SS Vishak

I always had a flair for story of scientists...I always wondered why very few Indian scientists were actually known widely. One of the few Indian scientists' names that crawl into our textbooks is Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose.The. Indian. Botanist. Sure, he found out evidence for life in plants using a crescograph, but actually, he MADE the crescograph. He was basically , a physicist... BORN A KING IN MYEMENSINGH Jagadish Chandra Bose was born on 30 November, 1858 at Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh. He was raised in a home committed to Indian values and culture. He got his elementary education from a vernacular school, because his father believed that Bose should learn his own mother tongue, Bengali, before studying a foreign language like English. Bose attended Cambridge after studying physics at Calcutta University. He returned to India in 1884 after completing a B.Sc. degree from Cambridge University. INDIA'S OWN POLYMATH  Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath ...

At times your life does not go planned. At all. Happens. But a lot of achievements have actually stemmed out of such places by pure play of probabilities or by an observant and opportunistic mind looking at it from a different angle. Sometimes you get the goal achieved. Sometimes, you get a whole lot better... There have been many such instances when science has advanced, empires have been forged and fortunes have been made due to such glorious misadventures.  One such accident led to... POST-IT NOTES Spencer Silver obtained a PhD in organic chemistry and joined a company-one which currently holds over 118,000 patents- 3M. As a Senior Chemist. Silver attempted to create a super strong adhesive, a superglue. But he ended up creating a low-tack adhesive. It was a pressure sensitive adhesive that could only hold papers together and weak enough to allow the papers be taken apart easily. But it was reusable. He patented it. He gave seminars to promote it within 3M a...

It has been a long time...A time as long as it took the second triumvirate to fall and as long as it took Augustus and Antony to go from friends to enemies. 3 years. The blog needed a resurrection.  What could be a better choice than  review of a book that itself served the job of being a part of the resurrection of the character to appease the   public outcry for the character's kill-off  ? The character of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle has intrigued me a lot. The Doyle books are a few of those that I cherish in all of fiction and this stands out as a pacy horror. Doyle got fed up with Holmes and killed him off  in “The Final Problem”(1893) and focused on non-sherlockian works of his. This story, though published after it ( serialized in The Strand Magazine in 1901-1902), takes place before the events of the former, for Holmes was revived a year later in “The Empty House”(1903).  SETTING The novel is set in Dartmoor, Devon in Engl...

I usually open my mailbox whenever I sit and aimlessly scroll down. 4 days ago I was doing that when I saw this... I had been attending this online physics course for two months(thanks to Geetha mam who had informed!) . Prof.H.C.Verma is well known for his books on concepts of physics. He and IIT-Kanpur together had announced an eight-week programme for all, mainly for UG,PG physics students and teachers and to interested high school students. I just thought we can see and learn 3 vid per week so 24 vids and enrolled. Then came quizzes and certificate criteria. The topics were of Electricity, Optics,Waves and Mechanics. When I checked the criteria , it came : excellent for 80-100%, good for 60-80%, satisfactory for all rest who got below that or just watched vids(whoa!). And then I got my certificate.. I had got Good..I was happy that I attended it. I learnt a lot of new concepts. It was knowledge that mattered to me always. But still I never expected this Bonus... SSV ...

I was just searching google by "S.S.Vishak" to see my blog in the results...but suddenly I saw an article in The Hindu, by the name "Fresh Idea"...,soon found out that it was my article which I wrote in 7th std for some short story on environmental issues.... FEATURES »  YOUNG WORLD Published: August 13, 2013 19:17 IST | Updated: August 13, 2013 19:43 IST   August 13, 2013 Fresh idea Samar, Salim and Samuel are close friends. They were doing a class project on the topic ‘environment’. But they were out of ideas. They decided to go out as they thought that it would give them some fresh ideas. The three of them went to a beautiful park, but a sight bothered them. A man was cutting a tree. They walked over to the man and Samuel asked, “Why are you cutting this tree?” “This is my job,” the man replied. “Trees give us oxygen, food, shade and shelter,” Salim said. “Trees help in timely rainfall and maintain the carbon dioxide and oxyge...

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, previously known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is a space telescope launched on STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64-hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2014. Chandra is one of the Great Observatories, along with the Hubble Space Telescope,Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991–2000), and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra has been described as being as revolutionary to astronomy as Galileo's first telescope., NASA named the third of its four "Great Observatories" after Chandrasekhar. This followed a naming contest which attracted ...

This story was sent to me by my teacher and well wisher, Geetha Ma'am. Change Your Thinking  It will take just 37 seconds to read this and change your thinking.  Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room.One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs.His bed was next to the room's only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back. The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation.Every afternoon, when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window.The man in the other bed began to live for those one hour periods where his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and color of the world outside. The window overlooked a park wi...