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THE HINDU IN SCHOOL I MONDAY I JUNE 1 I 2015

3SCIENCE & TECHWord of the dayExtemporize (Verb): Speaking with little preparation Used in a sentence: The librarian extemporised very well. She wassuddenly called to talk at the event. Your turn! Pick a word from today’s The Hindu in School, themeaning of which you do not know and send it to us atschool@thehindu.co.in. (Subject: Word of the day)

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Which of these two scenariosbest fit how you spent yourtime during the holidays: Didyou laze around in yourhouse, ordering the latestmobile with the best RAMspecifications from an e-commerce seller, pizzas fordinner and spent hours play-ing the most recently re-leased games? Or did you goaround with your parentswhenever you got thechance, helping them withtheir shopping and dailychores, and earned yourselfsome extra pocket money? Ifyou belong to the latter cate-gory, then you might appre-ciate this article a wee-bitmore…

If you’ve been out shop-ping, then you surely wouldhave encountered a shoppingcart. You see it, you use it tofill in with all the essentialcommodities that you wantto buy, and you leave it onceyou’ve settled the bill and gotyour goods transferred toyour bags. Did you ever stopto think how these cartscame to be? Let’s find out…

Born in 1898, Sylvan N.Goldman had steadied him-self by the 1930s after havingbeen through the Great De-pression. He owned theHumpty Dumpty supermar-ket chain in Oklahoma Cityand was doing reasonablywell.

Sitting in his store one day,Goldman noticed that hiscustomers were carryingtheir groceries in hand-heldbaskets. It didn’t take himlong to realise that this wasacting as a limiting factor, ascustomers stopped purchas-

ing if the basket eithercouldn’t fit in anything more,or had become too heavy tocarry around.

Staring idly at a woodenfolding chair, Goldman won-dered how he could make theshopping experience more

comfortable for his custom-ers, which in effect wouldlead to better results for him.That was when it struck himthat by replacing the seatwith baskets, and addingwheels on the legs, he couldgive his customers a shop-ping cart.

Doubters

Working with Fred Young,a mechanic, Goldman got hisfirst prototypes made. Metalframes with two wire bas-kets, they were designed tobe folded such that the twobaskets nested on each other.

Owing to his stroke of inspi-ration, Goldman namedthem ‘folding basket carri-ers’. Papers in OklahomaCity carried advertisementsof these on June 4, 1937. Ifyou are under the impressionthat they were an instant hit,wait till you hear this. Whilemen thought using thesemight make them look weak,women considered them notso fashionable.

Goldman hired models ofdifferent age groups and bothsexes and made them pre-tend like they were shopping.Add to it a store greeter whoencouraged the use of thesecarts, success was inevitable.Shops were designed suchthat checkout counters andaisles aided the use of shop-ping carts and by the 1940s,their popularity was huge.

Space saverIn 1946, Orla E. Watson

from Kansas City came upwith a telescoping shoppingcart that enabled the carts tobe fitted into one another,saving precious shop space atthe front and allowing forcompact storage. Patent warsensued between Watson andGoldman before they eventu-ally reached upon a settle-ment.

As for the carts, the basicdesign has more or less re-mained the same, while ergo-nomic changes have beentaken into account. Most re-tail supermarkets offer thesecarts in the hope that biggercarts that are convenient tomove around encourages thecustomers to buy more, in-creasing their sales.

Reach the writer atganesh.a.s@thehindu.co.in

Go cart-ing!When Sylvan N Goldman introduced the carts in his supermarkets to make shopping comfortable for hiscustomers, they weren’t welcomed with open arms. Goldman had to do more to actually make men andwomen start wheeling it.

A.S.Ganesh

HANDY A shopping trolley is pushed around a supermarket in London, Britain.PHOTO: REUTERS

While men thought using these might makethem look weak, women considered themnot so fashionable. Goldman hired modelsof different age groups and both sexes andmade them pretend like they wereshopping.

AN EYE FOR AN I

Just before noon on April25, 2015, the ground inNepal started to move.For about 30 seconds,people felt the groundshaking beneath them. Itdoesn’t sound like a verylong time, but it doesn’ttake long for an earth-quake to cause damage.The ground shook somuch and so hard thathouses cracked, buildingsflattened, and thousandsof people were hurt orkilled.

After the earthquake,cities and villages wereruined. Where there usedto be buildings, therewere only broken pieces.People were trapped un-der collapsed houses. Tosave people, you have todig them out. But first,you have to know wherethey are.

How can you findsomeone buried underrubble? You can’t yelltheir name because theywon’t be able to hear you.

If they yell for help, youcan’t hear them either.What you can do is listenfor their heartbeats. Youmight be thinking,“Heartbeats are veryquiet. You can’t just hearthem!” That’s normallytrue. You can’t hear themwith your ears, but youcan find them with a spe-cial machine.

Using radarThis new machine is

called FINDER. Thatstands for “Finding Indi-viduals for Disaster andEmergency Response.” Ituses radar to look for peo-ple under bricks, mud,

and pieces of buildings. Itwas built by scientists andengineers from NASA andthe United States Depart-ment of Homeland Secu-rity.

FINDER is the size of asuitcase. It weighs aboutas much as a two gallonsof water. When rescueworkers need to findsomeone, they turn it on,and the machine searchesfor heartbeats. It cansense a heartbeat even ifthe person is buried un-der 30 feet of brokenconcrete.

When the earthquakehit Nepal, the people whobuilt FINDER knew itwould be very helpful.They brought two of themachines to Nepal rightaway. On April 29, theyfound four men trappedunder collapsed build-ings. FINDER saved theirlives.

RADAR DETECTIVE FINDER joined a contingent of international rescuersin northern Nepal. This photo was taken on April 29 in Kathmandu.CREDIT: DAVID LEWIS, R4 INC.

Katie McKissickNASA can also use radar to find birds in thesky. http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/birds

Looking for heartbeats

Have you ever seen shoot-ing stars streaking acrossa clear night sky? Theseflashes of light often disap-pear as fast as they ap-peared, in the blink of aneye... But they actually havenothing to do with stars!Shooting stars, or meteors,are small solid grains enter-ing our atmosphere at highspeeds. They are going sofast that the air aroundthem heats up, makes themshine, and usually burnsthem up.

Fragments of asteroidsDuring its orbit around

the Sun, the Earth is con-stantly bombarded by par-ticles of all sizes, andextraterrestrial stonesthat make it to the groundare called meteorites. Vid-eos of meteorite falls haveallowed scientists to recon-struct the trajectories ofthese objects and to tracktheir provenance: meteo-rites almost invariablycome from a region be-tween Mars and Jupiternamed the “Main AsteroidBelt”. Most of them are in-deed fragments ofasteroids.

Asteroids are like smallplanets, although often of

irregular shapes. They arethe left-overs of the forma-tion of the bigger planets atthe beginning of the SolarSystem.

The link between meteo-rites and asteroids was re-cently spectacularlyconfirmed by a Japaneseprobe which returned dustsamples from a 600 meter-sized asteroid named Ito-kawa: these samples werefound to be identical withone of the major groups ofmeteorites, thus provingthat the meteorites belong-ing to this group and Itoka-wa derived from thefragmentation of the sameasteroid.

A glimpse of the pastMost meteorites have

undergone little changesince their parent asteroidassembled. They thus giveus a glimpse at the compo-sition of the Solar System inits first million years. Infact, it is through primitivemeteorites that scientistswere able to determine theage of the Solar Systemwith great precision: theyobtained 4.568 billionyears. Our Sun deserves acheerful “happy birthday”,right?

As they represent theoriginal matter from whichplanets were built, prim-

itive meteorites are madeof the same chemical ele-ments as the Earth (iron,magnesium, silicon, ox-ygen, etc.). Yet, they con-tain distinctive inclusions,the most conspicuousamong them being millim-eter-sized round grainscalled chondrules. The ori-gin of chondrules is still a

mystery, although it seemsthey were formed as moltendroplets which solidifiedbefore being incorporatedin the asteroid. The tem-perature must have beenvery high to melt the min-erals they contain, but the

nature of the heatingevents that lead to their for-mation is stillcontroversial.

Asteroids have not al-ways been cold inert bod-ies. Like the Earth, theywere originally heated up

by spontaneous radioac-tive disintegration ofatoms within them, as oc-curs in a nuclear powerplant. Some of them wereheated so intensely thatthey experienced a largedegree of melting, whicherased the primitive struc-tures such as the chon-drules. In these asteroids,

the dense metals separatedfrom the stony material toform a metallic core over-laid by a stony mantle andcrust. Some meteorites arefragments of these “differ-entiated” asteroids.

Meteorites originatingfrom their cores are fullymetallic, whereas frag-ments from the mantle aremetal-free and quite simi-lar to terrestrial igneousrocks. In fact, the Earth un-derwent the very same dif-ferentiation between ametallic core and a rockycrust. So, when you hold aniron meteorite, which is a

piece from a shattered ce-lestial body, it is almost asthough you were touchingthe deepest regions of ourplanet!

Emmanuel Jacquet is as-sistant professor at theFrench National Museumof Natural History in Paris,working on meteorites andthe formation of the SolarSystem. Jonathan Freun-dlich is a PhD student at theParis Observatory, inFrance, working on starformation and galaxy evo-lution. The authors can bereached at jonathan.freundlich@obspm.fr.

Meteorites: witnesses of the solar system’s birth Emmanuel Jacquet &Jonathan Freundlich

SHOOTING STAR A spectacular meteor fall painted by Frederic Edwin Church in 1860. COLLECTION OFJUDITH FILENBAUM HERNSTADT.

ASTROPHYSICAL SERIES

● To determine the age of the SolarSystem, scientists can use radioactiveelements in meteorites. The amount ofsuch an element decreases with time, someasuring its abundance yields the age ofthe meteorite.

● The name “chondrule” comes from theGreek “chondros”, which means “smallgrain”. A meteorite with chondrules iscalled a chondrite.

● Igneous rocks are rocks formed fromsolidified magma or lava, such as basalt orgranite.

● An impressive meteor fall such tookplace recently in Chelyabinsk, Russia. Youcan easily find videos of the event on theInternet.

Streak: FlashExtraterrestrial:Things/creatures fromouter spaceTrajectory: RouteProvenance: OriginPrimitive: Ancient Inert: LifelessSpontaneous: ImpulsiveDisintegration: Collapse Wee: SmallErgonomic: Scientificdiscipline that deals withthe design that optimiseshuman well-being andoverall systemperformance.

GLOSSARYWASHINGTON: Famous Holly-wood actor Jon Cryer hasgiven his voice to a new NA-SA film celebrating 50th an-niversary of the firstspacewalk by a U.S.astronaut.

On June 3, 1965, NASAastronaut Ed White becamethe first American to walkin space.

NASA is celebrating the50th anniversary of theU.S.’ first extravehicular ac-

tivity (EVA) — betterknown as a spacewalk —through a number of com-memorative features.

On June 1, NASA will pre-miere a documentary nar-rated by actor Jon on thehistory and future of hu-mans working on a tether inspace.

The film titled “Suit Up”will be aired on NASA Tele-vision and can be seen onthe US space agency’s web-

site and YouTube account.The documentary fea-

tures interviews with NASAAdministrator and astro-naut Charles Bolden, NASADeputy Administrator andspacesuit designer DavaNewman, as well as otherastronauts, engineers, tech-nicians, managers and lu-minaries of spacewalkhistory.

They will share their per-sonal stories that cover the

full EVA experience — fromspacesuit manufacturing tospacewalk manoeuvring —all brought to life throughhistorical and HD footage.IANS

NASA celebrates 50th anniversary of first U.S. spacewalk

Astronaut Ed White ispictured during his strollthrough space. PHOTO:THE HINDU ARCHIVES