10 Science Facts

[Mordred]

Today's theme: Various

1. Every year over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

2. The largest ever hailstone weighed over 1kg and fell in Bangladesh in 1986.

3. In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf.

4. Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.

5. The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.

6. The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

7. When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.

8. The Australian billygoat plum contains 100 times more vitamin C than an orange.

9. One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe was the size of a …pea.

10. A pig’s orgasm lasts for up to 30 minutes.

[z3ro]

The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
Where's the moon from then?!        How did the Earth catch it into orbit?

[Mordred]

The prevailing hypothesis today is that the Earth–Moon system formed as a result of a giant impact, where a Mars-sized body (named Theia) collided with the newly formed proto-Earth, blasting material into orbit around it, which accreted to form the Moon. Giant impacts are thought to have been common in the early Solar System. Computer simulations modelling a giant impact are consistent with measurements of the angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system and the small size of the lunar core. These simulations also show that most of the Moon came from the impactor, not from the proto-Earth.

[Mordred]

Today's theme: Various

1. Without its lining of mucus, your stomach would digest itself.

2. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.

3. There are 100.000 km (60,000 miles) of blood vessels in the human body.

4. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

5. On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried, the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

6. The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.

7. The call of the humpback whale is louder than the Concorde and can be heard from 500 miles away.

8. Each person sheds ~18kg (40lbs) of skin in his or her lifetime.

9. More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

10. A healthy person has 6,000 million, million, million hemoglobin molecules.

[Uriah]

Thanks again Mordred, and +1
When you say more germs are spread by shaking hands than kissing, isn't that irrelevant because when you kiss you are actually bringing those germs into more direct contact with your body, bypassing the skin barrier, whereas when you shake hands your skin protects you from infection? Or am I wrong?
I love all these facts, by the way, eventually they build up and become even more useful. Keep it up

[WirelessDesert]

Thanks again Mordred, and +1
When you say more germs are spread by shaking hands than kissing, isn't that irrelevant because when you kiss you are actually bringing those germs into more direct contact with your body, bypassing the skin barrier, whereas when you shake hands your skin protects you from infection? Or am I wrong?
I love all these facts, by the way, eventually they build up and become even more useful. Keep it up

But you don't come in contact with so much "germs" with your mouth do you?
Since you touch the handle of a door with your palm, it holds more germs. And apparently, the space of a single nail contains more germs then the sitting "lock" of a toilet.

[Mordred]

But you don't come in contact with so much "germs" with your mouth do you?
Since you touch the handle of a door with your palm, it holds more germs. And apparently, the space of a single nail contains more germs then the sitting "lock" of a toilet.

This is the correct answer to your question Uriah. Theoretically you have less bacteria in your mouth than on your hand or phone. Also in a various related fact, the mouth of the average dog contains about 1/3 the amount of bacteria as compared to the human mouth.

[WirelessDesert]

This is the correct answer to your question Uriah. Theoretically you have less bacteria in your mouth than on your hand or phone. Also in a various related fact, the mouth of the average dog contains about 1/3 the amount of bacteria as compared to the human mouth.

[picture]

AWW YEAH! I was right! And it was a wild guess!

[Mordred]

Today's theme: Various

1. A salmon-rich, low cholesterol diet means that Inuits rarely suffer from heart disease.

2. The world’s smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than the eye of a housefly.

3. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.

4. It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.

5. There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the Earth.

6. The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Arctic to Mexico and back every year.

7. Each rubber molecule is made of 65,000 individual atoms.

8. Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.

9. …and now they are already past the Moon.

10. The Saturn V rocket, which carried a man to the Moon, develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.

[Mordred]

Today's theme: Various

1. Koalas sleep an average of 22 hours a day, two hours more than the sloth.

2. Light would take .13 seconds to travel around the Earth.

3. Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth.

4. One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.

5. The weird static that you see on your TV set when you're not on a channel is created by the background radiation from the Big Bang.

6. Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda. This is why most scientists working on actual space travel are currently trying to build a proof-of-concept Alcubierre warp drive.

7. At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth.

8. The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is .02 inches.

9. The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of ~11 kilometers (35,797 feet).

10. The largest meteorite craters in the world are in Sudbury Ontario, Canada and in Vredefort, South Africa.

[0poitr]

5. The weird static that you see on your TV set when you're not on a channel is created by the background radiation from the Big Bang.

Not all of it. About 25-30%. Isn't it?

+1 for this link Alcubierre warp drive

[Mordred]

Today's theme: SPECIAL - The Alcubierre Warp Drive



The mesh you see under the shuttle is the fabric of space-time as described by Albert Einstein. The Alcubierre Warp Drive bends space-time in front of the ship, and expands it behind it. At the end of the post there is a short video that will show you this effect graphically so don't worry if you don't understand it now.


A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity.

The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be "warped" both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

Michio Kaku dubbed Alcubierre's notion a "passport to the universe." It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time, and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.

White speculates that such a drive could result in "speeds" that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

In terms of the engine's mechanics, a spheroid object would be placed between two regions of space-time (one expanding and one contracting). A "warp bubble" would then be generated that moves space-time around the object, effectively repositioning it — the end result being faster-than-light travel without the spheroid (or spacecraft) having to move with respect to its local frame of reference.

"Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed," White told. "However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy."

And indeed, early assessments published in the ensuing scientific literature suggested horrific amounts of energy — basically equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter (what is 1.9 × 1027 kilograms or 317 Earth masses). As a result, the idea was brushed aside as being far too impractical. Even though nature allowed for a warp drive, it looked like we would never be able to build one ourselves.

"However," said White, "based on the analysis I did the last 18 months, there may be hope." The key, says White, may be in altering the geometry of the warp drive itself.

In October of last year, White was preparing for a talk he was to give for the kickoff to the 100 Year Starship project in Orlando, Florida. As he was pulling together his overview on space warp, he performed a sensitivity analysis for the field equations, more out of curiosity than anything else.

"My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along," he recalled. "I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible." White had adjusted the shape of Alcubierre's ring which surrounded the spheroid from something that was a flat halo to something that was thicker and curvier.

He presented the results of his Alcubierre Drive rethink a year later at the 100 Year Starship conference in Atlanta where he highlighted his new optimization approaches — a new design that could significantly reduce the amount of exotic matter required. And in fact, White says that the warp drive could be powered by a mass that's even less than that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

That's a significant change in calculations to say the least. The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White's sense of plausibility — and NASA's.


Graphical View of the Alcubierre Warp Drive - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZt1Yh4-1U&feature=player_embedded

[Uriah]

+1 and thank you so very much for that. That was an extremely interesting read.

[Mordred]

Sorry about the absence of these things in the past few days. Been quite busy, but to make it up to you guys I will be making another short "series" similar to the one in the beginning called "When a star dies it can turn into: ...".




Today's theme: Quantum Mechanics: #1 Introduction to the quantum world

1. Quantum mechanics (QM – also known as quantum physics, or quantum theory) is a branch of physics which deals with physical phenomena at microscopic scales, where the action is on the order of the Planck constant and the size of particles is of the order of Planck length.

2. In physics, the Planck length, denoted ℓP, is a unit of length, equal to 1.616199(97)×10−35 metres. It is a base unit in the system of Planck units. The Planck length can be defined from three fundamental physical constants: the speed of light in a vacuum, Planck's constant, and the gravitational constant. It is almost impossible for me to explain to you how small that is, so in order to help you visualize it please check out this link and move the bar to the left slowly (for small, or right for bigger): http://htwins.net/scale2/

3. Quantum mechanics provides a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter.

4. In advanced topics of quantum mechanics, some of these behaviors are macroscopic and emerge at only extreme (i.e., very low or very high) energies or temperatures. The name quantum mechanics derives from the observation that some physical quantities can change only in discrete amounts (Latin: quanta), and not in a continuous (cf. analog) way.

5. In the context of quantum mechanics, the wave–particle duality of energy and matter and the uncertainty principle provide a unified view of the behavior of photons, electrons, and other atomic-scale objects.

6. Wave–particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties.

7. In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle known as complementary variables, such as position x and momentum p, can be known simultaneously. For instance, the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. You can't know where a particle is AND how fast it's going, at the same time.

8. Even with the defining postulates of both Einstein's theory of general relativity and quantum theory being indisputably supported by rigorous and repeated empirical evidence and while they do not directly contradict each other theoretically (at least with regard to their primary claims), they have proven extremely difficult to incorporate into one consistent, cohesive model.

9. Predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified experimentally to an extremely high degree of accuracy. According to the correspondence principle between classical and quantum mechanics, all objects obey the laws of quantum mechanics, and classical mechanics is just an approximation for large systems of objects (or a statistical quantum mechanics of a large collection of particles). The laws of classical mechanics thus follow from the laws of quantum mechanics as a statistical average.

WARNING: Complex terms follow! In order to fully understand today's #10 you will probably have to wait until this particular series is done. I will be explaining M-theory completely after the quantum mechanics series that just started, however today's #10 will offer you a taste of what's to come for this topic, and how it's related to quantum mechanics. Without further ado:

10. The quest to unify the fundamental forces through quantum mechanics is still ongoing. Quantum electrodynamics (or "quantum electromagnetism"), which is currently the most accurately tested physical theory, has been successfully merged with the weak nuclear force into the electroweak force and work is currently being done to merge the electroweak and strong force into the electrostrong force. Current predictions state that at around 10¹⁴ GeV the three aforementioned forces are fused into a single unified field. Beyond this "grand unification," it is speculated that it may be possible to merge gravity with the other three gauge symmetries, expected to occur at roughly 10¹⁹ GeV. However — and while special relativity is parsimoniously incorporated into quantum electrodynamics — the expanded general relativity, currently the best theory describing the gravitation force, has not been fully incorporated into quantum theory. One of the leading authorities continuing the search for a coherent TOE (Theory of Everything) is Edward Witten, a theoretical physicist who formulated the groundbreaking M-theory, which is an attempt at describing the supersymmetrical based string theory. M-theory posits that our apparent 4-dimensional spacetime (1.up-down +2.forward-back + 3.left-right + 4.time) is, in reality, actually an 11-dimensional spacetime containing 10 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, although 7 of the spatial dimensions are - at lower energies - completely "compactified" (or infinitely curved) and not readily amenable to measurement or probing.

 

[Uriah]

Thanks again Mordred, it's so awesome that there are people as interested in this stuff that I am. I guess my independent studies are holding up, too, because i either already knew or perfectly understood all of that
We should discuss this stuff together sometime.
Anyways, would you mind please explaining quantum foam? It's the most interesting thing to me at the moment, and my understanding of it is very limited. Thanks, and plus 1