Science facts that amaze you?

Maximus Alexander

Ompala wrote: »

Russia has a larger surface area than Pluto

And they're both equally bleak. :pac:

Ompala

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

And they're both equally bleak. :pac:

I'm expecting jokes about Russia increasing their surface area tbh...

Beano

Barely There wrote: »

If you put a small dog and a pigeon into an airtight room and leave them for 48 hours, when the room is re-opened the pigeon will have disappeared, but the dog will be able to fly.

Huh???

Kunkka

The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life. Sorry

DLMA23

After the USA, Ireland is the largest software producing country in the world

endacl

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

Probably pretty similar to this (yes I went to the trouble of making this for you ):

Nice one! Technology sure has come a long way since the 70s. It took Voyager decades to get out that far. You were out and back in an afternoon!

Hang on. Did you actually go that far. I'm not falling for that small/far away thing again!

:mad:

endacl

md23040 wrote: »

Thank you for that. But why is Madrid much colder in the winter than the summer considering the sun is 3 million miles closer, and on the principle of the tilt of the Earth etc, why is New Zealand or Austrailia not past boiling point, considering its angle of trajectory to the sun and so much closer by millions of miles?

Science!

Barely There

Peel and core an apple, and leave it in a basin of water overnight.

If you take a bite of it the next day, it will still taste exactly like an apple.

endacl

Barely There wrote: »

Peel and core an apple, and leave it in a basin of water overnight.

If you take a bite of it the next day, it will still taste exactly like an apple.

The apple, or the basin?

uch

If you fill a bath with Pee and sit in it, then eat a Nectarine while sitting in the bath, when you get out you will smell of Píss!

I know, amazing

Wibbs

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

For all we know the inverse could be true, maybe life normally progresses rapidly to intelligence and Earth was unusually slow on the uptake for some reason. With a sample size of one and a complete dearth of data, we just can't make those kind of inferences.

Oh sure it's possible intelligence was more selected for in another environment, but I'd still be doubtful. We have had multiple environments on earth over billions of years and many strategies were evolved in that time, but intelligence, particularly our kinda smarts only came along the once.

On the other hand, the amino acids which were found in the sample returned from Comet Wild-2 by the Stardust mission, complex organic molecules being detected on and around a multitude of moons and minor planets in the solar system (and even in remote clouds of gas throughout the galaxy), and the fact that abiogenesis occurred so quickly after the cooling of the Earth are pretty compelling evidence that life might be ubiquitous.

Certainly the ingredients are there, but whether the cake gets baked is the big question. It most certainly increases the chances of course but as you say with a sample size of one we can't know.

I'm biased here, because I actually prefer the idea of a universe teeming with life, but I think you're also biased by a desire to see Earth based, or human life as special.

Oh I have no issue with the idea that life may be all over the place in the universe MA and intelligent life like ours may be out there somewhere, but I would strongly suspect it's a rare enough event to get started and a rarer event to avoid extinction. We may not escape the latter ourselves(though I suspect we've passed a threshold on that score and will end up really moulding evolution by creating our own replacements).

And on the timeframe of the universe I'd bet it's very rare where such intelligence is common at the same time within say a galaxy. If an alien probe passed through our system looking for brains like ours it would likely miss indicators of it until farming and cities kicked off and even then would want to be looking closely. Modern tech like radio etc would have an even smaller window. About a century, out of millions of centuries. And that window may close even here as we go to more microwave transmissions which don't travel as far. There could be a farming level society on a planet within 20 lightyears of here and we'd never know it. There could be a society that rose and then went extinct at the same distance and we'd never know it. Or a society that turned inwards into some sort of virtual reality world and didn't ever bother to look outwards and we'd never know it. We've been searching the heavens for quite a while for signs of technology and so far it's very silent. It's a tough nut to crack.

As for human life being special? Outside the question of who else may be out there, human's are special here. We are demonstrably unique. There has been nothing within spitting distance of us in the entire history of the planet earth. No other animal could even begin to comprehend what we're doing on this very thread(inc our early ancestors), much less build it.

I too love space exploration and we need to do it and more of it. If we are unique in the galaxy at this moment in time we need to get out there, because being stuck here makes us very vulnerable.

Barely There

If you take any number and subtract it from itself, the answer will always be '0'.

No matter how large the number you initially chose - try it.

Grayson

Firstly, I hate the thread title. Why does everything have to be amazing?

Here's something rather interesting.

There was a bloke called Eratosthenes. He heard of a place where on a particular day (the solstice), at a particular time (midday), there was no shadow. This was because the sun was directly overhead.

He knew that on the same day at the same time there was a shadow cast where he was in Alexandria. He measured the angle the shadow cast, and assumed that if the earth was round, the earth would therefore be about 50 times that distance in circumference. So he found out the distance between the two points and worked out the circumference of the earth (He may have been out by up to 16% but this is because some of the figures weren't that accurate).

I think that's pretty cool for a guy living about 200BC and measuring the lengths of a shadow.

Grayson

Wossack wrote: »

Whats also interesting, is that the crater resembling the 'super laser' on the deathstar is entirely coincidental, as the crater wasnt discovered until 2 years after the film was made

I thought you meant the crater on the deathstar...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p_UCf2JLBZo/TaNi1-FG_gI/AAAAAAAAEZg/gU7zrrQ_62c/s400/duh-duh1233387823.jpg

AndyBoBandy

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

And they're both equally bleak. :pac:

I'll take my chances on Pluto thank you very much!!

Akrasia

Spiders can paraglide

Some species of spider transport themselves by climbing up onto something high, shooting out some spiderweb (out of their arse) into the shape of a kite and then letting the wind carry them somewhere new.

It's called ballooning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_(spider)

Betty Bloggs

I think the fecker spiders in my house can teleport.
I take my eyes of one for 2 seconds and they're gone, only to reappear the other side of the room soon later. Masters of evasion.

Frank Lee Midere

Wibbs wrote: »

Oh sure it's possible intelligence was more selected for in another environment, but I'd still be doubtful. We have had multiple environments on earth over billions of years and many strategies were evolved in that time, but intelligence, particularly our kinda smarts only came along the once.

Certainly the ingredients are there, but whether the cake gets baked is the big question. It most certainly increases the chances of course but as you say with a sample size of one we can't know.

Oh I have no issue with the idea that life may be all over the place in the universe MA and intelligent life like ours may be out there somewhere, but I would strongly suspect it's a rare enough event to get started and a rarer event to avoid extinction. We may not escape the latter ourselves(though I suspect we've passed a threshold on that score and will end up really moulding evolution by creating our own replacements).

And on the timeframe of the universe I'd bet it's very rare where such intelligence is common at the same time within say a galaxy. If an alien probe passed through our system looking for brains like ours it would likely miss indicators of it until farming and cities kicked off and even then would want to be looking closely. Modern tech like radio etc would have an even smaller window. About a century, out of millions of centuries. And that window may close even here as we go to more microwave transmissions which don't travel as far. There could be a farming level society on a planet within 20 lightyears of here and we'd never know it. There could be a society that rose and then went extinct at the same distance and we'd never know it. Or a society that turned inwards into some sort of virtual reality world and didn't ever bother to look outwards and we'd never know it. We've been searching the heavens for quite a while for signs of technology and so far it's very silent. It's a tough nut to crack.

As for human life being special? Outside the question of who else may be out there, human's are special here. We are demonstrably unique. There has been nothing within spitting distance of us in the entire history of the planet earth. No other animal could even begin to comprehend what we're doing on this very thread(inc our early ancestors), much less build it.

I too love space exploration and we need to do it and more of it. If we are unique in the galaxy at this moment in time we need to get out there, because being stuck here makes us very vulnerable.

What people don't get is fermi's paradox is a paradox because it assumes a) the Drake equation is true and b) the principle of mediocrity. Then it asks "where are they".

Taking fairly conservative values for Drake you get 10,000 to 1 million inhabitable and therefore (using the principle of mediocrity) inhabited worlds. Many would be older than earth by billions of years and have plenty of time to send probes everywhere. Answering that they may not be like us in terms of exploration or warlike ness ( we are not that violent actually) violates the principle of mediocrity. Thinking they are all better, or worse than us, violates that principle too. And even if some were not as warlike or expansionist because we are at the high end of those categories( violating the PM) given the numbers, many would be.

So where are they? Something in Drake has to give.

ScumLord

Powered flight has only evolved four times in the history of life on earth. Insects, pterosaurs (a separate evolution to birds), birds and bats.

There was very little oxygen on earth until life came along then one bacteria started producing oxygen, which was toxic to just about everything that was alive at the time. It eventually caused a mass extinction and the greenhouse effect from all this added oxygen plunged the earth into an ice age that covered the entire planet in 100m thick ice sheets depending. So the element that nearly all life on earth depends on for fuel almost wiped out life right at the beginning.

endacl

Grayson wrote: »

Firstly, I hate the thread title. Why does everything have to be amazing?

Because Brian Cox.

housetypeb

Liquid nitrogen at close to absolute zero turns into a super fluid and will seep through glass.
Amazing Interesting.

Jello

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU

hal9000

The sheer scale of the universe from the infinitesimally small to the unfathomably gargantuan is amazing!
http://scaleofuniverse.com/

Joe Doe

Pigs get sunburn, and further on this... pigs have almost the same biological makeup as humans (e.g. heart transplants are viable between us and pigs).

Some of those middle eastern folks won't touch it (considering it dirty or 'tainted dna').
This can go further back to most ancient of scripture (Sumerian Scripts) which imply some 'interference' by higher intelligence entities, you can read about these on those tablets thingies...

Rucking_Fetard

Advances in Wireless Power

Wibbs

Wossack wrote: »

a woman who doesn't give birth to a daughter, breaks a chain of women giving birth to women going back to the beginning of mankind

Just thinking on this, but is this also the case with a man who never has a son? Actually on that score I get the odd hint from my family as I'm the "last of my line" on the male side. All the other direct male rellies only had daughters.

Another one regarding this is that many more female lines have survived worldwide, the male lines are smaller. It seems that over our history a few men had more kids with more women. Genghis Khan a more recent example. His paternal line is found in over 100 million Asian dudes living today. Which should serve as a warning to never piss off an Asian dude, cos he may get genetic heritage on your arse. Even here in Ireland there is the Niall of the nine hostages male line that is present in a lot of men, particularly from the northwest.

Some other human genetics stuff is interesting too. There's one set of genes(being a twat I can't recall which ones) that when mapped out geographically line up with the Roman empire at it's most expansive. Fecking Italians eh? Even with back and forth invasions and travel etc most people in Europe and Africa and Asia can be genetically mapped to within 100 miles of where they actually live. Though women travel more and further. There was a case of an ancient skeleton in the UK where they rebuilt the genome and found that the nearest living relative to this stoneaged guy was a school teacher bloke who lived ten miles away from where his ancestor was buried 3 odd thousand years previously.

Africa has more genetic diversity than anywhere else on the planet. You could pick two blokes or blokesses at random who live 20 miles apart who look similar enough and they could be as unrelated as a Swede and a Syrian. As a continent Europeans have one of the narrowest genetic spread.

Then we look deeper and see non African folks got jiggy with other subspecies of humans. The Euroasians got it on with Neandertals leaving up to 4% of their genes still around today(though interestingly Europeans got slightly different Neandertal genes to Asians) and some populations of east Asia got it on with another subspecies of human of a similar type(Denisovans) that left an even higher genetic legacy and there may have been Barry White time with even earlier humans like Homo Erectus. Well if a lad lived up to that name you could see how he might be popular with the laydees...

Pale skin is another odd one. Europeans have it and so do Asians, but there are different genes involved. The Asian folks got the better one as they have about the same prevalence of skin cancer as Africans. Red hair is another oddball one. Europeans have it, but so can native Australians and some Semitic populations(Woody Allen a Jewish dude, is/was a ginge). Neandertals had it too(If some are ever found in the depths of Siberia I double dare you to call one of them a ginge bastard ), but it was a different set of genes, so we didn't get it from them. Blue eyes have only been around for 10,000 years and first sprang up in the Caucasus area. Blond hair appears to be even younger, more like 5000 years old. Indeed the Greeks didn't really have a word for it, which was a bit of a pain for Alex the great as he had it. No wonder his da thought the wife was playing away. Humans are bleedin deadly. We're so alike, yet remarkably different with it.

Rucking_Fetard

https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home

Jakey Rolling

The gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth is about 175 times that of the Moon, yet the Moon is the main cause of the ocean tides.

House of Blaze

Wibbs wrote: »

Just thinking on this, but is this also the case with a man who never has a son?

Well as far as I'm aware there is a slight difference between the two based on the transmission of mitochondrial dna.

Mitochondria are these really interesting little parts of our cells (called an organelle - think, organs like heart, lungs but at a cellular level) which work primarily as power providers for the wider cell. They take in and process atp into chemical energy that the cell can then use to do all the things that cells like to do such as growing, dividing and expressing proteins as different tissues.

The coolest thing about mitochondria though are the fact that they are mostly believed to be a result of one of our earliest biological ancestors (think at the level of there even being mutlicellular organisms) having absorbed a separate entity (commonly believed to be a bacterium of some sort due to the difference in the structure of the two separate dna strands). It has it's own genetic code that tells it what to do as much as the more familiar one we have in our nucleus to tell the whole cell what to do.

The prevailing theory is that when we were all early mutlicellular organisms floating about in the 'warm little pond' darwin spoke of. That we managed to blunder into a nearby bacterium at some stage which resulted in a symbiotic relationship developing between the two separate organisms. The trade off was the efficient power supply the mitochondria could provide the cell with in exchange for nice warm place to chill in. Since the mitochondria has a much smaller genome it is a much simpler creature than the proto human cell and that was a fine existence for it!

The mtDNA is passed down only through the female line during sexual reproduction, meaning that it almost never changes from one generation to the next unlike the nuclear variety we are familiar with. This is of paramount importance when tracing the genetic lineage of an organism and is is the primary method of identifying the last common ancestor between two more recent species.

This is what people talk about when they mention 'mitochondrial eve' with regard to the last common female ancestor that most(all?) of humanity can be traced back to.

And to think.. it's basically an separate organism which resides inside each cell in your body.. Humans are so weird like..

TheBegotten

Shampoo is generally acidic and conditioner is generally basic. When used correctly, they will clean and smoothen your hair and cancel each other out. 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner is one of the miracles of modern chemistry.

Viagra was initially developed to treat heart disease.

Homosexuality presents a net increase in children in a group setting, in line with the "Gay Uncle" theory.

kowloon

Barely There wrote: »

If you take any number and subtract it from itself, the answer will always be '0'.

No matter how large the number you initially chose - try it.

-1-1=

Rucking_Fetard

kowloon wrote: »

-1-1=

0

Sir Arthur Daley

sauce makes you cycle faster and longer.

Joe Doe

Jakey Rolling wrote: »

The gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth is about 175 times that of the Moon, yet the Moon is the main cause of the ocean tides.

Sure that's just retaliative, more variable and frequent positioning... check this recurring math though:

The Moon's polar circumference is 27.3% the size of the Earth's polar circumference.

The Moon orbits the earth every 27.3 Earth (sidereal) days and turns 10920.8 km at the equator every 27.3 days. This equates to a speed of 400 km/h. The Earth turns at 100 times the rate and travels 40,000 km per rotation. Conversely the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon and 400 times further away from Earth, which is why we get to see such great eclipses.

If you were to draw a circle inside a square, with the circle's diameter the same as the square's length, the area left over that the circle does not cover is 27.32% of the total area of the square.


Earth turns 366 times each orbit of the sun, and is 366% the measurement of the moon at the polar circumference. The moon orbits earth 366 times every 10,000 days.

There are 109.2 Earth diameters across the Sun's diameter.
There are 109.2 Sun diameters between the Earth and the Sun when it is at the furthest reach of it's orbit around the sun.
There are 109.2 x 100 km across the circumference of the Moon...

davemc180

I always thought the sky was blue because of the reflection of the sea...

only seen on discovery its because of the ozone and basically could be any colour of the rainbow except for the angle the light rays hit us...

like a washing up liquid bubble has hints of green purple etc

Bipolar Joe

davemc180 wrote: »

I always thought the sky was blue because of the reflection of the sea...

only seen on discovery its because of the ozone and basically could be any colour of the rainbow except for the angle the light rays hit us...

like a washing up liquid bubble has hints of green purple etc

So, you think water is blue?

Jonty

I can't believe it's not butter

davemc180

Bipolar Joe wrote: »

So, you think water is blue?

I know water is clear but the sea is blue..

AND IT IS REALLY BUTTER

Wibbs

Bipolar Joe wrote: »

So, you think water is blue?

Water is slightly blue. Unless you're an ancient greek in which case it's wine coloured.

RustDaz

RustDaz

i must be dense i can't figure out the video paste thing at all

Rucking_Fetard

RustDaz wrote: »

i must be dense i can't figure out the video paste thing at all

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056265452

RustDaz

Maximus Alexander

davemc180 wrote: »

I know water is clear but the sea is blue..

AND IT IS REALLY BUTTER

Both water and the sky are blue independently of one another. The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering. Water is blue in large quantities because it absorbs other wavelengths of light leaving blue behind, but also the surface of the ocean takes on a lot of its colour from the sky, which is why it can look grey when it's overcast.

dellas1979

I always wonder, you know thousands of years ago, who or how did they get the idea on how to start a fire (2 rocks).

Looking at 2 rocks, it just wouldnt be obvious, ya know?

Do ye think one day, thousands of years ago, 2 rocks fell on each other in front of some neanderthols, and a fire started, to which it was discovered its warmth. And from that you could cook/melt etc.

And without this discovery, we probably wouldnt be tapping away here.

Just fascinates me that at one stage this discovery happened.

Fate Amenable To Change

dellas1979 wrote: »

I always wonder, you know thousands of years ago, who or how did they get the idea on how to start a fire (2 rocks).

Without this discovery, we probably wouldnt be tapping away here.

Do ye think one day, thousands of years ago, 2 rocks fell on each other, and a fire started, to which it was discovered its warmth. And from that you could cook/melt etc.

Just fascinates me that at one stage this discovery happened.

They would have used flint to make their tools and weapons, likely someone saw the sparks when they were trying to shape something

dellas1979

Fate Amenable To Change wrote: »

They would have used flint to make their tools and weapons, likely someone saw the sparks when they were trying to shape something

Was that more stone Age tho? (I thought fire was discovered even before this?).

bnt

kowloon wrote: »

-1-1=

(-1)-(-1)=0

Wibbs

dellas1979 wrote: »

I always wonder, you know thousands of years ago, who or how did they get the idea on how to start a fire (2 rocks).

Looking at 2 rocks, it just wouldnt be obvious, ya know?

Well it happened over a million years ago long before Neandertals. Homo Erectus look like the first guys to cop it.

And yea without it we would not be who we are today. Cooking in particular was one of the biggest innovations humans ever made. It released more nutrients, softened food and removed toxins and parasites so we could exploit food resources we couldn't have otherwise without evolving different teeth and digestive system. Plus fire made the night safe. Animals run away from it. Which adds another level to this humans and fire thing, someone had to brave the fire in the first place. It also allowed us to go into areas that would have been too cold for us otherwise. Fire changed everything.

Fate Amenable To Change wrote: »

They would have used flint to make their tools and weapons, likely someone saw the sparks when they were trying to shape something

Highly unlikely. 1) knapping flint produces remarkably few sparks if any(I never saw any when I did it) and 2) contrary to a very popular belief out there it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to start a fire with flints alone. Flint as a fire starter only came into use when we invented steel which we struck off the flint. That creates a cascade of sparks large and hot enough to start a fire. Plus many areas we lived in had no flint/chert dense enough to be of much use even with steel which we didn't have until historical times.

How our ancestors and hunter gatherers today start fires is by friction. Rubbing wood against other wood, usually by the use of a wood drill. It's actually quite a complex behaviour. How did they do it back then? Maybe they didn't at first. Natural wildfires from lightning strikes and the like may have been their original source. First they grabbed the fire when they could and later they collected and "stored" it, rather than make it themselves, that could come later. Even in historical times some fully modern human groups didn't have the knowledge to create fire. IE the Andaman Islanders. They got it from natural sources and stored it as near continuous fires or in the form of embers which can burn for days.

The method to independently make fire probably came about as part of our first use of wood as a tool and the working of that wood. Someone noticed that friction in wood caused heat and they went from there. Maybe they explained it away that the fire spirit "lived" in dead and dry wood and by rubbing it for long enough they could liberate it.

Wibbs

dellas1979 wrote: »

Was that more stone Age tho? (I thought fire was discovered even before this?).

The (various)stone ages made up the vast majority of our history. The earliest stone tools deliberately shaped are simple pebble choppers going back nearly 3 million years ago. Made by people who would not look human if you met one. Fire comes along about 1 million years ago, made by people who looked a little more like us, but still more ape like in appearance.