The Pragmatic Lair

Running water contains some minerals and impurities so it is not pure water. Those minerals and impurities give that characteristic flavor. But what is pure water? The water you drink from the bottle, the boiled water, the spring water, the river water? No, none of those is completely pure. If you drink pure water, something will happen to you and you will not like it. Yes, you’ll die. Of course, if you only drink a glass of pure water, it won't kill you but you can't drink it regularly. The problem with pure water is that it is a hypotonic solution . Water has a property called tonicity. This is the ability of some solutions to change the shape of a cell and alter the volume of water inside it. Hypertonic solutions gain water and hypotonic solutions lose water.   The cytoplasm in the cells of your body also has a certain tonicity. When exposed to hypotonic solutions, they gain water and inflate like balloons. Pure water is one of the most hypot...

Imagine you are in a spaceship heading to Mars and a friend just woke up after a good sleep. He asks: "what time is it?" What do you say? Do you lie and say it's a dream or would you say the truth? You say: There is no time in space. The amount of time that has passed since the Big Bang is different everywhere, depending on the speed of a moving object. If there were two hypothetical watchers since the beginning of time, moving at different speeds, they would say a different time has passed. In addition, time is also affected by gravity. The closer you are to objects of great mass, the slower the time. You are out of time, absolute time does not exist. Of course he will tell you: I just wanna know what time it is. Then you'll say: oh, that's a bit different. The time as we see it, is a way of measure but we can't really measure time. We use time to measure intervals between events. We also use it to define the speed, which is the distance divided by tim...

Music tugs at our heartstrings and brain cells. But how or why? Think of the excitement you feel at a rock concert or the lump you get in your throat when the first dance starts at your friend's wedding. How nice it is to dance around your kitchen to your favorite Spotify playlist. The question of why music gives us the feels is a tricky one. And it's something psychologists have been investigating for a long time. Turns out this research might be so difficult because there are a whole bunch of explanations. First, it's worth pointing out that music really is universal. Whether you are hearing it through your ears or feeling something like rhythm through vibrations. It's been found to be part of every known human culture. And even as infants we react to and enjoy it. Different cultures also seem to use similar types of music for similar things. This suggests that music has an evolutionary purpose, which is something that scientists as far back as Darwi...

Permanent lava only exists in a few places around the globe. One of the strangest lava lakes is the top of  Mount Erebus  on the frozen continent of Antarctica. Probably the weirdest thing about this lake is that it's constantly releasing gas, and the composition of that gas changes on a roughly 10 minutes cycle. Erebus was a Greek god, the son of chaos, which is kind of fitting for a placement of ice and fire. Mount Erebus is the tallest peak on Ross Island, which lies close to the Antarctic mainland and is usually connected by ice sheets. It's an active volcano that's been bubbling away for decades, occasionally throwing off larger eruptions. The lava lake is around 20 meters deep and it sits in a crater which is itself inside of Mount Erebus's main crater. Under that lake is a conduit a tube that leads down to a chamber full of magma, underground lava. In other words, the lake is basically like a bowl with a hole in the bottom sitting on top of a pipe like...