Trillions of dollars, floating in space…
Asterank is a database that catalogs and computes the economic attributes of nearly 600,000 asteroids. According to the data, there are 74 asteroids worth over $10 trillion.
Semporna, Malaysia
Semporna, a town located in Tawau division on Sabah’s east coast, is inhabited mainly by ethnic Bajau Laut, also known as Sea Gypsies, many of whom live in sprawling stilt villages above the water or in traditional Lepa boats.
Amazing place, just blew me away.
Source: forum.lowyat.net
Annular eclipse.
(via reddit)
Move over Blue Marble, we have a new Marble.
Unlike NASA’s Blue Marble—which is a composite made from many different photographs—this is a portrait of Earth taken in one single shot. It’s the highest resolution image of our home planet, 121 megapixels. That’s an amazing 0.62 miles per pixel.
This image was not taken by NASA or the European Space Agency. It’s been taken by Russia’s latest weather satellite, the Electro-L.
Elektro-L is now orbiting Earth on a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator, sending photographs of the entire planet every 30 minutes using a 2.56 to 16.36 Mbits per second connection with ground control. The images—and the video of the Northern Hemisphere—combines four light wavelengths, three visible and one infrared. The orange you are seeing here is the vegetation.
Source: Gizmodo
the storage capacity of the brain! (via Explore)
But the “Digital data created in 2010” has lots of duplicates, so the figure for unique data will be far less, something like half of that. Still a long way off from the theoretical brain capaity since the graph is in log scale.
Source: tedxvienna.at
Love this. So much.
The Irukandji Syndrome — pain so harsh it makes childbirth look like child’s play
The severity of the pain from an Irukandji jellyfish sting is apparent in the 2005 Discovery Channel documentary Killer Jellyfish[20] aboutCarukia barnesi, when two Australian researchers (Jamie Seymour and Teresa Carrette) are stung. Even under the “maximum dose of morphine,” Teresa remarked that she “wished she could rip her skin off,” and is later seen writhing uncontrollably from the pain while lying on her hospital bed. In one scene, Teresa’s feet are shown contorting and digging into the bed, and she is wiggling her toes and kicking her feet around. When the camera moves back, Teresa is seen rubbing her face, her body is contorting in agony, and her legs are rapidly sliding and kicking around on the bed. Jamie, at his worst, is also seen writhing in pain, curled up in a ball and barely able to speak. Jamie said he wished that he was stung by Chironex fleckeri instead since “the pain goes away in 20 minutes or you die.”
Another recent program that aired on the Discovery Channel entitled Stings, Fangs and Spines featured a 20-minute spot on Irukandji syndrome. In the segment, a young Australian woman was stung and developed a severe case of Irukandji syndrome. In a testament to the severity of pain involved, a re-enactment (featuring the actual victim portraying herself) shows her screaming and violently thrashing around on the hospital bed in an almost convulsive state, for the bulk of the segment. She later commented that this unbearable pain lasted for hours, and added that “I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to endure that level of pain without turning into a vegetable.”
On the television program Super Animal, a woman compared her pain from childbirth to her experience with Irukandji syndrome: “It’s like when you’re in labor, having a baby, and you’ve reached the peak of a contraction—that absolute peak—and you feel like you just can’t do it anymore. That’s the minimum that [Irukandji] pain is at, and it just builds from there.”
Gave me goosebumps.
Source: Wikipedia
How much water do we have? All of the Earth’s water will fit into a tiny sphere that’s smaller than the United States.
This is insane. Here’s a visualization from USGS showing every single molecule of water on Earth, from oceans to icebergs to the water inside you and me and in the atmosphere, collected inside a single sphere. It is smaller than the US, having a dia of just 860 miles.
Think about it, all life on this massive mud ball we call “Earth” depends on the water inside that tiny blue sphere.
Wow.
Source: ga.water.usgs.gov
4D
Being three-dimensional, we are only able to see the world with our eyes in two dimensions. A four-dimensional being would be able to see the world in three dimensions. For example, it would be able to see all six sides of an opaque box simultaneously, and in fact, what is inside the box at the same time, just as we can see the interior of a square on a piece of paper. It would be able to see all points in 3-dimensional space simultaneously, including the inner structure of solid objects and things obscured from our three-dimensional viewpoint.
If you thought time travel was challenging, just think about travelling through dimensions. Blow your mind yet?
Source: Wikipedia
Does time stop when you travel at the speed of light?
This is something that’s been bothering me for a while and it wasn’t until a few months back that I finally saw what it actually meant when they said “time stops when you travel at the speed of light”.
Lets do a simple thought experiment - imagine that you took a spaceship and travelled all the way to the Sun. There you got out of your spaceship and just as your watch strikes 10 a.m you hopped onto a beam of light that was just starting out from the Sun’s surface. You are now hurtling through space at the maximum possible speed - the speed of light, ‘c’ and you have an astronomer friend back on earth who’s watching you through his advanced telescope - he now sees something amazing - you are not moving at all. You are standing perfectly still on that beam of light speeding past Mercury at ‘c’.
Why are you still? Because you can’t move. Every atom of your body, no, every particle in every atom of your body, is frozen into place - they all remain fixed rock solid at the exact same place they were, the instant you jumped onto the beam of light back at the Sun. Because if the particles moved, their net speed is speed of light + their own motion, which is > c - this is impossible. The max speed possible is c, and since every single particle in your body is already moving at c, they can’t move.
So, as you shoot past Venus, your friend takes a closer look at you - you’re frozen still, your watch still says “10 a.m.” because the watch hands can’t move as that would violate the ‘c’ limit. At this point, your eyes won’t see anything because if the neurons in the eye fire that would violate the ‘c’ limit, your brain won’t be able to think, for the same reason, your heart isn’t beating, and blood isn’t pumping through your veins. Temporary death. You are paused. Time has stopped for you.
Your friend back on Earth glances at his watch - 10.07 a.m. 7 minutes have passed and you’ll soon be hitting Earth.
It’s 8 minutes and 17 seconds past 10 and your friend watches you slam into Earth - since this is a thought experiment you survive the crash and your friend runs over to you to ask you about the experience - you have nothing to say. Because to you it was all over in an “instant” - one moment you are at the Sun and the next thing you know your friend is running over to you asking you how you feel. Your body doesn’t feel stiff or tired - not an atom in your body has moved from the moment you started at the Sun to the moment you crashed into Earth. In short, atom for atom, you at 10:08 a.m are the EXACT same person you were at 10:00 a.m - nothing has changed - and since nothing has changed, it’s the equivalent of saying time has stopped for you.
Now that it’s over, fumbling with your watch to set it back to Earth time while silently vowing to use a digital watch in the next thought experiment, you realize the biggest takeaway from this experiment is the insight that time doesn’t actually stop - all the clocks on earth are still running as usual - but it’s the atoms in your body that stop and that’s what makes travelling at the speed of light seem like time has stopped for you. Why is this the biggest insight? Because knowing why it feels like time has stopped for you, tells us something important about time travel - Time Travel Is Not Instant!
In TV shows and movies** , they show people stepping into a Time machine and ~whoosh~ they are gone 500 years into the future - NO! WRONG! It feels like an instant ONLY to the travellers inside the Time Machine because their atoms and bodies and brains have been “paused” by the ‘c’ limit. Observers outside the Time Machine will see the Time Machine continue to “pause” the bodies day after day for the full 500 years, which is its way of actually doing the “time travel”. People will grow old and die and new people will come, grow old and die all around the Time machine and at the end of 500 years the Time Machine would “unpause” the atoms of the travellers and they will emerge, atom for atom, the exact same people with the exact same memories in the exact same state as they were 500 years ago - if they were in the middle of exhaling as they stepped into the machine 500 years ago, they would finish the exhale as they step out from the machine 500 years later, in one continuous flow - 500 years will truly be an instant for the travellers, but not for the observers.
Driving home the biggest insight of the experiment once again - Time travel doesn’t have anything to do with manipulating time or manipulating the speed of light - it’s simply “pausing” the atoms in place, the side-effect of travelling at ‘c’, that leads to Time travel. It feels like an instant only to the travellers, it’s normal life for everyone else. Understanding these two things is the key to making Time travel a reality, because travelling at the speed of light is impossible - that approach is a dead end. But now that we know time travel is nothing but pausing the atoms in place for the duration of travel, we can explore other approaches that let us do that - cryostasis being one of them.
So, no, Time doesn’t actually stop when you travel at the speed of light. What stops is change - things travelling with you stop moving, your watch stops running, your body stops aging - so it’s only the equivalent of time having stopped and ONLY YOU, the traveller, experiences this. Everyone else who is not travelling at the speed of light will still keep seeing the “paused” version of you for the entire duration of your travel.
P.S:
Conceptually, Time travel involves going back and forward, but only forward travel is even remotely plausible. Even if we someday find a way to reverse the direction of each and every particle of each and every atom of the traveller, along the paths they had taken to reach their respective present states, we can’t restore the atoms that used to be a part of the traveller but are currently lost ( like, if the traveller lost a finger in an accident some years ago, there’s no way to restore that finger and trace back the history of those lost atoms as well, by tracing the history of the atoms in the present body of the traveller.)
** Movies and TV shows, of course, use creative freedom with their time travel sequences. The point is not to criticize them but to change how they have shaped the public perception of how time travel would happen using the current theories put forth by the scientific community.
Elastic blood vessels and 2 feet long hearts
Medical doctors during the mid-1950’s, concerned with high blood pressure in humans, conducted some physiological experiments on giraffe. The giraffe’s long neck piqued their interest. Changes in blood pressure, occurring when the giraffe leans down to drink, would create problems that had to have been solved by some physiological means. Unless there was some mechanism, lowering the head would increase the blood pressure to such an extent that rupture of blood vessels in the brain would be highly likely. The heart must pump blood up 2.5 meters to the brain when the giraffe is erect, and down 2.5 meters when the giraffe stoops to drink. The circulatory system must have some way of preventing the blood from rushing too quickly back to the heart from the brain when the animal is erect or down to the brain when the animal’s head is lowered. The giraffe raises and lowers it’s head quickly.
Tests showed that the blood pressure at the base of the brain was 200 mm Hg (millimeters of mercury) when the giraffe is upright and, instead of being higher as expected, dropped to 175 mm Hg when the head was lowered. The viscosity of giraffe blood and its protein content was expected to be high - thicker things flowing more slowly. Instead, the viscosity was found to be the same as man, and the protein content, which might have caused high osmotic pressure, was found to be lower than that of man.
As in most ruminants, the blood reaches the brain from the heart by way of the common and external carotid arteries. The two external carotids divide, just before each reaches the brain, into many small vessels forming a tight network that is called the rete mirabile. The vessels of the giraffe rete have elastic walls which can accommodate excess blood when the head is lowered so that the brain is not flooded. As a further safeguard for the brain while the giraffe is in this position, a connection between the carotid artery and the vertebral artery drains off a portion of the blood even before it reaches this network. The walls of the rete mirabile vessels are also elastic enough to retain sufficient blood when the head is raised so that the brain’s supply is not depleted momentarily during the system’s pressure changes.
(via africam)
Wikipedia adds:
Conversely, the blood vessels in the lower legs are under great pressure (because of the weight of fluid pressing down on them). To solve this problem, the giraffe’s lower legs have a thick, tight layer of skin, which prevents too much blood from pouring into them.
Interesting, but even more interesting is their gigantic heart…
Its heart, which can weigh more than 25 lb (11 kg) and measures about 2 ft (61 cm) long, must generate approximately double the blood pressure(~300/200, the highest of any animal) required for a human to maintain blood flow to the brain. Giraffes have usually high heart rates for their size, at 150 beats per minute.
Now you know why Giraffes are such gentle giants — they have a large heart.
One more thing… if this is what Giraffes have had to do to live with their long necks, imagine what the Sauropods, with necks over five times longer than a Giraffe’s and bodies as large as whales, would have had to deal with. The scale is just Insane.
DNAs, RNAs, and now XNAs
When it comes to messing with the backbone—the sugars and phosphates—it gets quite a bit harder to integrate things with actual biological systems. The enzymes that prepare and copy DNA, for example, are structured to work with sugars and phosphates. Having something that’s both chemically and structurally distinct doesn’t always work that well.
Rather than messing with the chemistry, the team behind the new paper decided to fix the enzymes. They started with a DNA copying enzyme, and introduced lots of random mutations, then checked for versions that would latch on to a chemical that was somewhat structurally related to the normal sugar used in DNA. After a couple rounds of this, they had an enzyme that could copy stretches of DNA into pieces of a nucleic acid that contained nothing but this sugar substitute, converting the DNA into an artificial chemical relative.
Using similar procedures, the same enzyme could be adapted to a wide variety of chemicals related to sugars. The authors picked five in total, all with features that were distinct from the normal sugars, like a double bond between carbon atoms, a fluorine replacing an oxygen, and a double-ring structure. Collectively, they termed these DNA/RNA substitutes XNAs.
Animals came from DNAs, plants from RNAs, and now with XNAs, the question of when we’ll meet aliens is finally answered… we don’t have to look to skies, we are making them right here on Earth in our labs. Exciting.
Source: Ars Technica
“…not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it…”
Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena’s melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. “She’s looking at you,” Dowd said.
A true story that is more interesting than most novels. Fascinating read about an incredible creature.
I love optical phenomena
Since I’m on the topic of interesting materials, just came to know that Diamond has not been the hardest material for at least half a decade now. First came Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (ADNR), and those were surpassed by w-BN (Wurtzite Boron Nitride) which itself has been surpassed by the current champ - a pure lab generated sample of Lonsdaleite with a value of 15.8 on the Mohs scale of hardness (Diamond is at 10).
One waterfall can power an entire continent
One waterfall. Enough power for an entire continent. Meet the ultra-massive Grand Inga Dam.
The design targets to top 39,000 MW in installed capacity, sufficient to meet the entire power demand of the African continent.
Africa has over 1 billion people spread across 52 countries and is larger than China, United States, Western Europe, India, Argentina, three Scandinavian countries and the British Isles combined. And one single waterfall can take care of all that for decades. The scale is beyond meaningful comprehension.
