complete search index in memory. Crawler updates, which used to take months in 1999, were down to just minutes by 2009. Search queries and processing power went up by a factor of 1000, while latency went down from around 1000 ms to 200 ms or 0.2 seconds.

Also, according to Jeff Dean, Google puts the search index all in memory several years ago and displays search results almost instantaneously to the person who is trying to search, so for each query, 2 , It is said that thousands of machines are working in tandem instead of three dozen machines. Google has developed various index compression technologies over the past several years and finally put it in a format that combines the four deltas of the position in order to minimize the number of replacement work required for decompression I told you it was solved. Google is paying attention to where their data is located on the disk, and data that needs to be read immediately is placed on the outer circumference of the disk which can read data at a higher speed even in the hard disk , It seems that cold data (data that does not need to be read out quickly, data with low reading frequency) and short data are placed on the inner circumference of the disk.
Also, in usual server applications, we use ECC memory at a higher price than usual which can correct errors themselves, but Google uses non-parity memory, so we created our own program to recover from errors, My own disk scheduler. The Linux kernel has also made a number of corrections to meet the needs.
Regarding the physical server as well, in the first phase it was a self-made server without a case, then it became a server to fit in a normal rack, but now it is back to a custom server without case again.

Credit : Giga zine

Picture Credit : Google 

Why is Roopkund called Skeleton Lake?

During World War II. an Indian forest Ranger called Hari Kishan Madhwa made a morbid discovery in a remote glacier lake in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand. Something strange was visible in its clear water. On closer inspection, it was revealed that the lake was full of human skeletons. It came to be known as Roop Kund or Skeleton Lake. A DNA sample of 38 skeletons showed that they came from three genetically distinct groups. Who were these people? When did they die? How did they die? Where did they come from?

One old theory associates the remains to an Indian king, his wife and their attendants, all of whom perished in a blizzard some 870 years ago.

Another suggests that some of the remains are of Indian soldiers who tried to invade Tibet in 1841, and were beaten back. More than 70 of them were then forced to find their way home over the Himalayas and died on the way.

Yet another assumes that this could have been a “cemetery” where victims of an epidemic were buried. In villages in the area, there’s a popular folk song that talks about how Goddess Nanda Devi created a hail storm “as hard as iron” which killed people winding their way past the lake. India’s second-highest mountain, Nanda Devi, is revered as a goddess.

Earlier studies of skeletons have found that most of the people who died were tall – “more than average stature”. Most of them were middle-aged adults, aged between 35 and 40. There were no babies or children. Some of them were elderly women. All were of reasonably good health.

Also, it was generally assumed that the skeletons were of a single group of people who died all at once in a single catastrophic incident during the 9th Century.

Scientists genetically analysed and carbon-dated the remains of 38 bodies, including 15 women, found at the lake – some of them date back to around 1,200 years. They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and their deaths were separated in time by as much as 1,000 years.

But more interestingly, the genetics study found the dead comprised a diverse people: one group of people had genetics similar to present-day people who live in South Asia, while the other “closely related” to people living in present-day Europe, particularly those living in the Greek island of Crete. Also, the people who came from South Asia “do not appear to come from the same population”.

Genetic studies found no evidence of the presence of any ancient bacterial pathogen that could provide disease as an explanation for the cause of deaths.

Credit : BBC 

Picture Credit : Google 

How long does glass take to decompose?

A glass bottle takes one million years to decompose, according to the Environmental Protection Agency of the U.S. If that’s the case, why are we more concerned about plastic, which takes only about 450 years to decompose? Because, plastic can leach harmful chemicals into the soil, unlike glass. It does not mean glass is harmless-for example, tiny shards can injure creatures. But the fact is that glass can be recycled while plastic, especially single-use ones, end up in landfills, resulting in pollutions of various kinds.

When a dropped glass shatters or a rock chips the car’s windshield, it’s tempting to think of glass as a fragile material. Actually, it’s one of the longest-lasting man-made materials. The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services estimates that it takes 1 million years for a glass bottle to decompose in the environment, with conditions in a landfill even more protected. Glass artifacts from glassmaking’s beginnings in Egypt, around 2000 B.C., still exist.

The glass-making process has been perfected over thousands of years. Glass used to be available only to pharaohs and royals but has become an everyday item. Glass can be made in several different ways, with different chemical compositions. Throughout history, however, soda-lime glass has been the most common form of glass produced, according to scientists with Texas A&M University’s Nautical Archaeology program. Most glass consists primarily of silica, a component of sand, mixed at very high temperatures with sodium carbonate or potassium carbonate and a small amount of lime for stability. Glass made with sodium carbonate (soda glass) is usually more transparent than glass made with potassium carbonate (potash glass).

Glass does break, but it does not readily break down. The glass decomposition rate is essentially nil. Over time, the surface of some glass bottles will absorb moisture. This results in devitrification, a process that causes the outer layer of glass bottles to crystallize and flake off. Devitrification takes place very slowly and results in a cloudy or iridescent appearance. Modern glass is made from an incredibly stable formula, however, so the glass bottles people throw in the garbage today will most likely remain in landfills for thousands of years, experiencing only slight devitrification.

Credit : Sciencing 

Picture Credit : Google