How India's lockdown has affected mental health- A special article on combating Covid-19 What will the psychological impact be for 2.6 billion people under lockdown? India’s public landscape has transformed dramatically over the last couple of months, with the most prolonged lockdown that the present generation can remember. Declared on March 24, 2020, the lockdown ensured that hundreds of millions of people were effectively confined to home, except when they ventured out, armed with a self-attested affidavit, to stock up on essentials. While this may have been effective in helping to curb the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in India, it has not, perhaps, been conducive to the emotional and mental health of some groups. A recent study published on the preprint server  medRxiv *  in May 2020 concludes that select groups might have suffered emotionally, and outlines measures to alleviate such potential harm. 14 ways to protect your ment...

What would happen if Earth started to spin faster? Even a 1 mph speed boost would make things pretty weird               Things would get pretty catastrophic. There are enough things in this life to worry about. Like  nuclear war ,  climate change , and  whether or not you're brushing your teeth correctly . The Earth spinning too fast should not be high up on your list, simply because it's not very likely to happen anytime soon—and if it does, you'll probably be too dead to worry about it. Nevertheless, we talked to some experts to see how it would all go down. First, let’s talk about how fast the world is spinning now. That actually depends on where you are, because the planet spins fastest around its waistline. As Earth twirls around its axis, its circumference is widest at the equator. So a spot on the equator has to travel a lot farther in 24 hours to loop around to its starting position than, say, Chicago, which sits on a narrower c...

Hot water and antimicrobial soaps don’t get your hands any cleaner You're probably washing your hands wrong- A special article on combating Covid-19 It doesn't matter what temperature  water  you use to wash your hands: all that matters is that you wash them, according to a study released earlier this week in the  Journal of Food Protection . And you're  probably doing it wrong . Understanding what gets our hands the cleanest matters, because not washing our hands is one way that germs from those that cause colds to those that cause life-threatening infections  spread . To figure out how water temperature affects hand sanitation, the researchers contaminated participants’ hands with harmless bacteria and then made them wash at 100, 80, and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers, who hailed from Rutgers University and Gojo Industries (a privately held manufacturer of sanitation products such as Purell) thought that 60 degrees was the coolest temperature that woul...

  Move over, Pluto, DeeDee is the new       (potential) dwarf planet in town       More exciting news about cold, dead rocks An artist's interpretation of obscure data about a far off potential dwarf planet.   All  dwarf planets  are equal, but some  dwarf planets  are more equal than others. Such is the case for  Pluto , the world's most beloved and most opined celestial body. You can keep feeling sorry for the icy  planet  if you want—or you could celebrate its growing crew of fellow dwarves. Meet DeeDee : a tiny, probably spherical object that, at roughly -405 degrees Fahrenheit, is icier than the hearts of those who took  Pluto  out of the planetary family. Its whole circumference is about the length of the Nile River, which (if it were a straight shot) means it would take you about two months to circumnavigate the entire thing. We've actually known of DeeDee for a few years now. She (yes, I'm ...

English as a National Foreign Language: I ndia has two national languages for central administrative purposes: Hindi and English. Hindi is the national, official, and main link language of India. English is an associate official language. The Indian Constitution also officially approves twenty-two regional languages for official purposes. Dozens of distinctly different regional languages are spoken in India, which share many characteristics such as grammatical structure and vocabulary. Apart from these languages, Hindi is used for communication in India. The homeland of Hindi is mainly in the north of India, but it is spoken and widely understood in all urban centres of India. In the southern states of India, where people speak many different languages that are not much related to Hindi, there is more resistance to Hindi, which has allowed English to remain a lingua franca to a greater degree. Since the early 1600s, the English language has had a toehold on the Indian subcontinent, whe...

What is the Pythagorean Theorem? You can learn all about the  Pythagorean Theorem , but here is a quick summary: The Pythagorean Theorem says that,  in a right triangle,  the square of a (a 2 ) plus the square of b (b 2 ) is equal to the square of c (c 2 ): a 2  + b 2  = c 2 Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using Algebra We can show that  a 2  + b 2  = c 2  using  Algebra Take a look at this diagram ... it has that "abc" triangle in it (four of them actually):                       Area of Whole Square It is a big square, with each side having a length of  a+b , so the  total area  is: A = (a+b)(a+b)              ...(1) Area of The Pieces Now let's add up the areas of all the smaller pieces:    First, the smaller (tilted) square has an area of: c 2     Each of the four triangles has an area of:(1/2)*ab=ab/2 So all ...