Fairy Rings

Old myths say that if you ever find mushrooms growing in a ring, beware of treading in it lest the fairies that made them grow that way cart you off!

I can’t prove the existence of fairies, but the scientific explanation is almost as neat. The mushrooms that you see aren’t separate organisms; instead, they’re all connected. Starting from a single spore, an underground part of the fungus called the mycelium grows larger and larger in all directions, making a circle. The mushrooms sprout from the edges of the mycelium.

There are two types of fairy rings. One type grows in lawns and meadows. As the mycelium grows outward, it secretes chemicals that break down organic matter and release the nutrients into the soil. For a short time, the grass in the area benefits from this, but as the mycelium grows to reach the area, it takes up all of the nutrients and the grass dies. The central mycelium eventually uses up all of the nutrients and dies itself, but the outer edges keep growing.
The second type is called a tethered ring. These grow in forests, and the mushrooms grow in symbiosis with the roots of trees. Indeed, they grow ‘tethers’ that keep them connected to the tree roots, thus their name. Both the mushroom and the trees benefit from this relationship.

Fairy rings can grow to be HUGE – several hundred meters across, and can live to be hundreds of years old. One that was discovered in France is almost half a mile across and may be 700 years old!

Fairy Ring Facts

Is there life somewhere else in the universe?

I can’t answer this for certain, but more and more the answer seems to be “probably.” We keep looking in places here on Earth where nothing could live, and we keep finding living things there!

We thought no ecosystem could survive without light to power photosynthesis. But then Robert Ballard discovered organisms living around deep ocean geothermal vents. Whole ecosystems that depend on chemosynthesis flourish in the depths.

Surely nothing can live in boiling, or almost boiling water. I mean, that’s how you sterilize things, right? But in the Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone, we are proven wrong again, spectacularly. Water bubbles into the spring at 160 degrees. For comparison, hot tubs are at or below 104. Your home's water heater should be at 120, so that you don't get scalded. As the water in the spring moves towards the shore, it cools slightly. Different species of bacteria live in the different temperatures, giving the spring its colors. By the way, that brown line on the left of the photo is a boardwalk. If you look closely, you can see people on it.

Okay, what about cold temperatures? Well gallfly larvae and even some turtles can freeze solid! Some fish produce antifreeze. And recently, after scientists drilled a hole through 600 feet of ice, they found living things.

So every time we think we find an environment that can’t support life, we’re proven wrong. So while I can’t guarantee that there is life on other planets, I’d say it’s probable. Life finds a way.

Sliding Scale

Much like I talked about in my Powers of Ten post, it’s very difficult to really understand how small some things are. This website does the best job of any that I have found to truly show you the sizes. If you scroll down to the bottom of the picture, you’ll see a slider. Slide it to the right to go down in size.

Sliding scale cell size

How many

How many...

times will your heart beat in your lifetime? About 2.5 billion

pounds of food will you eat? About 60,000 - 100,000.

calories does it take to run a marathon? About 2,000, which is the same amount it takes just to keep you alive for one day.

times will you breath? About 473 million times

miles will you walk in your lifetime? About 100,000. That's 4 times around the Earth.

times will you be in a traffic accident? The average is once.

times a day should you go to the bathroom? Once for #2. For #1, it depends on how much you drink.

times do you blink a year? About 10 million

people are in the world? As of 10am on March 24, 2010 it was approx 6 billion, 996 million, 70 thousand

people have your name? Well there are 11 people with my name.

Quick Comment

I'm very amused that the ads on this site are currently for Virgin Galactic "an accredited space agency". Yay future!

How big is the Sun?

BIG. No, bigger than that. Seriously, it’s almost unimaginably big.

It’s made of hydrogen and helium, the two smallest and lightest elements. And yet the Sun is 99% of the mass of the Solar System. All the rock of the Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the asteroids, PLUS all of the gas of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, PLUS the ice of all of the comets and Kuyper Belt objects, including Pluto and Eris, is only a measly 1%.

You could fit 1.3 million Earths inside it.

It’s 4.4 million km in circumference. The average human walks at about 4.4 km per hour, so it would take you 1 million hours to walk around it. That’s 41,667 days. That’s 114 years, nonstop 24/7 walking.
The Sun sometimes sends out huge bursts of material, called solar prominences. Here’s a nice one.

But how big is this compared to the Earth?

Great website with pictures of the Sun.

Got Questions?

Do you have any questions that you'd like answered? Something that you've always wanted an answer to? Feel free to post in the comment section and I'll do my best to answer it for you!

I Wanna Go To Space!

We are one step closer to real space tourism. On Monday March 22, 2010 the Virgin Galactic spaceship Enterprise (geek love for that name). successfully completed its first captive carry flight. with its launch vehicle/mothership Eve.

This all started with the X Prize - $10 million to the first privately built craft to safely carry a human pilot into space twice. Virgin, the parent company of Virgin Airline, sponsored Burt Rutan. If you don't know Rutan, I'll just say that if you a new and innovative design to do things no other plane has done before, you go to Rutan.

No surprise, his design which featured a launch vehicle (WhiteKnightOne) that flew up to about 50,000 feet, then released the spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, was the winner.

Rutan redesigned things for commercial flight, making the new spacecraft design (called SpaceShipTwo) able to hold 6 passengers. Tickets are available for $200k, with deposits as low as $20k currently being accepted.

Anyone feel like loaning me some money?

Virgin Galactic's website.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

All the evidence we have indicates that birds are descended from dinosaurs. In the 1800’s Thomas Huxley noted that birds have skeletons that are almost identical to some dinosaurs, other than the beak, of course. There are some striking anatomical similarities.
But if I asked you to tell me what makes birds different from all other animals, I’m guessing you’d tell me feathers. So how can we say that birds are descended from dinosaurs? Where did the feathers come from?
Well, it turns out that there were feathered dinosaurs! How do we know? Because we’ve found fossils with feathers.
So we have critters that aren’t birds, but that have skeletons very similar to birds. With feathers. And of course reptiles lay eggs. As time goes on, they get less and less like reptiles and more and more like a bird, until we end up with something almost, but not quite, a bird. It laid an egg in which the final mutation had occurred, and from which the first bird hatched. So our answer is – the egg!
Or you could go to a restaurant and order two sandwiches, egg salad and chicken salad, and see which comes first. :P

Momentum

Momentum is the tendency of a moving object to keep moving. You can find the momentum of an object by multiplying its mass times its velocity. In other words, heavy things, and things going fast, have a lot of momentum. A heavy thing that is also going fast have LOTS of momentum. Things with a lot of momentum have a hard time slowing down.

Why should you care? Because trains and large trucks have a LOT more momentum than your car.

Respect the momentum of a truck.
The average freight train takes over a mile to stop.

Equinox

Tomorrow is the Equinox, when the amount of daylight and the amount of darkness will be equal. It's the first day of Spring.

The seasons are NOT caused by the Earth getting closer or further away from the Sun. There ARE times when we are a little bit farther away from the Sun; that happens during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, so that can't be the cause of winter. Also, the seasons are the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere - right now in Australia they're getting ready for fall. And at the Equator, there aren't really any seasons at all. It's warm all of the time. If we had seasons because we got further away or closer to the Sun, then the whole Earth would have the same seasons.

The reason we have seasons is because the Earth is tilted. This means that during some parts of the year, your hemisphere is pointed towards the Sun, and at other parts, it's pointed away. When your hemisphere is pointed towards the Sun, more sunlight falls on each square meter. This makes it warmer and brighter. You've probably noticed that summertime is not only warmer, but brighter too. Now you know why!

When your hemisphere is pointed away from the Sun, less sunlight falls on each square meter. So it's colder and not as bright. That's why even a sunny winter day isn't as bright as a summer's day.

In addition, because of the tilt, during the winter time your hemisphere spends more time in the dark shadow of the Earth on the side opposite from the Sun. That means that the night time is longer. But it's the opposite in the Summer. So right now, every night is a little bit shorter and each day is a little bit longer, about 2 minutes on average. Nights keep getting shorter and days keep getting longer until one day, night is equal to day. "Equi" means "equal" and "nox" means "night". So the equinox is when the day and night are equal in length. After tomorrow, days will be longer than night. They will keep getting longer until the Solstice, which I'll talk about in June.

Bill Nye song about the seasons

Powers of Ten

I was listening to my Schoolhouse Rocks CDs yesterday, and heard "My Hero, Zero" again for the first time in a long time. Most of us learned in school that if you put a zero after a number, you've multiplied it by 10. And if you take a zero away, then you've divided the number by 10.

This is what leads us to scientific notation. 10⁴ means 10 times itself 4 times, or 10 x 10 x 10 x 10. Well the easy way to do that is just to write a 1 followed by 4 zeros, 10000.
10¹ = 10
10² = 100
10³ = 1,000
10⁴ = 10,000
10⁵ = 100,000

So 2 x 10⁴ means that you take 10 ⁴ and then multiply it by 2, or 2 followed by 4 zeros (20,000).
7 x 10⁴ = 70,000
4 x 10⁴ = 40,000
6 x 10³ = 6,000
3 x 10² = 300
8 x 10⁵ = 800,000

And if that superscript number is negative, you're talking about fractions. 2 x 10^-4 is 1/20000.

Okay, so you can do scientific notation, but what does it all MEAN? I can tell you that a human blood cell is 8 x 10 ^-6 meters small, but you probably don't really understand how small that is. Or I can say that the Sun is 1.5 x 10¹¹ meters away, but you probably don't get how big that is. So here is a great video that shows you exactly what all of those numbers mean.

Powers of Ten video
Powers of Ten website

A St. Patrick's Day Parable

Why are there no snakes in Ireland? Well, actually many islands have no snakes. It all depends on whether the island is volcanic (was formed by a volcano on the sea floor that grew until it broke the surface) or continental (broke off from a continent).

Volcanic islands, like Hawaii, rise up out of the sea as bare rock. Only plants and animals that can be blown there (small seeds, flying animals) or cross the sea on floating natural rafts of vegetation (coconuts, small reptiles) will colonize the new island. So volcanic islands rarely have snakes, unless they formed very close to another land mass, close enough for snakes to survive on rafts.

Continental islands are another story. When they break off, they carry with them all of the plants and animals that are on them at the time. Continental islands often give us a snapshot of evolution in progress. Madagascar broke off from Africa before monkeys evolved, so there are no monkeys on Madagascar. This allowed the lemurs to survive on the island, whereas on the mainland they were outcompeted by the monkeys and died out. In the same way, Australia broke off from a supercontinent after marsupial mammals had evolved but before placental mammals.

Once the island breaks off, it has its own story. In Ireland, the Ice Age came along and killed off anything that couldn't survive the cold, such as many reptiles. The same thing happened on the continent. However, on the continent, once things warmed up, snakes could migrate back from the warm places further south where they had survived. But they couldn't cross the cold sea to recolonize Ireland.

A better written, longer version of this, and the article that gave me the title of today's post.