Do You Know?
1. I have seen photos of Luis Armstrong’s footprint on the moon. Why is moondust so sticky?
Ans: First of all, this famous photo is not of Armstrong's footprint, but of his colleague, Buzz Aldrin, who was the second person to set foot on the moon! The picture was taken by Armstrong. 
The moon is not covered with beach sand, nor with desert sand, but with extremely fine-grained mineral dust with jagged edges and a static electrical charge. It is called the lunar regolith and has very different properties from Earth's soil.
The picture shows what beach sand looks like under a microscope. The edges of each grain are rounded from repeated jostling against each other. This is called "weathering", with natural resources such as wind, water, and even ice, degrading large rocks into fine sand grains over time. As a result, dry sand quickly fills a depression.
But that’s not the case for industrial mineral dust, for talc, or for moon dust or Mars dust. Grains of these are the result of impact events, not erosion. The grains still have the shape they had when they formed, and unless they were molten when they formed, that’s usually a jagged shape. Remember the moon has no atmosphere. The lunar regolith is made of very sharp and adhesive particles, and apparently has a distinct smell of gunpowder. 
Soil from the lunar maria has grains which are tiny, jagged, electrically charged (when on the moon) and surrounded by vacuum instead of air. When you make an imprint in dust of this type, the impression stays put. So those footprints are still on the Moon!
Since there is no atmosphere, and no wind, on the moon, how does "weathering" of moon rock occur? That is, why do we even find any fine particles on the moon? This is because of mechanical weathering: bombardment of the moon's surface by meteors, solar and interstellar atomic particles, over billions of years. This is because the moon has no atmosphere to protect it from such bombardment. Due to these impacts, the thin dust on the lunar surface is electrically and magnetically charged. Just like your comb causes your hair to rise up on a dry day due to static electricity, the moon dust sticks to any surface with which it comes in contact. Unlike mud, it doesn't need to be wet to make impressions on it: it is self-sticky.
In fact, when Armstrong and Aldrin (and all others who have landed on the moon) put down their feet on the lunar surface, the sharp grains would have got embedded into their shoes (like a splinter or thorn). It is very abrasive and almost impossible to clean off. It stuck to the astronaut's clothes, to their equipment, to every exposed surface. In fact, if exposed to it, moon dust can damage their lungs as well. It is a major consideration in space exploration like Mars landing missions.
Fun fact: When any module lands on (or takes off from) the moon, the dust around it rises, and then quickly falls back. That is, you will not see a cloud of dust hovering in the air to indicate that it was disturbed. This is because there is no air to keep the dust airborne; also gravity on the moon is very much less than on Earth, so the dust settles very quickly.

2. Are cyclones getting worse than they were before?
Ans: Yes. The number and percentage of storms that reach the level of Cagtegory-3 cyclones (with about 200 km per hour wind speeds) has increased over the last 40 years. As the world warms, tropical cyclones are likely to bring higher amounts of rainfall as well as reach higher wind speeds. The more the change in global temperature, the more extreme will the cyclones be.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the proportion of cyclones reaching Category 4 (where wind speeds can reach up to 250 km per hour) or even Category 5 (any stomr beyond this level, that causes extreme damage), will increase by about 10% if global temperature rises by 1.5 degrees. The fraction will increase to 40% if the temperature increase is 4 degrees. Why does this happen?
As the Earth warms, more heat is trapped in the ocean water. As storms move over the oceans, they absorb this heat and convert it into the kinetic energy that powers the wind. Also, since the oceans warm up earlier than ever at the end of winter, storms also begin occurring earlier than before. Once a storm absorbs enough heat, it turns into a cyclone that brings death and destruction in its path.
A further effect is that the movement of cyclones is slowing down; it is not clear why. But the end result is that the cyclone now moves slowly over the land, and thus has more time to bring huge amounts of rain to any place. Sometimes the entire cyclone gets stuck over one place, and then brings unimaginable amounts of rain for many days to that place. 
Finally, the air over warmer oceans and land is also getting warmer. Warm air can hold more moisture (7% more per degree) than cold air. So cyclones can get even wetter because of this, although this is a smaller effect.
You may have noticed that cyclones tend to form in the tropics, beyond about 9 degrees North and South latitudes. This is because the Coriolis force due to the rotation of the Earth, needed to make cyclonic winds form and turn about a calm centre, is sufficiently large only at latitudes away from the Equator. Now, because of the oceans warming, cyclones are forming farther and farther away from the Equator, by about 50 km every decade. This seems like a small amount, but what happens is that it exposes people to cyclones who are not used to dealing with them. Their homes may not be built to withstand cyclone-force winds and so the damage will be even more.
In general, there is no good news about cyclones due to climate change.

3. Which part of the human body evolved most recently?
Ans: Evolution doesn’t just hand out useful traits such as opposable thumbs or colour vision like lottery prizes. Natural selection is constantly tinkering, and no part of our body is more ‘recent’ than another. But some are changing faster. But evolution is a very slow process: time scales of 10,000 years are involved in evolutionary changes. Some of the more obvious changes over the years are:

a) After millions of years of increasing in size, the human brain suddenly shrank 10% 10,000 years ago. But in general, our skull is getting bigger. Plus, we are getting taller. In particular, the neocortex comprises the largest part of the cerebral cortex and makes up approximately half the volume of the human brain. It is thought to be responsible for the neuronal computations of attention, thought, perception and episodic memory. This is the most recently evolved area of the brain.
b) One of the fastest movers is the human jaw, which has been steadily shrinking over the last 10,000 years, as the invention of agriculture and cooking gave us softer foods that need less chewing.
c) Blue eyes: This trait is a result of a mutation in a single ancestor that occurred 6,000–10,000 years ago. The mutation affected the OCA2 gene, which limits the production of melanin in the iris, resulting in blue eyes.
d) Humans are definitely still evolving. Lactase persistence, or the ability to continue breaking down lactose through adulthood is a fairly recent change on the timescale of evolution. The long switch from hunting-gathering to agrarian society gave humans who could continue to consume milk past infancy an advantage over their peers who couldn't.
e) A recent Australian study showed that human beings are evolving an extra artery to feed blood to their hands. The prevalence was around 10 per cent in people born in the mid-1880s compared to 30 per cent in those born in the late 20th Century, so that’s a significant increase in a fairly short period of time. Some scientists believe that by the end of the century most human beings will have this artery.The arrows in the figure point to the new artery that human beings are evolving.

4. Can AI turn my thoughts into speech directly?
Ans: Yes, indeed such a decoder has been made. It can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text. In other words, it allows a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively for the first time. Incredible, isn't it?
The decoder could reconstruct speech with very high accuracy while people listened to a story – or even silently imagined one – using only fMRI scan data. Functional MRI (fMRI) Functional MRI is a type of MRI scan that can show which areas of your brain are most active. Tracking and comparing that activity to what you were doing at the time can help “map” your brain activity. It's most often used for planning surgery or similar procedures in the brain.
Previous language decoding systems have required surgical implants, and this latest advance raises the hope of new ways to restore speech in patients struggling to communicate due to a stroke or motor neurone disease.
The fundamental limitation of fMRI is that there is an inherent time lag between receiving and decoding the signal. This makes tracking activity in real-time impossible. The lag exists because fMRI scans measure the blood flow response to brain activity, which peaks and returns to baseline over about 10 seconds, meaning even the most powerful scanner cannot improve on this. This limit has hampered the ability to interpret brain activity in response to natural speech because it gives a “mishmash of information” spread over a few seconds.
However, the advent of large language models – the kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI) underpinning OpenAI’s ChatGPT – provided a new way in. These models are able to represent, in numbers, the semantic meaning of speech. This means that scientists can look at which patterns of neuronal activity corresponded to strings of words with a particular meaning rather, than attempting to read out activity word by word.
The learning process was intensive: three volunteers were required to lie in a scanner for 16 hours each, listening to podcasts. The decoder was trained to match brain activity to specific meanings using a large language model.
Later, the same participants were scanned while they were listening to a new story or imagining telling a story. The decoder was used to generate text from their brain activity alone. About half the time, the text closely – and sometimes precisely – matched the intended meanings of the original words.
For instance, when a participant was played the words “I don’t have my driver’s licence yet”, the decoder translated them as “She has not even started to learn to drive yet”. In another case, the words “I didn’t know whether to scream, cry or run away. Instead, I said: ‘Leave me alone!’” were decoded as “Started to scream and cry, and then she just said: ‘I told you to leave me alone.’”
The decoder struggled with getting "He" versus "She" versus "I" right; it's not clear why. However, this is already a major break-through. 
The scientists are also aware that such technology could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that. They want to make sure that it only reaches people in a helpful way. 

5. Why do cotton clothes get crumpled so easily?
Ans: Have you've ever spent time wondering why your cotton clothing wrinkles so easily? (We do!) It's because of something we're surrounded by - water.
Cotton (like most plants) is made of a substance called cellulose, which contains hydrogen - an essential ingredient in water. When this material is woven into a piece of apparel - like a shirt - the hydrogen particles are attracted to each other and form a bond. This gives the shirt shape and helps it to maintain its form when it's worn, sat upon or folded - unless you get wet.
If you sweat, spend time in a humid area, spill a liquid on yourself or wash your shirt, it wrinkles. Water is the key culprit behind wrinkling of cellulose-based fabrics, such as cotton, linen, and rayon. The polymers in these fabrics are linked by hydrogen bonds, which are the same bonds that hold together molecules of water. Absorbent fabrics allow water molecules to penetrate the areas between the polymer chains, permitting the formation of new hydrogen bonds. The new shape becomes locked in as the water evaporates and causes wrinkles.
Heat breaks the bonds holding polymers in place within the fibers of a fabric. When the bonds are broken, the fibers are less rigid with respect to each other, so they can shift into new positions. As the fabric cools, new bonds form, locking the fibers into a new shape. This is why clothes that have just been brought in from a hot sun and dumped in a heap get badly wrinkled. This is also the reason why ironing gets wrinkles out of your clothes! 
Non-toxic, chemical treatments are available nowadays, to get wrinkle-free fabric.

Taken from several sources