Intensive Care Unit

A typical emotional Bollywood film often opens with a scene outside the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in a hospital. The patient's relatives sit in the waiting aisle, bearing serious facial expressions. It is one of the most tense moments of the film. This climax scene usually decides the course of the story and the lives of the characters involved. 

Interestingly the use of ICUs dates back to the 1800s, when Florence Nightingale, often referred to as the founder of modern nursing, created separate spaces for treating war soldiers with severe injuries. These soldiers were kept separate from the other war-impacted soldiers as they required special treatment and care. The ICU is a specialty facility of a hospital that cares for people who are not very stable in their health. These patients are usually suffering from serious, life-threatening illnesses. Hence, they require constant care and attention from a well-trained nursing force and doctors. This treatment is generally one-on-one unlike for the patients in the general ward.

Their bodily parameters are continuously monitored. A typical ICU is filled with several state-of-the-art, high-class instruments. When you have a closer look at it, the body seems like an experimental model to which several instruments are attached to create a working setup. One of the crucial components in this are the cardiac monitors. These are similar to ECGs and constantly monitor the heart activity- every heartbeat gets converted into an electrical signal which is amplified on a small screen next to the patient. Another one is a mechanical ventilator. The ventilator tube directly pushes air into the patient's lungs, through an invasion made through the windpipe and a ventilator mask attached to the mouth. Then there are syringes and infusion pumps that supply a constant dose of medication and liquid food to the patient. Again, the suction pumps, help remove liquid excretions generated by the body. As I said earlier, all of this looks like an experimental setup attached to a piece of flesh.

I had never felt the gravity of what the patient’s close relatives might be going through until I myself had to experience it. One has to go through extremely painful moments clouded with fear and doubt. But this pain is still nothing compared to what the patient might be going through. Having all those insertions made and tubes passing through various parts of the body must be so hurtful. For the doctors and nurses, the treatment is quite a routine procedure, but as someone related to the patient it's really tough to forebear and analyze what would happen next. And if the patient is unconscious (which is usually the case), then it's even more devoid of hope as all you have to look at are the lines on the ECG that show that the person is still alive.  

This incident made me realize the impermanence of life. The moment when someone is at the threshold of death, struggling to get a breath of life, makes all the other events insignificant. Health is the most valuable asset and taking it for granted is the biggest liability. Medical science has progressed tremendously. Health care is among the largest investing markets. It has improved the quality and efficiency of our lives multifold and helped eradicate several diseases. But good health is something that we need to create for ourselves. The right amount of work, good rest, active exercise, a healthy, junk-free diet, and learning to declutter the mind from unnecessary thoughts, little stuff, and toxic emotions are a few things that might work for good health. In the end, it's about having a healthy body and a free mind to live a happy life.

©Neha Kanase 

 A halt at the EV charging station 

Too many Electric vehicles (EVs) are visible in my locality lately. Although the EV battery technology was commercialized long back in India, may be, these vehicles are being preferred more now a days. 'To save the petrol expenditure' is the answer I got when I enquired a few users about their choice. 

One evening, while driving back home, I spotted an EV charging station outside a park. Out of my usual curious nature, I pulled over to have a closer look at the charging station. It consisted of 2 electricity output plugs similar to a petrol pump, a QR code to enter vehicle details and a meter that displayed the amount of charging done and time left to reach full-charge. It had a 60 KW charging capacity. I wanted to try it out, but mine isn't an EV.  I stood looking at it for sometime and left when the passerbys started staring at me.

After a few days, me and my friend drove for a weekend hangout. And guess what- she had got her brand new EV two wheeler. We travelled a lot that day, I told her about the charging station and she agreed to try it out. After scanning the QR, we filled in details like vehicle and charger type using the Bijlify app and made the payment. The charging plug was unlocked and the charging began once we connected the cable to our vehicle's charging port.

Regular vehicles work with the help of an internal combustion engine. The fuel used, most commonly diesel or petrol is consumed inside the combustion chamber that provides the vehicle with the energy required for locomotion. The electric vehicles, on the other hand have an electric motor in place of the internal combustion engine. The motor is powered by an internal battery that acts as the energy source for the vehicle. The battery requires regular charging through the inbuilt charge port of the vehicle. Just like our mobile charger acts as an AC to DC convertor, an EV vehicle charger too converts the AC received at the charging port during charging to DC for the battery. But this, being a very high voltage current is first converted to lower voltage and then transmitted to the electric motor that drives the wheels and moves the vehicle forward.

The initial purchase cost of an EV is more than the regular vehicle. But as some say, EV saves the regular fuel costs. Moreover, since it does not work through fuel combustion, it does not emit carbon dioxide- one of the culprits of climate change as being presented currently. Also, EVs aim at reducing the dependency on the conventional, depleting fossil fuels. But the irony is that the electricity on which an EV runs, comes through the burning of fossil fuels at the thermal power plants!

©Neha Kanase 

 

CHEMICAL REACTION ENGINEERING 

When a chemical reaction occurs, it doesn't announce at each stage about its progress or the mechanism through which it is moving ahead: well, I am kickstarting with a slow rate, reactant concentration is going down, half-life attained, the catalyst has crossed the activation energy barrier, I would now be throwing out some heat, the entropy is increasing and so on. Also at the mechanism level- I just deprotonated, hydride shifted to my carbon neighbor or the ring's a little too strained, I'd now expand to a six-membered one.

All the processes occur in tandem in a chemical reaction, very much in a flow. These are so interlinked that its kind of hard to segregate between them and know which one's actually going on. It's only possible if something goes wrong at a particular stage or if we try to freeze the discrete steps to understand what's going on. But this is still at the laboratory level. When these reactions are carried out in the industries, they are at a much larger scale and occur in chemical reactors. 

Chemical reactors act as hosts for carrying out these reactions. Designing and construction of a chemical reactor is one of the key aspects of chemical reaction engineering. All the reaction parameters come into the picture- kinetics, mechanism, flow dynamics, process control and so on. Chemists and engineers work together in this. While the chemists identify the parameters and reaction mechanism,  the engineers take part in the kinetics, working, and parameters' optimization. A chemical reaction is almost like a living entity. It hydrates, condenses, reacts, heats up and converts. The erection of a reactor takes all these aspects into the picture. It is a very intricate process with a detailed calculation of the specifications involved. There are different kinds of reactors that host chemical reactions on a daily basis in an industry. Also, scale-up of a chemical reaction is another aspect that engineers look into. For synthesizing reactions at large scales in an industry, expansion of the laboratory level reaction needs to be carried out. These need to be checked for reproducibility and feasibility at such a large scale. Sometimes, the mechanism that worked in a lab, might not work in an industry- you might not get the desired reaction intermediate that is supposed to take the reaction forward. In such cases, the mechanism and the reactor engineering might have to be modified. That's where the chemistry logic as well as creativity are applied.

Finally, the reaction end products are what we are concerned about. The starting material- reactants turning into the final outcome-products, that's the main aim. Once the reaction is completed, the products undergo several steps of fine-tuning- isolation from the reactor, purification, and testing. These end products obtained at industries are products of our daily use- medicines, food ingredients, dyes and paints that bring color to our life, pesticides and fertilizers, tyres, fibers, glues, digital displays, and whatnot. The list is endless, and so are our needs. Although there are now sustainable and green approaches to carrying out these reactions, still there's just so much that can be done, given the ever-increasing demand. Its probably high time to reduce the needs. Chemical industries employ large number of people at all levels- scientists, engineers, managers, workers, and many more. As of 2023, the Indian chemical sector hosts 11,000+ chemical companies and employees about 2 million people.

The models of these chemical reactors have evolved over time. They have turned into more efficient designs with minimum losses. The video below shows a  few models of chemical reactors featured at the ChemTech World and ChemExpo 2024. 

©Neha Kanase 

 Sweaty clothes and rocky roads

If you have never gone for a geology field work, you've never studied the subject. The word 'geology' might still sound alien to many ears, it did to me when I first heard about it. During my initial days of trying to understand this subject, I could not find anything else in it except one thing- rocks. Whether you are in the laboratory or outside, all you get to study is rocks. 

Geology awakened me to the presence of so many rocks around- based on the way they look and how they were formed- hard, soft, igneous, metamorphic, layered, folded, with joints, glassy, gemstones and many more. There are also the ones with dead creatures embedded in or at times engraved on them, that come under paleontology. These rocks are usually studied based on their texture, what are they made of, internal structure of the stuff they are made of and so on. Just like an X-ray machine is used in medical sciences to get the images of the human skeleton, an X-ray diffraction technique is used to study the internal structure or the crystal structure of a rock. The X-rays are bombarded on a part of the rock sample that is usually in the form of a powder. Depending on the kind of atoms present in the rock, the regions where they are present, spaces between them, the x-rays get scattered at different angles and with different intensities, studying which, the possible arrangement of the atoms and thus the internal structure can be understood. Before this point, I'd never gone to visit a place to study what kind of rocks are found there and how they are different from the ones found at other places.

These field visits would be day-long where, we would walk, climb, run, crawl through mountains, flatlands, plateaus and thorny paths. We would start early in the morning with a heavy first meal of the day- apparently that was the only meal of the day we would have without sweat or dust and in a quiet place. Lunch was usually packed to carry along. The field work for the day ended late in the evening, followed by a quiet dinner, with no energy left. The day would end with a discussion or more precisely, a day-summary session where our professor would discuss what all we saw during the day and explain extra stuff. We would finally get to sleep late at the night and after a few hours it would be time to get ready for the next day's field work. 

All the locations we had to visit during the day were always pre-planned. The first thing that we would do at any topography was to find out the latitude and longitude of the place using a software called Latlong. Then, our professor would ask us to observe the rock type, watch for any specific patterns in the rock- like folds, joints, its texture. He would also help us recollect whatever we'd studied in theory and try to correlate. We used an instrument called the clinometer to study the inclination and the angle between two rock surfaces. A hammer was also a part of our geological field kit. This was used to break apart a small portion of the rock to study its internals and for keeping a sample of it to carry at the laboratory. But this needed to be done really carefully. I remember once, me and my friend hit a rock surface so hard that there was a tiny sparkle created and a small piece flew up in the air. Fortunately it didn't hit anyone. The hammer was also used as a standard for estimating the size of a rock feature while we took pictures of it. It goes without saying that, a comprehensive report on our field work was mandatory for evaluation. We would map all the collected data. Just like maps and globes have a scale in them to incorporate places of large distances, geological maps have contour lines to connect regions of equal altitudes.

After the first two days, the purpose started getting clearer. It struck to me that these were attempts to answer some of the fundamental questions of the universe- How was the Earth formed? How did the life originate? What caused the things around us to be the way they are? 

Rocks were tools, studying which we could address some of these questions. Geology wasn't just rocks but something much beyond. This subject had a vast reasoning landscape for many of the natural phenomenon like the continental drift, earthquakes, volcanoes, the underground water table, petroleum and coal reserves and many more. One of the really interesting concepts is the geological time scale, a systematic classification of ages of the Earth based on the evolving rock strata.

Its been a long time now since I last studied the subject. Many of my friends have walked down the geological career paths. I get to hear many stories from the quarry mines, construction sites-where the base rock needs to be studied before laying the foundation and so on. Some of them are also in the ground water table studies and as petroleum geologists. I am not very sure about the current scope of this subject, only a geologist would be able to answer it. I've had my share of it with the first and the only geology field work of my life in 2018. After which I chose pungent odors and fumes of chemicals over dusty and rocky roads. 

©Neha Kanase 

 Lifting off the run-way

Every time I sit in an airplane, I feel the same sort of a pulling sensation in my gut during the take-off. The throat suddenly feels dry and the ear tubes close down. When the wheels lift off the runway, it feels weightless and an upward pull is experienced as if someone is dragging up from the edge of a cliff. 

This time, I got a seat right next to the wings. I don't mind the 'view-blocking' that it causes, but, it might really put someone off guard, when one sees the slight up-down motion of the farther portion of the wings due to the wind. It seems as if the wings aren't enough to support the plane body and might get knocked-off any moment. But I guess, that's how its supposed to be according to the flight dynamics. This basically works on Bernouli's principle. Daniel Bernouli was a swiss mathematician who applied equations to decode some of the observations of the physical world. According to Bernouli's principle, if the speed of the flow of a fluid is increased, then, a simultaneous decrease is seen in the pressure of the fluid. Faster the fluid flows, lesser pressure it exerts. Any substance that flows is defined as a fluid. So if we think of air as as a fluid (its made of particles that flow through), then, we can apply Bernouli's principle to understand the aerodynamics of a flight. The wings of the plane are designed in a manner such that the air moves faster above the wings than below. As the speed of the air increases, the pressure of the air above the wings decreases- from Bernouli's principle. The air pressure on top of the wings is less than the air pressure at the bottom of the wings. This pressure difference that is created, leads to the upward lift that pulls the airplane off the runway. This is a pre-calculated lift force based on Bernouli's equation. There are other factors and equations involved too, but, this is the primary one.

Speaking of aircrafts and aerodynamics, recently, there was a Defense Expo held in Pune, organized by the Maharashtra government. This was a first of its kind effort by the state, showcasing the defense and armament related exhibits. It was a wonderful experience to watch almost every aspect of the Indian Army, Navy and Airforce that was featured in an informative yet engaging manner. I have tried to coalesce a few glimpses of this Defense Expo in the form of a video here. 

©Neha Kanase 

Are you serious or-chiding?

Imagine being crammed in a really tiny, closed space and buried in mud, while you're still alive. Everyday you get soaked completely in the muddy water. After a few days of this, you start peeping out of your closed space. You somehow try to walk through all that mud and what not. Finally, you come of your own and blossom to the fresh air. You are quite happy with yourself and then suddenly someone looks at you and exclaims 'you're beautiful', and soon, you're gone!

In the quest of 'knowing stuff around us' somebody came across orchids. That person didn't just admire and move on, but started studying these floral beauties. Since, he hadn't seen them anywhere else, this turned out to be a rare encounter. And because it was rare and beautiful, it had a value. Soon that person started developing techniques in his laboratory to grow more of these and different types of them. Orchid cultivation is a huge area of study in the horticultural sector now. It has turned into a source of livelihood for many and a huge industrial market- because of whosoever buys them.

One very unique things about orchids, lies in their germination. They grow in association with a fungi called micorrhiza. Since very early stages, the fungi starts propagating in the vicinity of the orchid plant, usually near its roots. The fungi provides the plant with nutrients which it absorbs from the soil. The plant uses these along with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide during the process of photosynthesis. The glucose, generated in the form of food by the plant ,is given back to the fungi. Since, Fungi cannot undergo photosynthesis due to lack of chlorophyll pigment in them. This is usually done by means of an exchange-surface area created between them during growth. Its often referred to as a 'symbiotic relationship'. I have heard a few botanists talk about it as an example of helping each other or mutual understanding. But I don't think the two of them even know they are doing this. 

Its just like someone in the family gets the grocery and the other person cooks for both of them. I heard someone preach the value of helping each other just like the orchid and Fungi. I'm not sure if that sort of silent action works for us. Because if we (in many cases) help someone, we usually shout it to the whole world. I came across a few lovely orchids recently, put for display. Of course, I was window-shopping. Sometimes it feels so good to just admire and enjoy something rather than trying to figure out how and where it came from.

©Neha Kanase   

 Ornitho

A red vented Bulbul (Pycnonotus cafer) built a nest and laid eggs in one of the potted plants of our terrace. This was a few years back in 2019. The parent Bulbuls brought one straw at a time to build the nest. The nest was empty for quite a while. We became aware of the eggs only because of their not so usual chirping. Soon, this was a new experiment for me to observe and a lovely pastime activity. I maintained a diary, similar to a lab notebook- noting down the progress each day. Nothing major happened for the first few days. The mother Bulbul would sit for long hours over the eggs during the incubation period, as if meditating. 

On the 11th day, 3 little ones came out of those eggs. They simply lied on top of each other, without any movement. Since, it was a hanging pot, I would take pictures everyday, climbing upon a chair. At the beginning, the mother Bulbul would immediately start shouting when I went near the nest. But once she came to know that we weren't doing any harm to her infants, she was more relaxed. During the first few days, when the newborns were just lying on top of each other, I could feel a lot of heat as I went near the nest. After 2-3 days, tiny feathers started developing. Their beaks and jaw lines too became more prominent. This was a rapid phase of growth- within a week, they were covered in a blanket of feathers. She started feeding them more frequently (3-4 times daily) and their size also grew. But all three of them lived quite comfortably- the dimensions of the nest constructed were indeed perfect. 

Now, came the most interesting part of the journey- the first flight. After they grew and were feathered completely, slight movement of their wings was seen. They would flutter their wings up and down, imitating their mother. This is so wonderful- the knowledge of flying comes in-built with the wings. Nature has constructed the device and installed the programming as well. The crawling version just needs to be uninstalled.

It was a delight to watch, as the first one took it's leap out of the nest and halted over the balcony grill. Further, taking a second leap from the grill to a nearby branch. Soon, the second one also went off. The third one was a little bit slow, but he too managed to join his siblings. 

The nest was empty once again. This, so very much matches with the setting of this world- the promising emptiness that has nothing to offer, yet there is something that adds beauty to it which is hard to quantify and analyze. There are so many Bulbuls being born and nurtured everyday on this planet. This age old process is going on for billions of years. Yet, the emptiness has remained new, fresh and untouched.  

©Neha Kanase