What & Why ?

What does Burundanga mean?

Burundanga is the other name of the drug ‘Scopolamine’, used for criminal activities like rape or to rob innocent victims. The drug is passed on to the victim through business cards, pamphlets, etc. Even if the skin, through touch, absorbs just a very small quantity of the drug it has the desired effect. The drug is also administered through tablets added to drinks. This is known as the ‘dating drug’.

— Pulkit Jain, Bangalore
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why is gold softer than iron?

The softness of a metal is its ability to undergo permanent deformation under applied stress. All metals have specific crystalline structures. Each structure has its own densely packed crystalline planes. There exist line defects and plane defects in a crystal system. Such defects are more in densely packed crystal systems, i.e., metallic crystals with higher density, and result in a number of slip planes, which can easily deform under a little stress. Noble metals like platinum, gold and silver have extra slip planes called twinning. Iron and most of its have very rigid and open packed crystal structures and are difficult to deform.

— Sujay Bhattacharya, Pune
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What is the 'six degrees of separation' theory?

The theory was the brainchild of psychologist Stanley Milgram who wanted to find the answer to the small-world problem. So in the 1960s, he conducted an experiment by mailing a packet to 160 people in and around Omaha Nebraska, that needed to reach a broker in Boston. The findings showed that these letters reached the broker in five to six steps. This concept has been explained well in the book 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell. American playwright John Gaure is believed to have popularised this phrase by his work named after the theory, 'Six degrees of Separation'.

- Devanshi Vaishnav, Bangalore
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Why are viruses at the borderline of living and non-living things?

A virus has a very simple composition. It has a protein sheath inside which there is a strand of DNA. A virus shows some properties akin to living organisms. However, unlike other organisms, they show some properties that are akin to non-living things. They can undergo crystallization and in that form, survive for billions of years. They can survive very high temperatures, freezing cold and ultra-violet radiation in space vacuum, in crystallized form.

— Sachindra Tavkar, via email
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(Times Of India, 19:04:2009)
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