Know It All

2012-04-27T15:43:00.004-07:00

MAN MADE LIFE?

New research has brought us closer than ever to synthesizing entirely new forms of life. An international team of researchers has shown that artificial nucleic acids - called "XNAs" - can replicate and evolve, just like DNA and RNA.

The researchers, led by Philipp Holliger and Vitor Pinheiro, synthetic biologists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, say their findings have major implications in everything from biotherapeutics, to exobiology, to research into the origins of genetic information itself. This represents a huge breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology.

The implications of the team's findings are numerous and far-reaching. For one thing, the study sheds significant light on the origins of life itself. In the past, investigations into XNA have been largely driven by the question of whether simpler genetic systems may have existed before RNA and DNA the fact that these XNAs appear to be capable of evolution adds to an ever-growing body of evidence of a genetic system predating DNA and RNA both.

These studies have made us realize how different alien life forms may be from us and also that life can exist in ways much different than we have observved. How close are we to creating new life forms ourselves away from nature? I would say about.... 2 years in the past. scientists have already created very simple life forms with no ancestors (man made life forms). Here is an article explaining the findings and research of Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith I highly recommend you read it if you have an interest in this sort of stuff http://www.economist.com/node/16163006

2012-04-26T13:55:00.001-07:00

MINING IN OUTER SPACE?

Planetary Resources is establishing a new paradigm for resource discovery and utilization that will bring the solar system into humanity’s sphere of influence. Their technical principals boast extensive experience in all phases of robotic space missions, from designing and building, to testing and operating. They are comprised of visionaries, pioneers, rocket scientists and industry leaders with proven track records on—and off—this planet.

They plan to mine asteroids for rare resources such as heavy metals and in the process pave the way for human exploration of the solar system. It may seem to you that this venture is centuries away, however plans are in place already to send off 2 space telescopes which will basically tell them which asteroids to mine. It is widely accepted by NASA scientists that we already have the technology to mine asteroids. The test of time will show us how accurate this assumption actually is.

2012-04-24T15:12:00.000-07:00

FINDING EARTH-LIKE PLANETS THAT CAN SUPPORT LIFE

NASA's planet-hunting Keplerspacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced.

The new finds bring the kepler space telescope total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation.These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700.

Kepler-22b's radius is 2.4 times that of Earth, and the two planets have roughly similar temperatures. If the greenhouse effect operates there similarly to how it does on Earth, the average surface temperature on Kepler-22b would be 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius). It has All the right conditions for liquid water and thus life to exist. Although little is currently known about the surface of this alien world, however when the Hubble Space Telescope is updated in 2014, we will be able to make very accurate predictions about 22b and the handful of other known rocky planets in the 'Goldilocks zone'.

2012-04-24T13:34:00.001-07:00

Cows churn out "human breast milk"

Chinese scientists have produced a herd of genetically modified cows that make milk that could substitute for human breast milk -- a possible alternative to formula in a nation rocked by tainted milk powder scandals.

Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology of the China Agricultural University introduced human genetic coding into the DNA of Holstein dairy cow embryos, then transferred the embryos into cow surrogates.

In 2003, after years of testing on mice, scientists managed to create the first cow that could produce milk with the same nutritional properties as human breast milk, but with a taste even stronger and sweeter

2012-04-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post of kangaroo facts:

1. Female Kangaroos have 3 vaginas
2. Kangaroo fetuses are identical to human fetuses
3. There are more Kangaroos in Australia than humans
4. A kangaroo can jump up to 25 feet
5. Kangaroos can live for 2 months without drinking any water
6. New born kangaroos have no eyes or ears

2012-04-22T09:38:00.003-07:00

THE MOST EXTREME ANIMAL ON EARTH
It can survive temperatures as low as -270 degrees Celsius (-450 Fahrenheit) and as high as 150 (300 Fahrenheit). It can survive 1000 times the radiation that would kill a human being and can live without water for well over 100 years. So what is this super resilient animal? Meet the Waterbear

This tiny animal has 8 legs and survives by sucking juices out of moss. They have fully developed eyes and skin. It can survive such extreme conditions as it dehydrates itself completely, retracting its legs and curling up into a ball until conditions are good enough for it to eat and drink which can be up to 120 YEARS after it curls up. So this animal can literally come back from the dead.

These amazing animals have ever=n been subjected to the harsh vacuum of space. When brought back to earth, just by adding water, they came back to life and continued as if nothing had happened

image of a waterbear http://zeptarthestarman.tumblr.com/post/3518779757/water-bear-water-bear-paramacrobiotus

2012-04-21T10:54:00.001-07:00

OBESITY SO BAD, A BLACK HOLE IS CREATED

If you think about it, black holes aren't actually that heavy. By this i mean that a black hole is essentially just the mass of a very large star however compared to a galaxy containing billions of stars, it is extremely lite. So what makes a black hole a 'black hole' and a galaxy, with many billions of times its mass, not a 'black hole'. Well it turns out that a black hole is the way it is because of its density and not just because of its mass. Using the formula density = mass/volume we can see that if the volume is small enough, any mass could become a black hole.This volume is called the schwarzchild radius. Mathematically speaking, any object could become a black hole!

For example:

Mount Everest has a schwarzchild radius of about a nanometer.

Earth has the schwarzchild radius of about the same size as a cherry.

You and I have a schwarzchild radius of about 8.2x10^-17 nanometers while your mother has one about the same size as an apple. And now, here is a picture of a black hole for you to enjoy...

2012-04-21T03:59:00.002-07:00

WE LIVE IN THE PAST!

What is meant by the word 'now'? Most of us would think that 'now' is when we perceive something happening at the exact moment that it actually happens. This is of course incorrect. The fastest our Brain can process the information our senses supply it with is in a time of 80 milliseconds. This means that we can never actually know what is happening 'now', all we know is what happened a fraction of a second ago. This means that if the area you live in was attacked by a nuclear bomb, your brain would be destroyed before you would be able to process any pain as we live a fraction of a second in the past. Another factor that puts us slightly into the past is that electrical impulses in our body travel at about 115 meters per second (about 250mph) meaning that if we are driving a car at this speed and we don't see and obstacle 115 meters away, we will be dead before we even process what is happening. An experiment you could do at home is to tap yourself on your toe and your nose at the same time. now we know that you should feel the tap on your nose first as the information needs to travel a shorter distance to your brain. The reason why they are felt at the same time is because your brain doesn't instantly give you the feeling that you are being touched, rather it tries to detect any other touch on your body at the same time. This is a quick experiment that will show you that taller people live more in the past than shorter people. Another weird thing is that when we look in the mirror, it takes the light 3.335640952 x 10^-9 seconds to travel the meter or so to your mirror and back to your eyes. Added with the delays of processing information, this means that you can never see yourself in the mirror as you are right that instant.

2012-04-19T07:57:00.001-07:00

PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE 4TH DIMENSION

As most people know, black holes have a gravitational field so large that not even light can escape it. But its not just Black holes that can alter the path of light. Very heavy objects can distort light and make a light ray bend around it. Galaxies can do this as they have an extraordinarily large mass. If 2 galaxies are directly aligned with us, the galaxy closest to us will bend the light, and the galaxy behind it will appear distorted and will often appear as an illuminated ring around the closer galaxy. This effect is called Gravitational lensing (aka galactic lensing). The image to the left is a diagram of this.

Using this phenomena, we can calculate the mass of a galaxy by measuring how much it distorts the light. What we find while doing this is that there is a lot of mass in most galaxies that is having an effect on light however is not actually present. This is a type of dark matter and what we find is that in some galaxies, up to 90% of the mass is not actually present. Mass is occupying the region where the galaxy is located however in 3 dimensional space, its not there! The explanation to this is that the hidden mass must be occupying the 4th dimension, so it still has an effect on light, however it's not present in the 3rd dimension. The 4th dimension can also explain the existence of worm wholes, which may one day in the distant future allow us to travel to distant places without spending millenia is interstellar spacecrafts.

2012-04-17T10:05:00.001-07:00

NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY, YOU WILL NEVER MAKE PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH ANOTHER HUMAN BEING UNLESS YOU EAT THEM

What do i mean by this? Well let's first talk about what happens to atoms when they get closed to each other. The outside area of atoms is composed entirely of electron. As you may know, electrons are negatively charged and so they repel each other when they come too close. So when you touch an objects, the electrons in your skin are repelled away from the object and we interpret this repulsion as touch. The texture of an object is determined by how much it repels against your skin, so harder objects push your skin away more. So technically you have never touched another human being or any other object since you were born. Every kiss hug and handshake in your life have been an illusion of touch and have actually just been the outer atoms of your own skin being repelled inwards without making contact with another person. This means that technically we are always hovering above the ground at an atom level and never actually touch it. But wait there is one way of making actual contact with another person. Ask them if you could eat one of their limbs. As your body digests all the different nutrients, some covalent bonds will allow you to touch matter that is of the other person.

For more info, read about the pauli exclusion principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle

A short youtube clip explaining this concept http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBZr1qmsQ0U

2012-04-16T13:49:00.001-07:00

I AM AT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING IN EXISTENCE MOVES IN REFERENCE TO ME!

Now you may think from the title that I'm a self loving narcissist, however the title is completely correct.

But how? Well in order to understand this, we have to know about the expansion of the universe. All the galaxies in the universe are moving away from us and the rate at which they move away from us is increasing. But what are they moving away from? There must be a central location in the universe from which all the galaxies move away from. That's what you would think. However our universe is flat and rather than things moving away from each other in the way we would expect in a 3d shape, they do so like they are occupying a flat surface much like dots drawn on a balloon move away from each other when it is inflated. In this way, whichever reference point we take, things move away in reference to that point and the point itself remains in the same location. This would make the reference point the center of the universe and everything would move in reference to that point and as I am an object in the universe, if I were to take myself as the reference point, I would be the center of the universe. So the next time someone asks you why you think your so important or why you think your the center of the universe, explain to them that you are!

2012-04-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

WE ARE MADE UP OF EMPTY SPACE!

This post will explain how little actual 'matter' we are made of.

As most of you will know, everything is made up of atoms. But what are atoms made of? Atoms are made up of a nucleus containing protons and neutrons which make up virtually all the mass of the atom, and electrons which orbit around the nucleus and have virtually none of the mass of the atom. However the models most of us are used to don't give the full picture of how much empty space there is between the nucleus and the electron. If we were to scale the nucleus up to the size of a pinhead, the electrons would orbit this nucleolus with a diameter of about 95 FEET. That means that for 95 feet of diameter, there is only a pinhead worth of actual matter. But wait this is only the scale of a hydrogen or helium atom which have smaller radii than any other types of atom. This means that all the other atoms have even move empty space inside them! If we were able to somehow pack all of the matter inside your body into a single object, it would be about the size of a single 1.5 inch hair. That means that in all of your body, there is only enough matter for one human hair and the rest is empty space. If we were able to do the same thing to the entire Earth, it would shrink to the size of a peanut.

2012-04-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

I WAS BORN TOMORROW AND WILL DIE LAST WEDNESDAY?

In this post i will explain how everything in my entire life is happening at the same time and also at every time.

Many of you may have heard of the theory of special relativity. If not, I strongly recommend that you watch this video before reading on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajhFNcUTJI0

Ok so basically, despite what seems obvious, time is not a constant! Time slows down when your velocity increases. This means that what happens at a certain time relative to one observer can be a completely different event at the same 'time' to another observer as their velocities throughout their lives will be different.
So how Does this relate to the title? Well, lets take an exact point in time for example exactly 14 billion years after the big bang (very rough number). To one observer I died last Wednesday of old age. However to another observer who has been travelling at a very high velocity throughout his life, time has been passing a lot more slowly and therefore in his perspective I am not even born yet and I will be born tomorrow. This is why it is possible that i was born tomorrow and i will die last Wednesday. But wait, there is another aspect of time which we don't consider in our daily lives. This is the fact that there is no set rate for time. This means that what seems like a second to you could be my hour and someone else's week or even month.

2012-04-15T00:49:00.001-07:00

Imagine a new colour... What would this colour look like? There is no such thing as new colours right? WRONG!

In order to understand this, we must understand what a colour actually is. Well that's pretty simple, we see light with different wavelengths as different colours, meaning each colour and each shade of each colour has a specific wavelength. Next we must understand how we see. we see using things called cone cells. Each type of cone cell can detect a different wavelength of light (colour) and sends a signal to our brain telling us that the colour is present. Humans possess 3 different kinds of cone cells meaning that we can mix the three (blue green and red) to make all the different colours we see. However not all animals have 3 types of cone cells. For examples bulls only have 2 types and dogs only have 1 type which is why we say that dogs are colour blind. Well what does all this have to do with a new colour? Well, an animal possessing 4 types of cone cells could see 16 more colours than you and i can not. What blew my mind even more is the fact that some rare human beings also possess 4 types of cone cells. The condition is called Tetrachromacy (linked to wiki) and it means that people can really see new colours.

2012-04-15T00:12:00.005-07:00

Hello people of the world. On this blog, I would like to show people the beauty and the mysteries of the world using science and attempting to blow peoples minds with the complexity of the universe and showing how much and yet how little we actually know about the world we live in.