Science kits

Nicolae Minovici Self hanging experiment

2022-02-08T10:53:00.008+01:00

Nicolae Minovici was a Romanian scientist who was obsessed with finding out what happens to the human body during a hanging. In fact, he wrote an essay in which he analyzed almost 200 cases of people who had been hanged, and the factors that influenced, such as the type of knot of the rope, the weight and even the gender of the person.

Minovici, he was not happy with just "reading" about people who had been executed in this way, he wanted to know how he really felt, so he started a series of quite strange experiments and above all dangerous.

First he did some preliminary tests with a rope that did not contract, he hung himself 6 times a few seconds to get used to it, but as Minovici himself wrote in his notes:

"The pain was almost intolerable"

Still, he was determined to experience what it felt like to be hanged, so he leveled up.

He and some of his collaborators put their heads in a regular contraction rope and asked an assistant to hang them, twelve times in a row.

He also performed choking experiments on volunteers by applying pressure on their carotid arteries and jugular veins for up to five seconds, until the faces of his subjects became red. During their post-experiment accounts, the volunteers recounted experiences such as vision problems, heat sensation in the head, as well as paraesthesias such as a tingling and numbing sensation in multiple places of their bodies.

When describing previous experiments, Minovici repeatedly apologizes saying that "despite all his courage, he could not endure the experiment for more than three or four seconds."

Despite his efforts, Minovici failed to find tangible results from his series of hangings, which in total numbered almost a dozen. Nicolae Minovici died at the age of 73 in 26 June 1941 from an illness affecting his vocal cords.

Footnotes

Nicolae Minovici: The Man Who Hanged Himself Repeatedly To Study Death!

Formation of the Planets in our solar system after the Big Bang

2021-07-17T09:33:00.001+01:00

The gas giants are first generation planets and were formed 4.6 billion years ago: first Jupiter and Saturn, then Neptune and Uranus.

Jupiter is said to be the oldest planet in the solar system and was formed shortly after the Sun. It would have been followed by Saturn.

We know this because unlike Uranus, Neptune and the rocky planets, Jupiter and Saturn are rich in helium and hydrogen.

By the time the other planets were formed, much of the hydrogen and helium in the primordial cloud in the solar system had disappeared. Jupiter and Saturn are representative samples of this cloud.

Among the rocky planets there are first, second and perhaps third generation planets.

According to the "giant impact hypothesis", the Earth is a second generation planet formed by a collision between rocky planets of the primitive solar system, Gaia and Theia.

These two planets collided 4.468 billion years ago, more than 100 million years after their formation.

The hypothesis proposes that Theia was formed at a Lagrange point of the Gaia-Sun system, at the same distance from the Sun as Gaia, but forming with them an equilateral triangle.

After Theia had reached the current size of Mars, 6,500 km in diameter, the other planets would have destabilized it and caused its collision with Gaia.

Theia would have struck Gaia at a speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour at an oblique angle, ejecting portion of both Theia and Gaia into space and creating a ring of debris around the new Earth. By accretion, between one and a hundred years later, half of this debris would have given birth to the Moon.

Mercury would also be a second generation rocky planet. Indeed the core of Mercury has a higher iron content than that of any other planet.

Mercury would have been formed by collision between an ancient planet of approximately 2.25 the current mass of Mercury and a planet of approximately 1/6 of this mass. The impact would have removed much of the mantle of the old planet, leaving the core behind at the base of the formation of Mercury.

The Arago spot

2021-07-11T08:45:00.002+01:00

Oh, there’s a beautiful experiment first done back in 1818 that really was the decisive experiment in favor of treating light as a wave: The infamous Arago spot.

You see, in the early 19th century, whether or not light traveled in a straight line or behaved more like a wave was an open question. Sure, there were experiments like Young’s, but they were not considered decisive. Newton’s corpuscular theory of light was still the preferred view by many.

Then came Poisson, who studied Fresnel’s wave theory of light, in particular the diffraction of light by the edges of objects. Poisson calculated that when it comes to the shadow of a circular object, diffraction should cause a faint spot of light appear at the exact center of its circular shadow. This faint spot would be there because light waves, diffracted by the edges of the circular object, would arrive at the center (and only at the center) with the same phase, causing constructive interference. Elsewhere, rays of light will have traveled paths of different lengths from different parts of the circumference of the circular object, and thus no constructive interference would occur.

Poisson actually thought that this nonsensical prediction (a spot of light at the center of the shadow) would disprove the wave theory of light. However, the head of the committee entrusted to study the properties of light by the French Academy of Sciences, Arago, behaved exactly like a proper scientist should: he actually carried out the experiment!

And guess what: The Arago spot was there. It is not easy to see, e.g., in this Wikipedia picture (supposedly an actual photo, not a simulated image), but it’s right there in the center, I can see it even on my mediocre quality Laptop:

Because of its convoluted history, that faint spot at the center is sometimes called the Arago spot, the Fresnel-Arago spot, even the Poisson-Arago spot. Whatever we call it, it was the decisive experiment that proved the wave nature of light.

In the decades that followed, light was of course eventually unified with electromagnetic phenomena in the form of Maxwell’s theory, and then came the quantum theory, then quantum electrodynamics, yielding our modern view of the electromagnetic field as a quantum field, its quantized excitations serving as light quanta, i.e., photons, which sometimes behave just like Newton’s light corpuscles were expected to behave. But that, as they say, is a story for another day.

Now let's Take a quiz

Elon musk's Starship concept of taking Humans to mars

2021-07-06T11:32:00.001+01:00

The whole purpose of the Starship concept is that it makes transport from Earth to Mars and back again not just possible, but practical.

The first part of the concept relies upon the use of orbital refuelling to refill the Starship in LEO. This basically externalises the staging of the system and allows huge cargoes to be transported to the red planet. Think of it this way, if you are heading to a destination that is literally millions of miles from home, with no prospect of a rescue mission if things go wrong, do you want to be in a tiny capsule with just a few tonnes of supplies, or do you want a huge space ship around you, and 100 tonnes of gear with you? Starship allows this to happen thanks to it getting a fresh charge of fuel and oxidiser in orbit, effectively “resetting” the rocket equation at a position that allows a much lower energy transfer to occur.

Now you have a spacecraft with full tanks, just like on the launch pad, but already travelling at 8km/s, giving you a huge boost in what you are able to do. This new fuel allows you to boost out of Earth’s gravitational influence, get to Mars and slow down to be “captured” by it. The “belly flop” landing technique is yet another fuel saving method that uses the thin Martian atmosphere to put the brakes on, as it were, slowing the craft down by 90%, meaning that only a small amount of fuel is required to land the behemoth.

Now you are on the surface of Mars on a giant spaceship with empty tanks, which seems like a bad situation, but this is not the full story. Your Starship is not the first to land on Mars, in fact there have been several Starship landings at your landing zone over the last few years. These unmanned, robotic missions have paved the way for your arrival by establishing an energy source (solar or nuclear power), and assembling a fuel depot that uses local resources such as water ice and CO2 to synthesise methane and oxygen that has been stored back in the tanks of the first Starships to arrive.

This means that you already have the fuel required to return back to Earth ready for you before you even leave the launchpad on Earth. You are arriving at a pre-assembled Mars base, complete with power, fuel, and oxygen. Add to this your extra 100 tonnes of supplies, and you have a viable method of making the first human landing on another planet.

OK, so the domes and roads might be a little too much for the first robots to manage, but the first humans to land on Mars won’t be duplicating the conditions that the Apollo astronauts had to deal with on the moon. There will be a level of support and material available that greatly increases the odds of success.

Extending Our Sun's Lifespan via Star lifing

2021-07-02T12:29:00.005+01:00

Starlifting is basically the process of using the Sun as a propulsion device! And from science, we have observed that less hydrogen in a star leads to longer lifetimes!

The largest stars fuse all of their hydrogen supply into heavier elements and go supernova in only a few million years. Our Sun’s projected lifespan is a total of 10 billion years, 5 of which it has already lived.

Each day, our Sun is getting brighter as it transitions into a red giant state. It’s also getting larger. Eventually, it will become a red giant. Once our Sun has exhausted all of its hydrogen supplies and fused elements up to carbon and possibly even iron, it will eventually go nova. This will “kill” our Sun, rapidly transitioning the Sun into a white dwarf within a matter of minutes.

But we don’t want this to happen. That’s where starlifting comes into play. Starlifting is the process of moving our star by using Stellar Engines. There are different types of Stellar Engines, but the engine we are looking for to extend the lifetime of the Sun is the Caplan Thruster.

Caplan Thruster

The Caplan Thruster is like rocket engine scaled up so that it requires millions of tons of fuel per second. It uses strong electromagnetic waves to funnel hydrogen and helium from the Sun. The hydrogen is shot back at the Sun using particle accelerators to balance the Caplan Thruster. Using energy from a Dyson Swarm around the Sun (more on that later), helium is FUSED into oxygen and expelled at incredible velocities.

An artist illustration of a balanced Caplan Thruster. The blue flame is hydrogen, and the yellow flame pushing the Sun is the superheated oxygen. Credit: Kurzgesagt/ YouTube

The Caplan Thruster uses the Dyson Swarm to focus sunlight to one area of the Sun. This heats up that area to incredible temperatures, and as a result billions of tons of matter is ejected. This matter, focused by the thruster, is ejected out for propulsion.

A Dyson Swarm consists of billions of solar panels around the Sun that allow most to all of the energy released by the Sun to be captured. It looks roughly like this.

A Dyson Swarm (in purple) with a Caplan Thruster. Not to scale. Credit: Kurzgesagt/ YouTube

A civilization that could build a Dyson Swarm can also build a Caplan Thruster. As the thruster uses fuel from the Sun, it is extending its lifetime and at the same time possibly delaying entering a red giant stage.

It will take possibly millions of years to significantly increase the Sun’s lifetime. But it’s still possible given we start early. We still have 5 billion years.

If you want to know more about Stellar Engines, check out this awesomely made Kurzgesagt video on YouTube. It’s where I got the images for discussing this topic. They go into more depth on how to move the Sun and how to extend its lifetime.

18 mind-blowing facts about the Sun

2021-06-29T16:14:00.002+01:00

The Sun is the largest object within our solar system, comprising 99.8% of the system's mass. It's a yellow dwarf star, a hot ball of glowing gases at the heart of our solar system. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth.

Here are 18 mind-blowing facts about our Sun.

The sun burns hydrogen atoms into helium atoms in its core. In fact, the sun burns through 600 million tons of hydrogen every second.
As the sun’s core becomes saturated with helium, what happens? It shrinks which causes nuclear fusion reactions to speed up making the sun shoot out more energy. Every billion years it burns hydrogen, our beautiful and very busy sun gets brighter.
The sun is a main sequence star meaning that it’s a sphere composed primarily of two gases, hydrogen and helium. So if our sun could talk, it would sound funny. Helium right.
Our sun is not the biggest type star nor is it the smallest. Our sun is a yellow dwarf type star.
One million earths could fit inside the sun.
The sun is a near perfect sphere.
Our sun is all colours mixed together. It appears white to us.
Temperatures inside the sun can reach 15 million degrees Celsius.
The Sun is 24,000-26,000 light years from the galactic centre. It takes the Sun 225-250 million years to complete an orbit of the centre of our Galaxy The Milky Way.
Our sun is middle aged.
The energy created at the centre of the sun’s core is nuclear fusion.
Once the Sun has completed its red giant phase, it will collapse. It’s huge mass will be retained, but it will have a volume similar to that of Earth. When that happens, it will be known as a white dwarf.
If the Sun disappeared, we would only notice its absence after eight-minutes, since it takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach us.
The Sun weighs an incredible 1,989,100,000,000,000,000,000 billion kilograms. That’s roughly the weight of 330,060 Earth.
The Sun is of impeccably perfect size, shape, brightness, age, temperature and distance for life to exist on Earth. If it were any different in these categories – ever so slightly – life as we know it wouldn’t exist.

If you were to take a journey to the Sun in a normal airliner flying at its regular speed (about 644km/h), it would take you 20 years to get there without stopping.
As the Sun creates energy within its core, the heat from this causes expansion. If not for its enormous gravitational force, the Sun would explode like a giant bomb.
Solar winds also create some of space’s most beautiful phenomenons such as the dazzling tails of comets and the Aurora Borealis, or The Northern Lights.

And now, for the end of the earth.

In five billion years, the sun will begin its helium burning process and that will turn our cute yellow dwarf sun into a raging, killer red giant. The red giant sun will consume Mercury and Venus and reach Earth boiling all water off of our planet before burning Earth to a cinder and probably consuming it because Earth will be right at the edge of the red giant.

If mankind has not inhabited another star system’s planets by now, this will be the end of humans. But I have a feeling that long before this happens, mankind will be living elsewhere. We are survivors. We love killing each other, but we are survivors. I have faith in us.

But what the hell will we look like then?

Five Disturbing Facts about our Oceans

2021-06-27T00:26:00.003+01:00

The sea is a fascinating, strange and mysterious world. But it can also be disturbing, even dangerous. Human beings have always fantasized about the ocean which has given birth to many myths and legends.

Let's dive together to explore it all.

Creatures of the Abyss

It has long been thought that the deep seabed was devoid of life because sunlight does not reach such depth. But this is far from the case : life is well established in the abyss, adapted to cold and darkness.

The deep sea is home to a varied fauna with many species of fish, crabs, molluscs. Due to the cold and dark, the species live in slow motion, the fish grow very slowly but live very old, sometimes up to the age of 150 years. Among these fish are the Orange roroughly or the Macrouridae.

And because it is an extreme environment, the animals have adopted a strange physique, even disturbing.

(The monkfish, a formidable predator that uses its blue light to attract its prey in the dark.)

(A bioluminescent red jellyfish.)

And yes, in the abyss, since there is no sunlight, some fish are bioluminescent, they themselves produce their own light to hunt or flee predators like the monkfish.

The giant squid that can measure 10 meters in length. It has also inspired many legends, including the Kraken, this monster capable of sinking entire ships, as in Pirates of the Caribbean.

The giant squid is also the sperm whale's favorite prey as seen above. However, no one has yet been able to witness a fight between these two sea giants. One can only imagine. But this fight must surely be scary.

Oceanic trenches

In some regions, especially along the alignments of islands such as the Philippine archipelago, Japan or the Aleutian Islands (Alaska), the ocean floor suddenly stops and narrow trenches plunge very deep.

The Mariana Trench descends 11 km below the surface, it could contain Mount Everest which is almost 9 km high. From a certain depth, there is hardly any form of life. It is the total dark void.

(The 12-tonne Deepsea Challenger submarine in the Mariana Trench.)

Waterspout

Now let's come to the surface.

It is a sea tornado. It is an impressive swirling water column sucked towards the sky, it is essentially composed of a cloud of humid air and liquid water.

It is formed when the water is warm enough and cold air descends into a depression, which creates thunderstorm clouds, the most violent of which generate tornadoes.

The greatest danger comes from the weight of the water. These powerful whirlpools can surprise mariners and even sink tall ships by dumping tons of water on them.

Waterspouts may also have inspired Homer for the Odyssey. They could represent the monster Scylla who carries and kills several of Odysseus's companions during the return trip to Ithaca.

Maelstroms

This is a giant version of water that drains into a sink. The largest maelstroms are formed from strong tidal currents.

The Saltstraumen maelstrom, off the coast of Norway, is one of the most dangerous. To study them, scientists throw objects into them which, once sucked up, hit the seabed, before being then violently expelled.

Maelstroms may also have inspired Charybdis, a formless monster from Greek mythology that generates whirlwinds and violent currents. In Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses and his companions just pass off Charybdis to join Ithaca.

Human impact

Most disturbing, however, is the human impact. It was long believed that the oceans were so vast that nothing could affect them. Unfortunately, this is not true.

Over-fishing, various types of pollution (plastic, hydrocarbon), global warming are disrupting marine ecosystems. For example, every year, 8 million tons of plastic are released into the oceans, 100 million sharks are also killed, this seriously unbalances marine ecosystems. It is very dangerous because the oceans produce at least half of the oxygen we breathe.

We have to realize the harm we are doing to the sea and change our behavior before ecosystems become too degraded, it is still possible but we must hurry.

Meteoroids - Whats behind them

2021-06-26T00:42:00.005+01:00

Have you even wondered what lies beyond the universe? When you see a streak of light passing through the night sky, what’s the first word you utter? Do say ‘Wow! Those are meteors!” or “Is that asteroid?” Or do you just stay silent while enjoying the beautiful scenery?

Everything you see in the night sky has their corresponding names. Just like star, moon, clouds, and even meteoroids and asteroids. They might be known as heavenly bodies or objects’ that are found and existing in space. But in this article, we’ll just focus in the concept of meteoroid.

Meteoroid

Meteoroids are small rocky fragments whose size ranges from dust grains to small asteroids. They’re commonly known as “space rocks”. Most of them are made of silicates-minerals that contain silicon and oxygen, and also heavy metals like nickel and iron. Meteoroids that are mostly made of iron and nickel-iron meteoroids are far massive and dense compared to stony meteoroids which are lighter and fragile.

When a meteoroid survives a trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it is now called a meteorite.

Where do meteoroids originate?

Scientists believes that most meteoroids are formed from the collision of asteroids that orbit around the sun in a region known as the asteroid belt, which is located between in the paths of Mars and Jupiter. When these asteroids hit each other, they produce crumbly debris-meteoroids. Such fragments will orbit around the sun for millions of years before being captured by Earth’s gravity. When dust particles which are made from asteroid and comets enter the Earth with a high speed, meteor shower occurs. They rub against air particles and create friction when they hit the atmosphere, which also cause the meteors to burn up. The heat now vaporizes the meteors, creating what we commonly say shooting stars. But, do you actually know what happens when a meteoroid enter the Earth’s atmosphere? Meteoroids heat up as they enter the layer of the upper earth’s atmosphere. This causes the meteoroid to glow luminously, causing humans to witness meteoroids in visible manner with their naked eyes. Because of the bright tail they have, many people often referred them as shooting stars or falling stars. Most of them occur in the mesosphere, which is about 50-80 kilometres above the Earth’s surface.

The amount of speed and light that the meteoroids contain affects their travel time and the longer of time they glow. Most meteors that have a larger size and higher speed also have the brighter light and longer of time they glow. Larger meteors shine for about 10 minutes, while the smaller ones can only last in seconds. Unfair isn’t it? That’s why you must not miss the moment.

Meteors appear in different colours

“Different chemicals in the meteors produce different colours as they burn up while entering the Earth's atmosphere,” Samuel said. The atoms in the meteoroid emit light because they are heated up by entering the Earth’s atmosphere, which burns them and so thus they produce different wavelengths of light. For instance Iron, which is one of the most common elements found in meteors, glows yellow. A red glow indicates the presence of element silicon. And lastly, the visible green glow in the trail of shooting star is caused by burning copper.

Types of Meteors

Meteors are known by their size, brightness, and proximity from Earth, according to the National Geographic article. Earth grazers are meteors that are known for having a long and bright tails. They streak close to the horizon. They’re the type of meteors that skim at the top layer of the Earth’s atmosphere or simply bounces back to the outer surface when they’re about to hit the Earth. Some of them streak through the sky as falling stars. The most common earth grazer meteor is known as the “1972 Great Daylight Fireball”, which alarms the whole nation of U.S state of Utah, and causes most the countrymen to feel such enthusiasm in witnessing its journey into the sky. Fireballs are the most common type of meteor, whose sizes range from a basketball to a small car. They also have brighter and longer-lasting light than earth grazers. The International Astronomical Union describes a fireball as a “meteor brighter than any of the planets.” If fireballs are large meteors, bolides are far larger than them. They are brighter and massive compared to the fireballs and earth grazers. They often explode in the atmosphere, and when they do it produces a thunderous sound that can felt on Earth’s surface. The most common hazardous and dangerous bolides are known as super bolides. These type of bolides can endanger species and cause harm to the entire surface of Earth. These can takedown people, environment, animals, and even infrastructures! One example is the super bolide meteor that passed over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in the year 2013. It exploded with a rate of 500 kilotons of TNT that destroys countless of apartments and injured more than 1200 people. Many have said that the Chelyabinsk meteor is 30 times brighter than the sun- the brightest object that it caused people to burn their skins!

Written by Sarah Jane Sederiosa

Recent discoveries which have contributed to a better understanding of human evolution

2021-06-25T00:39:00.011+01:00

There have been some discoveries which expanded our understanding of human evolution as the analysis of DNA has advanced to give more details of ancestry.

We have now identified the genes from cross breeding with other Hominid species in particular geographically spread human populations.

Namely the discoveries of a small percentage of Neanderthal genes in European population, and some Denisovan genes in Asiatic populations.

There never was a “first Homo sapiens”! Branching specialization is a slow shift of allée frequency in diverse populations through several generations.

While both mutation and evolution are on-going processes, there is not likely to be much change in the human physique or intellectual capabilities in the last ten thousand years.

Some populations have become more tolerant to certain foods, while the digestive systems of other populations are upset by allergic reactions.

There is evidence for interbreeding between archaic and modern humans during the Middle Paleolithic and early Upper Paleolithic.

The interbreeding happened in several independent events that included Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as several unidentified hominids.

In Eurasia, interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans with modern humans took place several times.

The introgression events into modern humans is estimated to have happened about 47,000–65,000 years ago with Neanderthals and about 44,000–54,000 years ago with Denisovans.

By Public Library of Science - Cro-Magnons Conquered Europe, but Left Neanderthals Alone"From PLOS ONE, an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited."© 2004 Public Library of Science. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.", CC BY 2.5, File:Reconstruction of Neanderthal woman.jpg

A model of the phylogeny of H. sapiens over the last 600,000 years (vertical axis). The horizontal axis represents geographic location; the vertical axis represents time in thousands of years ago

By Dbachmann - Own work (sources used cited in description; see also: [2][3]), CC BY-SA 4.0, File:Homo sapiens lineage.svg

Homo heidelbergensis is shown as diverging into Neanderthals, Denisovans and H. sapiens.

With the expansion of H. sapiens after 200 kya, Neanderthals, Denisovans and unspecified archaic African hominins are displayed as again subsumed into the H. sapiens lineage.

Possible admixture events involving certain modern populations in Africa are also shown.

Neanderthal-derived DNA was found in the genome of contemporary populations in Europe and Asia. It accounted for 1–4% of modern genomes, although estimates may vary.

Neanderthal-derived ancestry is absent from most modern populations in sub-Saharan Africa
while Denisovan-derived ancestry is absent from modern populations in Western Eurasia and A

The variations in genetic make up across the continents give clear indications of the successive wave of migrations out of Africa.

K2-18b is a habitable super-Earth

2021-06-25T00:07:00.002+01:00

A super-Earth is an extra solar planet with a mass higher than Earth's, but substantially below those of the Solar System's ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, which are 14.5 and 17 times Earth's, respectively.

K2-18b is one o the super-Earth. Super-Earth is the planets that are about the size of Neptune.

The scientist concludes from the observation of Kepler mission that super-earth about124 Lights year away from the earth exits.

K2-18b is in a habitable zone. It means that the Planet has the condition to make water light at a common temperature. Although, scientists discover various other exoplanets.

Various features excite scientists to have a life on K2-18b. Here I mention some magnificent features of this giant Earth with the possibility of life struggles over it.

K2-18b is about 8times heavier than the Earth.
The Planet revolves around a Red Rowaf Star that is a small dim star.
Scientists come to find that life on K2-18b is tough. The Planet has no magnetic field that makes it more exposed to radiations.
The gravity of K2-18b is 11.57m/s2. It is near the Earth's gravity.
A year over the K2-18b is about 33days.
The air composition of K2-18b has a survivable amount of hydrogen, helium and 0.01% water vapors.
It’s a very tough job to live on the K2-18b. You require more time for breathing because the air is much heavier.
Water requires more time for boiling. A heavier planet means we need more fuel to run the machines. Rockets consume more fuels and require engineering designs that are suitable for K2-18b conditions.
The harmful radiations increase the risks of skin ailments and cancers on the K2-18b.
You require more effort to walk. Your casual walk is like running a marathon.
The K2-18b has no moon, which means our nights are definite dark.
The high gravity shakes the core of K2-18b more as compared to Earth. It means more volcanic Eruption and Super-Earth quakes.

Due to exposure to viral radiations, It's impossible to live on the ground surface of K2-18b.

After living on the K2-18b for centuries, the human body will evolve according to the circumstances.

Could the Big Bang be True?

2021-06-24T23:58:00.010+01:00

Many people think the Big Bang theory says that the universe sprang from nothing. Moreover, they think the Big Bang theory was invented - out of thin air - purely so that scientists could avoid the self-evident fact that God created the universe.

Well, that’s not how the Big Bang theory came about, and in fact the Big Bang theory is not even about the origin of the universe.

We can see that the universe is expanding. That means it must have been smaller (actually “denser” is a better way to look at it) in the past, right? Seems pretty sensible, right? Nothing outrageous, no denying self-evident truths about God, just a straightforward (or straight backward, actually) extrapolation from observed facts. With me so far?

Congratulations, you now accept the Big Bang theory! (that wasn’t so bad, now was it?)

Despite what you may have heard, the Big Bang theory has nothing to do with how the universe was created - it’s simply a description of how a very dense, very hot, region of spacetime could have expanded and cooled off to produce what we see today. It’s called the Big Bang theory to distinguish it from the now-discredited Steady State theory, which proposed that the universe was NOT denser in the past.

Where did that early universe come from? No one knows! The Big Bang theory has been tracked backwards to a tiny fraction of a second after the universe came to be - and if it’s true, then there would be observable consequences today, like the Cosmic Microwave Background. When we look at the CMB, we see exactly what we’d expect to see if the universe really did expand from a very hot, very dense, starting configuration. So we’ve got good reasons to think we’re on the right track.

Maybe God did create that early universe. Or maybe he created our universe 6,000 years ago, and just created all the galaxies flying apart to fool us (though one wonders why God would basically lie to us like that). Or maybe he created the universe at midnight last night - not only creating galaxies in a “flying apart as if they had been together ~13.8 billions years ago” configuration, but creating the neurons in your brain in the same configuration they would have been in had you actually grown up, went to school, had your first kiss, etc.

All of those things are technically possible - but until/unless there’s any evidence for them (spoiler: there isn’t), science can’t really do much with those ideas. Science doesn’t say there isn’t a God, it just says that most things don’t seem to really need a God.

It’s like plumbing: there are religious plumbers, and atheist plumbers - but they all need to know that water flows downhill. There’s no obvious benefit to having a religious plumber - he can’t “bless” your pipes and make them better somehow. When you go to plumbing school, they don’t deny that there is a God - but I guarantee you it never comes up in class, because there’s just no need for a God in plumbing. It’s the same with cosmology.

Extermination of Humans through Artificial Intelligence

2021-06-24T23:55:00.007+01:00

Screw the Matrix or Sky-net. Those are incompetent and incapable of exterminating the human race no matter what they try or how advance they become.

The only one capable of doing it as far as I know from playing games is the Faro Plague from Horizon Zero Dawn. These guys …

What made them special is that they did not go after human race at all. Instead they went after the very thing that we all dependent on and yet take advantage of because of its abundant - Nature itself - through Biomass Conversion System.

First they destroyed a small area of its biomass and then use that energy to create new machines like the Corruptors and other weapons of war. In the game (Horizon Zero Dawn), it started at Timor Leste. The company (run by Ted Faro) made a crucial mistake - he thought he could control the swarm in matter of days and he could use his money to fix it like it never happened. That time allowed the Swarm to grow in size, enough to create Corruptors in masses.

Another mistake is that the human army were made obsolete by introducing these machines of war as “Peace Keepers” so by the time they are detected as threat, humans threw more machines toward the swarm only to have them hijacked and turn against the humans. Very much like what Skynet did just before Judgement Day when it started to take over both military and civilians servers and shut down them down.

In the end, they only had 18 months to live before the Earth become a toxic mess and no life can survive. 18 MONTHS to bring down not only the human race but also everything that was living on our World.

In summary, any attack machines does on our environment WILL have a catastrophic chain reaction which will spiral onward. First the food production will face destruction which lead to wide scale riots and chaos. That will lead to collapse of central government which means there is no organized military to counter-strike the threat, allowing it to expand greatly.

By the time anyone can get anything organized, it could be too late. The environment could become too toxic and billions could have died. But the physical bodies of these dead then become biomass for the machines to create more machines and this will continue until nothing remains. That could be most logical way an AI destroy the human race.

Even if you say that the AI only wishes to kill humans and not harm Nature or non-humans living there, destroying the environment is the best methods because with our current technology, we could upload information on how to plant and take care flora-lifeforms into machines as we prepare them for farm-work within next decade to come. They could kill humans and replant the World and make it green again.

Footnotes

Faro Plague

Facts about our moon!

2021-06-24T23:43:00.005+01:00

The moon is slowly moving away from earth at the rate of 3.8 centimeters a year. That means when Julius Caesar was looking at the moon, it was about 257 feet closer.

There is water on the moon in the form of ice.

When Apollo 12 deliberately crashed the Ascent Stage of its Lunar Module onto the Moon's surface, it was claimed that the Moon rang like a bell for an hour, leading to arguments that it must be hollow like a bell. Also seismologists stated that during some moon-quakes, they left the moon ringing like a bell.

Where did the moon come from? The most widely-accepted explanation is that the Moon was created when a planet sized rock named Theia, about the size of Mars, slammed into Earth shortly after the solar system began forming about 4.5 billion years ago. This gargantuan collision ejected debris from earth flinging it out into space only to be captured by the earth’s gravitational pull and slowly forming into our rather large moon perfectly placed in the heavens, not too big, not to small and at just the right distance to effect the earth with life friendliness. If the moon was further away, or much closer, or not there at all, we might not be here either. It’s as if someone or something placed the moon in exactly the right spot.

Deep below the moon's South Pole -Aitken basin (the largest preserved impact crater anywhere in the solar system), researchers have detected a gargantuan "anomaly" of heavy metal lodged in the mantle that is apparently altering the moon's gravitational field.

Gold, platinum and other metals known as highly siderophile ("iron-loving") elements are far more abundant in Earth's crust than they are in its natural satellite. That may seem odd, given the two worlds' shared history as a Mars sized asteroid slammed into the earth ejecting material that later formed the moon.

The moon stabilizes the earth’s axis. If earth had no moon, its axis would be unstable.

Ours is a moon with two faces: the nearside boasts a thinner and smoother crust, while the far side crust is thicker and dotted by impact craters left nearly undisturbed by lava flows.

Lately, researchers used models to explore what may be possible explanations for the stark differences. They argue that those distinctive sides could be the result of giant asteroid slamming into the moon and leaving a massive crater across the entire nearside.

So there are some amazing facts about the moon.

The early solar system was not a nice place and extremely hostile. Few planets were safe from great chunks of rock slamming into them. A huge heavenly body smashed into Uranus knocking it on its side, so compared to the other planets, Uranus is laying down. It also has rings and rotates from east to west as does Venus while the other planets rotate west to east.

Another odd sequence of events is that Uranus and Neptune actually switched places about four billion years ago. How do they know that? The same way that they know that Jupiter has a fluffy core instead of a solid one.

Mars was also slammed into by a giant asteroid hitting its South Pole and giving Mars a rather odd shape.

Yes the moon, in fact our own solar system is a strange place.

The Largest Atom Existing in the Universe

2021-06-24T23:42:00.003+01:00

Like Suns, atoms have a maximum size.

In the nucleus, after Calcium, all other nuclei need more neutrons than protons to ‘space’ the protons apart and to share the charge over all the nucleons present, otherwise the proton charges make the nucleus unstable and it splits to a lower element that is more stable and some fermions are ejected to balance the numbers.

By the time we get to Uranium, there are 92 protons but also 142, 143 or 146 Neutrons (U-234, U-235, U-238). These are very stable isotopes with half lives in the region of 100s of thousands (234) or 100s of millions of years (235, 238). They are also the most abundant, with U-238 making up over 99.27% of all Uranium.

Other isotopes range from U-215 to U-242 - most have half lives of milliseconds or less, some have up to a few days and one or 2 are as stable as the first three mentioned. These are all trace/infinitesimal amounts though.

Note that the only change in an isotope is the number of neutrons… this is nature’s padding.
Pushing the analogy further: get the padding just right and there is no jiggling in the ‘packet’ and things hardly ever get damaged… if the padding is skimped or is too tight, then the whole package is liable to break when jiggled or the packet is knocked.

So there is quite a range, but the most stable range is just around 234–238. In this stability graph, you can see a block of black squares in a row for Uranium (92 protons) and this corresponds to stable (long half-life isotopes).

Now when we get to Copernicium we can see, for Z = 112, there should be six stable isotopes (in the white circle, the island of stability), but no atoms of this element and atomic mass have yet been created. This leads us into the field of Nuclear isomers and spin, gamma decay and more. It is a well studied field by professionals.

Suffice it to say, there is a reason why nature does not create certain elements, and only ‘man’ has attempted to create synthetic elements in high energy conditions - there are many configurations that are inherently unstable in nuclei, and the higher you go, the less stable elements appear, and the harder it is to create them. They also exist one atom at a time as we create them and then they decay to stable elements VERY quickly.

So nobody Knows ™; making these synthetic elements is very hit and miss, and they won’t last very long anyway. It might be possible to make an element with 200 protons and say 300 neutrons but its half-life will be probably in the order of femtoseconds.

It is worth mentioning here the three main forces involved:
Electromagnetic interaction - protons repel each other due to this.
Strong force - at close distances, the mix of Protons and Neutrons interact with the Strong force which overcomes the Proton charge repulsion.
Weak force - this is the force which causes Neutrons to decay, and as Z approaches 100, the number of Neutrons present reach a limit in the nucleus where the Weak force’s effects on Neutrons overcome the Strong force in the Nucleus, thus causing Neutrons to decay where you would expect ‘more’ to be better. This is why all elements past Uranium are radioactive.
Note: In Neutron Stars, Gravity overwhelms the other forces due to its extreme value.

Global Warming: Causes and Effects

2021-06-19T19:20:00.000+01:00

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the gradual increase of the Earth's temperature due to the greenhouse gases promulgated by human activities such as burning of fossil fuel, which pumps methane, carbon dioxide (CO2), and other dangerous gases into the atmosphere; (this has been the case since the Industrial Revolution). These dangerous gases are trapped at the Earth atmosphere through a naturally-occurring process called the greenhouse effect.

According to the Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment; Greenhouse effect is a natural process that warms the earth’s surface. When the sun’s energy reaches the earth’s atmosphere, some of it is reflected back to space and the rest is absorbed and re-radiated by greenhouse gases. This process maintains the Earth’s temperature at around 33 degrees Celsius, allowing life on Earth to exist.

Evidence of Global Warming

The evidence of Global warming is everywhere; a good example is the melting of glaciers in the artic sea. According to a NASA report, the Artic sea ice has shrunk by 10% in the last 30 years . The rates at which glaciers are disappearing have caused the rise in sea level resulting to flooding in coastal areas around the world. Other evidences include increase in ocean heat content and the recent string of very warm years.

A report from the Centre for global development states that developing countries are responsible for 63% of current carbon emissions. China emits 27% of the world’s greenhouse gasses at 7.18 metric tons. Furthermore, researchers have prognosticated that the temperature will rise to about 2 - 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

What will be the fate of Earth if this trend continues?

If humans continue emitting greenhouse gases, our eventual doom is inevitable. The future of our planet is in jeopardy due to human negligence. Some of the changes to our environment include:

Increase in greenhouse gas concentration
Temperature changesShrinking Glaciers
Permafrost
Rising sea-level
Change of pattern of precipitation and storm events
Future ocean acidification

These changes will have a big impact in our environment, infrastructure, water supply, food supply, our health, and the things that surround us.

Save Earth, Stop Carbon Emissions

Let’s face the truth; we humans have contributed to this global warming hysteria. Our influence on the weather can be traced back to the industrial revolution, even though; according to some researchers, our weather is constantly changing.

We can compensate our involvement in this, by playing a positive role in in our environment. We can save the earth by minimizing our consumption of energy, avoid driving, recycling materials, avoiding products with a lot of packaging, adjusting the thermostat, planting trees, turn off electronic devices, and equally important, speak and advocate about the proper of preserving our nature. These may be little steps, but we should set in mind that our little steps could be the product of greater things. Our mother earth is screaming in devastation, and as her ever loving inhabitants, our job is to protect and preserve it at all energy.

Written by Sarah Jane Sederiosa

Extraterrestrial planets with an atmostphere like earth

2021-06-18T00:30:00.008+01:00

An atmosphere is a very important factor to consider when looking for life on extraterrestrial planets. an atmosphere like earth protects us from the radiation from the sun, and also helps in the greenhouse effect.The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, commonly known as air, retained by Earth's gravity.

Ignoring other factors needed for life on extraterrestrial planets to occur, lets focus on the atmosphere, and list possible candidates in our solar system except for mars which we all know about. We could try looking at this planet for inspiration,

Venus, a rocky planet and our inner neighbor that has a rather impressive atmosphere of mostly CO2 (96.5%), which is so thick that it has a surface pressure of over 90 Earth atmospheres, and keeps the surface temperatures at a toasty 460 deg C.

In comparison Mars has an atmospheric pressure of just 0.00628 that of Earth, even if it is mostly CO2 (96%) like Venus.

If atmospheres are your thing, then you can’t go past Jupiter.

Jupiter is based on a rocky core, just like Earth, Mars and Venus, but unlike the small terrestrial inner planets, it’s core is many times the mass of Earth, and this along with its orbit at a distance 5 times further away from the sun than us has allowed it to gather and retain a truly impressive atmosphere.

Jupiter represents over 70% of the mass of everything in the solar system that is not the sun, and most of that is its atmosphere (70% hydrogen, by the way). Jupiter’s atmosphere is so dominant in fact that if you were foolhardy enough to enter it, and were capable of surviving the incredible pressures that it created inside, you would not be able to detect the “surface” of the core.

As your indestructible body descended into the atmosphere, you would find that the density of the mostly hydrogen “air” would merge from a gas into a liquid, then into a metallic hydrogen state that compromises 78% of the radius of the planet. It is unclear if you would be able to detect the transition to the rocky, metallic core in these sort of conditions, just an increase in pressure.

After Jupiter we have more gas giants like Saturn.

Uranus.

And Neptune.

All gas giants like Jupiter, and containing most of the left over 30% of the planetary mass the Jupiter does not represent.

Poor scorched little Mercury has almost no atmosphere at all to speak of, thanks to its close proximity to the sun and small size (and small gravity).

As you can see, a lack of an atmosphere is rarer than a thick one as far as planets are concerned. Sometimes even a moon can have a significant atmosphere, like Saturn’s moon Titan.

Titan is actually bigger than Mercury, and has an atmosphere 1.45 times thicker than ours, although being mostly nitrogen (98.4%) and a rather chilly -180 deg C, you would not want to be taking a breath of it. Mind you, it would be rather impressive to watch a rainfall of liquid methane running down a methane river, and into a sea of liquid hydrocarbons, all of which happen on this moon.

Scientific Proof of the Big Bang Theory

2021-06-18T00:19:00.004+01:00

The Big Bang Theory – which actually is a bad name (we will come back to that later) – explains how the universe got from a hot dense state in the distant past, to the cold empty state we see now. If anyone said it was the idea how the universe came from nothing, they were either grossly simplifying it, outdated, or lying. It’s usually one of the two first.

To explain the evidence, we have to go way back in time, to when science thought that the Milky Way Galaxy was all there is and that it had been around forever without a beginning. I apologize for the story being so long, but it is actually rather interesting.

Chapter one: The speed of light

I could probably go back all the way to Newton and the apple, or Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, but that may be too far back. So say hello to these guys:

That’s Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, and in a famous experiment they proved that light moved at the same speed regardless of frame of reference.

At the time, scientists also thought that light moved as a wave through a light-carrying medium, the luminiferous aether. The experiment was actually intended to show that there was such a thing as luminiferous aether. Since the Earth also moved through this luminiferous aether, it would mean that the light should be faster in some directions than in others.

They built a really sensitive device to measure the difference in speed in two different directions, and found nothing.

So they redid the experiment, twisted the apparatus and still found nothing. No speed difference at all. Light seemed to move at the same speed regardless of direction.

That lack of evidence is actually a pretty important piece of evidence, because it brings us to this guy:

That is Hendrik Lorentz, and he produced the Lorentz transformation to explain mathematically the lack of results of the Michelson-Morley experiment and how light could appear to travel at the same speed regardless of direction, thus allowing the idea of luminiferous aether to live on for a while. All that was needed was an invariant of some kind.

Chapter two: The bendiness of space

This is where this guy enters the story:

Yes, Albert Einstein. We just had to get to him at some point in our story.

The reason that he enters the story is that he finally got rid of the luminiferous aether. He postulated that light did not just appear to move at the same speed, but actually was the invariant Lorentz was looking for, and always moved at the same speed regardless of the frame of reference. Using the Lorentz transformations, he formulated special relativity of how speed and acceleration affected your frame of reference (and also that nothing can go through space faster than light), and then later general relativity of how gravity also affected your frame of reference.

In general relativity, he treated space and time as one unified spacetime, which could be stretched and bent by mass. He thought of gravity as not an attracting force as Newton had, but as a curvature in spacetime, and set up a number of equations to describe how it happened.

This idea was so weird that he didn’t get a Nobel Prize for it. The Nobel committee realized that the theory of relativity was something important, so Einstein got a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, the thing that makes the camera in your smartphone possible, as a kind of consolation prize.

Scientists in generally were much more impressed, especially after the discovery of this guy:

That is Sir Arthur Eddington, and in 1919, he showed the curvature effect of gravity during a solar eclipse by photographing how the apparent position of stars shifted near the Sun.

Speaking of Eddington and going back to the Nobel Committee’s inability to understand general relativity, there is a joke about him, when a journalist told him that there was just three people in the world who properly understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, and asked him what he thought of it. Eddington sucked on his pipe, pondering the question, and finally replied “I’m trying to figure out who the third person would be.”

That persons could very well be this guy:

That’s Alexander Friedmann, and like every other scientist in the day, he fiddled with the theory of relativity. He found a solution to general relativity that the universe was not static. In fact, it could not be static!

Still with me? Great, because this is where we enter Big Bang territory.

Specifically, we get to this guy who wondered what would happen if the universe actually wasn’t static.

No, not the guy with the wild hair. That’s just Albert Einstein again. The guy to the right is Georges Lemaître, Belgian astronomer, mathematician, physicist and Catholic priest.

So Lemaître did the math, and concluded in 1927 that not only was the universe not static, but it also had a beginning where the universe was very small. He called it the “Ur-atom” or the “cosmic egg”. Unfortunately, people scoffed at him. Even Einstein dismissed Lemaître’s prediction from his own equations.

Chapter three: The expanding universe

Let us stop here and look at what science thought about the universe in about 1927:

The universe was static, despite Lemaître and Friedmann. The universe had not changed since literally forever. A universe with a beginning was something out of religion.
The universe consisted only of the Milky Way galaxy, beyond which there was nothing.

Now, we come to a point where it shows that there is hope for all of us, in the form of this guy.

That’s Edwin Hubble, from which the Hubble Space Telescope is named. Edwin Hubble was a lawyer, but he turned into an astronomer instead, and started to observe the skies. One of the things he did was to show that the fuzzy thing that we had called the Andromeda Nebula (“nebula” means “cloudy or fuzzy thing”) wasn’t a nebula at all. It looked like a galaxy. And it had cepheids in it.

And that brings us to this woman:

That’s Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and she made an important discovery about cepheids. Cepheids are variable stars that appears to blink. Leavitt’s discovery – now known as Leavitt’s law – is that the variance period and luminosity are linked. If you know the period, you know how bright it is or how much light it sends out. The longer the period, the brighter the star.

If you know how much light it sends out, you can use it as a “standard candle”: measure how bright it appears in your telescope, and then you can use the inverse square law to figure out how far away it is.

Hubble used Leavitt’s law, and conclusively proved that the Andromeda Galaxy was way outside the Milky Way, and as such it had to be its own galaxy.

Not only that, he also discovered a lot more galaxies. And he discovered that almost all of them were red shifted more or less, indicating that they were moving away from us; and that the further away they were, the faster they went away from us.

One side note here: the further away something is, the older the light we’re observing. If we look at something three million light years away, the light we see now left that something three million light years away. So if we can determine the distance to a thing, we can also determine the age of that light.

But back to the Redshift and that distant objects seemed to be more red shifted and thus moving away faster. Hubble made his most brilliant deduction: everything is rushing away from everywhere else. The universe is expanding, just like Lemaître said.

This led to three things. First, Einstein apologized for dismissing Lemaître. Second, Einstein stopped looking for a cosmic constant, and called it his biggest mistake ever. And third, the astronomical society split right down the middle: one part in support of a static universe, and the other in support of an expanding universe.

One of the scientists still in support of a static universe was this guy.

His name is Fred Hoyle, he was an atheist, and he was the one that invented the term “Big Bang” on radio in 1949. Hoyle died in 2001, and never accepted the Big Bang theory.

Sadly, the name stuck. This is unfortunate, since the consequence is that everyone now imagines that the big bang was a giant explosion in space, which it is not. It was an expansion of space.

Chapter four: The afterglow of the bang

Many other scientists accepted the Big Bang eventually, though. Say hello to these three guys:

This merry trio is George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman. In 1948, they predicted that if there had been an Ur-atom in which all matter in the universe exists, then for a period of time after it expanded, the universe must have been so hot and dense that it must have been a plasma. Plasma is very opaque, so you can’t see anything through it. Only when the universe cools down so much that plasma can become atoms will the universe be transparent. This is sometimes called “the surface of last scattering”. This surface should have a black body radiation of heat at this stage. That radiation should still be here, but spread out and red shifted to microwave wavelength with a temperature of about 5 Kelvin.

And these two guys found it:

That’s Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson. In 1964, they were using that strange contraption behind them to find out where the hiss in your old AM/FM radio and the “ant war” in your old television came from when you set them to a dead channel. After ruling out things like the sun, the Milky Way, and pigeon poop, they discovered that it came from, well, everywhere, and that it had a temperature of about 4.2 K in the microwave spectrum. It was still a bit off – the actual temperature is about 2.7 K.

They got a Nobel prize for it: they had just showed beyond reasonable doubt that the universe had been expanding.

But things in the universe has a mass, and mass attracts mass through gravity. So much like a rock thrown straight up will slow down (eventually it will either leave Earth’s gravity influence, or it will fall down again), the universe ought to slow down. It may go on expanding forever, slower or slower, or it may start collapsing to a Big Crunch.

Let’s again stop to review what science thought about the universe in the 1960s-1970s:

The universe had a beginning, around 10–15 billion years ago.
The big question was whether it would expand forever but slower and slower; whether it would eventually stop; or whether it would collapse on itself in the distant future.

Chapter five: Late-comers to the party

After that, bigger and better telescopes – one of them in space and bearing Hubble’s name – have been used to measure speed and distance to more and more distant galaxies. We have made better measurements of and even mapped the microwave background radiation.

This has introduced a new mystery: the microwave background is incredibly even: the cold blue spots are about 0.015 mK colder than the average, and the hot red spots are about 0.015 mK hotter than the average. How could the universe be so even, and what did these minute differences mean?

And why is this a problem? Well, even when the microwave background cleared up, the universe was really big. So big, in fact, that there had not been time for the temperature to even out.

This guy proposed an answer:

That’s Alan Guth, and he had an idea that is still radical among cosmologists and kind of accepted because there is no other idea at the moment: in the earliest moments of the universe, between $10^{- 36}$ and $10^{- 32}$

seconds or thereabouts, the universe inflated very rapidly – many times faster than the speed of light – from the size of an atom to the size of a grapefruit.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you say, “I thought that nothing could go faster than light?” Well, almost – nothing can move through space faster than light, but space itself doesn’t have a speed limit. Space can go how fast it wants.

Anyway, Guth’s proposal would not only explain how the microwave background is so even – it had the time to even out before it inflated – but could also explain the minute differences that existed, from quantum fluctuations before the inflation that got frozen when the universe inflated.

The weakness of cosmic inflation is that we don’t know what caused it to happen or the force behind it. But it kind of explains what we see, so cosmologists grudgingly accept it until someone has a better idea.

But no matter how the minute differences came to be, they allow us to determine the age of the universe with great precision. The current measurement is at about 13.8 billion years.

We have also tried to weigh the universe, through gravitational lensing and measuring galaxy formation, and concluded that the universe weighs too much. There seems to be some mass there that we can only detect through its gravitational influence, and there’s a lot of it: five times more than regular observable matter. We have dubbed it “dark matter” as a placeholder name: “dark” because we can’t observe it directly, and “matter” because whatever it is, it has gravity.

Not only that, we have also looked at the conditions before the surface of last scattering, by simulating the conditions of that age using particle colliders. We have also measured the curvature of space, which is important to predicting if there will be a big crunch or forever expansion.

Which leads to the final people in this story:

That’s Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt holding the Shaw Prize in Astronomy. Perlmutter led one team surveying supernovae type 1A (remember those?) and Schmidt and Riess led another team doing another survey. The reason they were awarded those medals was that they found a weird thing: the universe did not seem to go towards a Big Crunch at all. On the contrary, the expansion rate of the universe seemed to have been increasing for the last four billion years ago.

So the old prediction of a slowing expansion was wrong. Their discovery was so mind-blowing that they were not just awarded the Shaw prize in 2006, but also had to go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in 2011.

That’s where we are today: we get better and better measurements of the age of the universe, and we have an entirely new mystery to explore: why the expansion is speeding up. We don’t know why, but whatever it is that causes the accelerating expansion has been named “dark energy” as a placeholder name: “dark” because we can’t observe it directly and that it is unknown, and “energy” because it ought to take energy to speed things up.

One final review of what science today thinks about the universe:

The universe had a beginning, around 13.8 billion years ago.
There was a period of inflation at the earliest moments.
The expansion of the universe is speeding up.
And what the heck is this dark matter and dark energy?!!

Quantom Physics is still a conundrum

2021-06-16T01:40:00.001+01:00

Once upon a time some words meant something different than they do now. That’s true for a lot of words, “silly” once meant “blessed and worthy”. And “prove” once meant “test”.

But then mathematics came along and gave a whole new meaning to “prove”. A mathematical “proof” is absolute. It means there is no other way for things to be if your assumptions are true then the conclusion cannot be anything other than true. That’s an insanely high bar and can only ever apply in mathematics and logic. In a complex and physical “real” world such certainty is not possible, there are pretty much always other possibilities, even if they are pretty absurd. But sometimes the reality is absurd!

That mathematical meaning of ‘prove’ spilled over into our everyday speech however, to create a muddle, because we try to apply that meaning to the old meaning. Sometimes that’s harmless… the old saying “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” makes almost as much sense when you use the word in this extreme way rather than the original “test”. Sometimes it makes things kind of obscure but also interesting… another old saying “It’s the exception that proves the rule” gets some extra resonance when “proof” means something more than “test”. But sometimes it makes the meaning completely different and kind of broken. Like “has quantum theory been proven?”.

Now in the old sense of the world that question is very reasonable and the answer is absolutely yes! Quantum mechanics has been tested over and over, to extreme precision. It has met all of those tests beautifully. It is extremely well tested.

But in the new sense that question has no meaning. Theories are not mathematical theorems, they are explanations about why we see the things we do, and a means to predict what other things we’ll see under other circumstances. You can’t mathematically prove something like that any more than you can fry an adjective or conjugate peanut butter. There are always other possibilities that can explain the same observations, just as an infinite number of mathematical functions can fit a finite set of points!

For example there is an entirely separate theory, Bohmian Mechanics, which gives the same predictions as Quantum mechanics and yet which most people would consider a separate and different theory. I am sure there are infinitely many other theories that give the same predictions (within the parts of nature we can access with our experiments at this time).

(Above are possible electron trajectories in the double slit experiment according to Bohmian mechanics. Image from Wikipedia Commons)

The thing is that, because Quantum mechanics is so very well tested, if we are going to take any of those theories seriously then they will have to pass those same tests. For example it has to match the pattern of measurements in a double slit experiment… and all the tens of thousands of other experiments that have been done. Which means all alternative theories will be almost exactly the same as Quantum mechanics in most respects, including the weirdness that some people don’t like.

Me, I think weird is wonderful, but I’m a bit weird myself.

A theory is never proven, just tested and successful or unsuccessful at explaining what is seen. But Quantum mechanics is so well tested that anything that replaces it will look almost exactly the same in most ways.

11 Fact about Albert Einstein you may not know about

2021-06-16T01:27:00.003+01:00

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein is known for developing the theory of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.

Here are 11 fact about Albert Einstein you probably haven't heard about

The doctor who performed Einstein's autopsy stole his brain and kept it in a jar for 20 years. Thomas Harvey while performing an autopsy on Einstein, removed his brain without permission and kept it aside in the hope of unlocking the secrets of his genius. Experiments were carried out on his brain and it was deducted that Einstein had an abnormal folding pattern in parts of his parietal lobe, which could explain his amazing Mathematical ability.

His great ideas and discoveries came from scenarios that he created in his mind, and not in the laboratory.

Einstein did not consider himself an atheist, but an agnostic or a "religious nonbeliever." Einstein also stated he did not believe in life after death, adding "one life is enough for me." Einstein read the philosopher Eric Gutkind's book Choose Life, a discussion of the relationship between Jewish revelation and the modern world. On January 3, 1954, Einstein sent the following reply to Gutkind
    The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me). Such refined interpretations are naturally highly varied and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the unmodified Jewish religion, like all other religions, is an incarnation of primitive superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mindset I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better at anything than other human groups, though at least a lack of power keeps them from the worst excesses. Thus I can ascertain nothing “Chosen” about them.

    Overall, I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and seek to defend it with two walls of pride: an outer one as a man, and an inner one as a Jew. As a man you claim a certain exemption from otherwise valid causality; as a Jew, a privilege for monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer causality, as our wonderful Spinoza had first said in the strongest terms. And the animistic interpretations of natural religions are also through monopolization not invalid. With such walls we fall essentially into self-deception, but they do not help us in our search for a higher morality. On the contrary.

    Now, though I have in all honesty expressed our different beliefs, I still have the certainty that we largely agree on important matters, e.g. in our assessment of human conduct. What separates us, in Freud’s terms, are intellectual “supports” and “rationalizations.” I therefore believe that we would understand each other well if we were to talk about concrete things.

    With friendly thanks and best wishes,

    your

    A. Einstein.
In 2018 his letter to Gutkind was sold for $2.9 million.
Israel wanted the scientist to be president of the country, but he refused to assume that position.

Known to have a bad memory, Einstein struggled to remember names, dates and phone numbers.
Einstein's eyes are still kept in New York; Thomas Harvey didn't only take Einstein brain during autopsy, he also removed his eyeballs, which he gifted to Einstein’s eye doctor, Henry Abrams. Henry Abrams kept Einstein eyes in a safe deposit box,where its said to remain till this day.

Star Wars Jedi Master Yoda was inspired by Albert Einstein.
During his lifetime, Albert Einstein apparently never learned to drive a car. But he did manage to experience the thrill of getting behind the wheel, at least once.

Above, watch a newly-discovered home movie of Einstein and his second wife, Elsa, visiting the Warner Bros. sound-stage on February 3, 1931.

Einstein was totally against racial segregation, and called the phenomenon "white people's disease". He worked as an activist for causes against racism during his lifetime.
The physicist was one of the people to sign a petition against German law banning homosexuals.
In order not to have to enlist, Einstein renounced his German citizenship in 1896 and spent five years without any citizenship. Then he acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901, Austrian in 1911 and American in 1940.

Footnotes

Was Einstein Really Religious?

Our Observable Universe | What lies beyond it

2021-06-12T17:46:00.004+01:00

Our observable universe is a 93 billion light-year wide imaginary spherical shell around us.

This is the distance we can see things. Light within this sphere, may have been around long enough emitting light, for the light to reach us.

Anything outside of this sphere can't be seen, even if it started shining when the Universe began, some 15 billion years ago, Even with the strongest theoretical telescopes, we cannot see that far, because the light from there, just isn’t here yet.

An analogy is being on a boat far enough away from land that all you see is ocean to the horizon in every direction:

From your point of view on the boat, everything you can see is within the portion of the ‘observable ocean’. Outside of that, is just more ocean.

What’s outside of the observable universe, is, just more universe. That does raise the question of how big is the entire universe, outside the ‘walls’ of our observable universe shell?

Well, we don’t know.

But, we have estimates or, rather, the maths. Some of our current cosmological theories suggest competing answers to this question, although we do not have enough information to come to any certainties yet.

For all we know it could be infinite, but some research has indicated that our “full universe” is at least 250 times larger than our observable Universe. There are estimates of our Universe being 10^10^10^122 times larger than the observable universe.

And the estimate of 10 to the 10th to the 10th to the 122th power, is just ridiculously large.

If you wrote down a “1”,
Then turned every atom in the observable Universe into a “0” (that’s about 10^80 zeroes)
Placed them in a line after the 1.
The number you wrote down there, would not be 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of the number of “0”’s you would have to write after a “1”, to indicate how many times large the complete universe is, to the 93 billion light-year wide observable universe.

As for what’s outside of all of that? We definitely don’t know. That’s going to depend on how the universe acts on scales so large we can not measure or observe or even see many clues of at our small scale. We can't see enough of the universe to know whether it’s ‘flat’ or ‘curved’; ‘closed’, ‘open’, finite or infinite; Is there such a thing as “an edge” of the universe? Is matter expanding into infinite empty space, or is space itself created as the universe expands into it?

These are the types of questions in cosmology we just don’t have enough information to give any reliable answers. If we keep tossing more telescopes into space, building more particle acellerators & gravity detectors, keep experimenting, keep studying, we may find the answers to some of these questions… some of these questions might never be answerable by humans, no matter how long we’re around, or how much we discover.

Exoplanet - TOI-700 d

2021-06-12T16:45:00.006+01:00

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has just bagged its first potentially habitable planet discovery, named TOI-700 d, which orbits a red dwarf star about 100 light years away from earth. So what is it about this planet that makes it habitable?

First off, it receives 85% the amount of energy from its star that Earth gets from the Sun, which puts it safely in the habitable zone. Despite receiving less energy, average surface temperatures might be closer to that of Earth, given that red dwarfs radiate most of their energy in the infrared.

The planet is 1.22 times the size of Earth and probably rocky. Size is important, if the planet were bigger, say around 1.6 times larger than Earth, it might not have a solid surface to live on.

The star it orbits appears to be rather quiet. The TESS satellite observed this star for nearly a year and did not detect any stellar flares. Of course flares are bound to happen at some point, but their non-detection in the TESS data suggest that they are a rare occurrence. This fact is a plus for habitability, as strong flares can potentially erode away a planet’s atmosphere or sterilize the surface.

However, even though this planet is potentially habitable, it would still be different from Earth in many ways. The first and most obvious feature would be that TOI-700 d is tidally locked to its star. One side of the planet gets constant sunlight, while the other side is in permanent darkness. On the day side, water from oceans (if there are any) could evaporate and form a giant cloud layer, which has the potential to cool down the surface and make it more livable.

It remains to be seen what 700 d is made of. Researchers have generated models based on the size and type of star in order to predict 700 d’s atmospheric composition and surface temperature.

In one simulation, NASA explained, the planet is covered in oceans with a “dense, carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere similar to what scientists suspect surrounded Mars when it was young. In another, the planet is dry and cloudless”. Researchers modeled 20 different versions of TOI 700 d, any of which might be correct.

In summary, I’d say that TOI-700 d is definitely one of the better candidates for being potentially habitable.

Gateway Drugs - Examples, Effects, and Prevention

2021-06-09T08:25:00.003+01:00

WHAT ARE GATEWAY DRUGS?

Gateway drugs are often described as substances, which may lead the user to more addictive and harder drugs if used consistently. Why Gateway? The term "gateway" is referred to as the passage or opening to something else, and that's what gateway drugs mean! In other words, these drugs open the door for harder drugs if you've ever tried them! For instance, you tried to smoke a cigarette because you’re curious about the sensation it creates, and because of the sensation or feeling, you've gotten addicted to smoking, until you turn to try out other harder drugs too! Well, that's pretty dangerous! On the other hand, these drugs are less expensive to buy compared to other drug, that’s why many individuals, mostly young people, prefer to buy them. The most common examples of gateway drugs are marijuana, tobacco, alcohol, and even prescription drugs. Some prescription drugs aren’t considered as hard drugs, but that doesn't mean they're harmless, being an abuser of these drugs can often lead to other harder drugs and thus creates more danger to one’s health, both physical and mental.

EXAMPLES OF GATEWAY DRUGS

• Marijuana

Marijuana is dried leaves, flowers, stems, and seeds from the Cannabis plant. It is also known as a psychoactive drug, it contains the mind-altering chemical Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) that primarily affects one's memory, movements, decisions, concentration, coordination, sensory and time perception, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Marijuana is used widespread among teenagers and young adults, and can commonly be found in rolled tobacco, baked goods or cookies, beverages, oils and tinctures. That's why marijuana seems like an easy find since its accessible.

Effects of Marijuana

The use of Marijuana has a damning effect on different aspects of a person's life. These include:

Short-term effects

loss of control
school difficulties
car accidents
memory problems
having troubles in concentration
drained mentality
affects appetite
delusions
psychosis
hallucinations
severe anxiety
family problems (highly possible)
Tachycardia heartbeat
higher chance of stroke
panic

Long-term Effects

Decline in IQ up to 8 points
addiction
relationship problems
Symptoms of chronic bronchitis, and increased rates of respiratory infections and pneumonia (According to NEJM article)
schizophrenia (people who are predisposed to them)
depression

• Tobacco

What is Tobacco?

By definition, tobacco also known as Nicotiana tabacum is a plant where cigarette and its other products come from. It contains the highly addictive stimulant alkaloid Nicotine and also Harmala alkaloids. Studies have shown that the use of tobacco is the leading cause of cardiovascular disease such as heart attack, heart failure, arrhythmia, stroke, etc. which is the single leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Studies have shown that, about 34 million US adults smoke cigarettes, and 58 million non-smokers are exposed to secondhand smoke.

What are the factors of tobacco use?

Several factors indicates the use of tobacco. These include

Environmental factor- an environment with the majority of its population using tobacco may push an individual to use it too. This happens especially if the person is highly exposed to the people of the said environment.
Peer Pressure- an individual whose peers smokes may be forced to do the same in order to be accepted within the group.
Parental influence- an individual who has parents that use cigarette might cause him to do the same thing
Advertisements- Advertisements may show how smoking feels good. It may also show the features of the cigarette, which heightens the enthusiasm of an individual to use, or to even try.
To Free Stress- Smoking sometimes gives the user the feeling from stressful situations. Users tend to smoke when they have problems because they believe in its calming effect just for the moment.
Curiosity- Curiosity gives a person the feeling of eagerness to try something new, especially if the majority of people are also doing it.

Effects of Tobacco Use

We all know that tobacco contains nicotine that is highly addictive, and thus resulting to several damages to one’s health. Cigarette smoke contains over 7,000 chemical substances, 69 of which are known carcinogens, which are highly dangerous. The inhaled smoke circulates in every area of the body and reaches every organ which affects the overall condition of smokers. Second hand smokers are also affected by the smoke. These effects include:

Dry lips
bad breath
pale lips
coughing
dyspnoea
senselessness and tastelessness problems
cardiovascular disease
certain types of cancer
irregular periods (in women)
erectile problems (in men)
lung disease
diabetes
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
asthma
premature (low birth-weight babies)

Smoking can also increase the risk of:

tuberculosis
certain eye diseases
brain damage
immune system problems

• Alcohol

According to Merriam Webster dictionary, alcohol is an ethanol, especially when considered as the intoxicating agent in fermented and distilled liquors. It damages the end of the neurons also known as dendrites, which makes it hard for neuron to relay message to each other and thus, slows down brain function which affects our movements, speech, and reaction time. Since alcohol is broken down by the liver, long-term use of it can cause damage to the liver. It also heightens the risk of developing a chronic liver inflammation and liver disease, which in the long run, might cause you to live a shorter life

Factors for alcohol use

Peer pressure
Curiosity
Socialization
Parenting
Losing one's inhibitions
Endless problems
Broken-hearted (major factor)

Effects of alcohol use

drained brain
slow movements.
difficulty in speech
lose one's control
govern one's emotions
hallucinations
panics
dizziness
behaviour changes
liver damage
cancers
heart damage
pancreatitis
fatigue
stomach distress
lung infections
coordination changes
numbness
diabetes
malnutrition
sexual dysfunction
infertility
birth defects

• Prescription Drugs

Prescription drugs are pharmaceutical drugs that usually require a medical prescription in order to be obtained. The abuse and misuse of prescription drugs often turns them to a gateway drug. According to Science Daily, Researchers have found that four out of five injection drug users misused an opioid drug before they injected heroin. Such overdoses of prescription drugs may cause coma and death. The effects of abusing prescription drugs include:

low blood pressure
slowed breathing rate
memory problems
depression
anxiety
panic disorder
paranoia
hallucinations
heightens aggression
heart failure
seizure
choking

HOW TO PREVENT GATEWAY DRUGS?

The following are preventive ways to help you to stay out and quit from the use of gateway drugs. These include:

Choose good friends
Know the importance of your health
Eat healthy foods
Avoid Temptation and Peer Pressure
look for help
Hangout with individuals who do not use drugs
skip parties where drugs are present
know the dangers of gateway drugs
learn how to say "no"
discipline and control yourself

With all of these, we can now conclude that gateway drugs are indeed hazardous to our health, both physical and mental. It does no good to us, except to harm our lives and even destroy our happiness. It covers up the lightness which this world tries to show us, and even causes us to feel bad about ourselves. Well, it's not the end. You can always change anytime you want; especially once you know how important our health is. We should also know that we only have one life, and overtime it can be taken away from us, therefore we need to take care of ourselves so that we can live longer lives.

Written by Sarah Jane Sederiosa

Implications of a Terraformed Venus

2021-06-07T19:40:00.015+01:00

While the planet Earth remains primarily in its natural state, the fate of our planet is yet to be determined. As we continue to develop and pollute the natural habitats that once existed, it may only be a matter of time before our planet becomes uninhabitable due to irreversible damage. On the other hand, many scientists believe that we are able to terraform Venus by creating an atmosphere suitable for life.

Venus is 38 million kilometers away from Earth at its closest point. This is the closest that any planet comes to Earth. The farthest that Venus ever gets from Earth is 261 million km.

However, let’s assume that Venus got terraformed at some point and was close enough to the “habitable zone” of the solar system.

With Venus being a 2nd blue marble on the solar system the following would most likely happen:

Political and economic will would fund like crazy to space organizations to make future missions to Venus.
Venus being a potential place to live can grant human colonies to be made and possibly reduce overpopulation.
The possibility of confirming life being possible other than Earth. Complex organism would most likely be found in the oceans.
Mars would get less attention since Venus is now a more viable option to settle humans.
Natural phenomena would be studied rigorously and be compared to that of Earth.
Venus would probably have similar organisms to that of Earth. (Assuming they have nearly identical chemical compositions)

Realistically, that would never happen. Venus would have to get rid of its thick greenhouse atmosphere and would need to get further away from the Sun.

The problem with that is essentially that if a planet gets too close with each other their orbits become unstable. It could potentially make them crash or make them be torn apart depending on tidal forces.

Venus has a slow rotation, too hot, no liquid water, and is chemically different than our own Earth.

It would still be very Venus-like even if shared with the orbit of Earth. That’s just how its composition is.

At 880 degrees Fahrenheit, the planet is hot enough to melt lead. It is also home to sulphuric clouds that rain acid and a brutal atmosphere comprising 96 percent carbon dioxide. Meaning? "If you were to stand on the surface of Venus, you would be crushed," — Dodson-Robinson

BLC1 - The Mysterious Radio Signal From Proxima Centauri

2021-06-07T19:14:00.011+01:00

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here. — Arthur C. Clarke

In April and May 2019 Scientists at the Parkes Observatory observed a radio signal spatially coincident with the direction of the Solar system's closest star Proxima Centauri

The signal is known as BLC1, which stands for; Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1. The radio signal was detected during 30 hours of observations conducted by Breakthrough Listen. Here it is folks, BLC1;

This signal was exactly 982.002 MHz. There is no known natural emitter of anything remotely like this narrowband beam, the signal is technological.

“We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency. Perhaps, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves. But for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological.” — Siemion, Berkeley University.

Proxima Centauri is a rare triple star system, of ultra long-lived, stable Red Dwarf stars, most incredibly we know that NASA has identified a rocky exoplanet that sits in the habitable zone of this system.

The innermost planet known in the Proxima Centauri system orbits its parent star inside that system’s habitable, or Goldilocks, zone where temperatures are “just right” for water to form on planets.

This warmth is the result of Proxima b orbiting extremely close to its central star — just five percent of the distance between the Earth and Sun. This close orbit means the planet orbits Proxima Centauri every 11.2 days.

Artists conception of Proxima Centauri b, a rocky planet with an estimated mass of at least 1.2 times that of Earth and warm enough for liquid water.

Finally, and perhaps most fascinating of all, the Doppler shift of the signal BLC1 only increased during its period of observation, meaning whatever technological device emitted this signal, appeared to be moving.

Scientists are not completely sure if the signal is indeed coming from the direction of Proxima? According to an article from AstroWright

If it’s ground-based interference, it’s definitely not coming from that direction. If it’s really from space, it could actually be coming from any place in a 16 arcminute circle around Proxima—about half the width of the full moon.

Footnotes

BLC1 - Wikipedia

BLC1: A candidate signal around Proxima

What is BLC-1 – That Weird Signal from Proxima Centauri?

Alexis St. Martin: The Man With A Hole In Stomach Revolutionized Medicine

2021-06-07T18:35:00.003+01:00

Alexis Bidagan dit St. Martin was born at Berthier, a village about 40 miles North of Montreal, Canada on April 18, 1794. On June 6, 1822, St-Martin was accidentally shot with a musket at close range at the fur trading post on Mackinac Island. The charge of the musket shot left a hole through his side that healed to form a fistula aperture into his stomach.

The bullet traveled through St. Martin’s stomach, tearing a hole right through! In 1822, little was known about digestion. One surgeon, William Beaumont, took this as an opportunity to experiment.

He observed food falling out of St. Martin’s stomach when he ate. He sampled the man’s stomach acid, and at one point, even licked the gaping hole, discovering that it didn’t have an acid taste until the stomach was actively digesting food.

He looked directly into the stomach and observed it’s motion. He poured in water with a funnel and put in food with a spoon, and drew them out again with a tube. He put pieces of meat on a string into the stomach, and removed them hourly for examination.

Beaumont trialed the effect of gastric juice with different kinds of food and measured temperature and acidity. By doing this, he proved that digestion required hydrochloric acid. Beaumont also demonstrated that gastric juice is produced only in response to food, and did not accumulate between meals as previously thought. He also disproved the idea that hunger is caused by the walls of the empty stomach rubbing against each other.

St. Martin eventually felt humiliated by Beaumont’s experiments and yearned to go back to trading. Several times he ran back to Canada to live a normal life, but each time, poverty brought him back to the doctor. Once, Beaumont even sent agents to track St. Martin down and bring him back for more experiments!

In the end, Beaumont performed approximately 200 experiments on St. Martin over a period of ten years.

In short, St. Martin was one helluva person! I can't imagine someone experimenting on me asleep, let alone awake!

Footnotes

Alexis St. Martin: The Man With A Hole In His Stomach

This Man’s Gunshot Wound Gave Scientists a Window Into Digestion

Alexis St. Martin - Wikipedia