Height

If you don’t read the web comic “xkcd” you should. The author does a fantastic job of illustrating some scientific concepts that are difficult to understand any other way.

One of these is how tall or how high up some things actually are. And if you keep going up, you get into space. How far away are those things in space? Well, xkcd has a great chart showing you. It’s on a log scale, so every two inches or so that you go up on the chart is actually DOUBLE the height of the previous two inches.

Enjoy.

Read it at the xkcd website

The Oceans Flow Through My Veins

Remember that line from a song I quoted in yesterday’s RDA? “I am made of the stuff of the stars, and the oceans flow through my veins.”

Let me explain the second part of that. Your body contains water, a lot of it. I don’t think that surprises anyone. But what not everyone knows is that it’s not pure water – it contains some salt, 0.9% by weight, as a matter of fact. And this concentration is the same for most living cells. If you’ve ever gotten a small cut on your hands and sucked on it, you may have noticed that blood is slightly salty, for instance.

No matter whether it’s a bacteria or a bald eagle, a horse or a human, a blade of grass or a giraffe, we all have the same concentration of salt in our cells. Why? Well, all of the evidence that we have says that life started in the oceans. The first cells probably had the same concentration of salt inside as the ocean water did outside. And things have just stayed the same ever since.

But the oceans haven’t. The oceans have gotten increasingly salty over the many years since the first living things. So the ocean has gotten saltier, while we’ve stayed the same. But it still comes down to this; you have a certain concentration of salt in your body. It all has the same concentration as that ancient sea. You and every other living creature still hold the memory of our Mother Ocean “running through your veins.”

I am made of the stuff of the stars

Where did I come from? There are a lot of answers to that question, depending on how you interpret it. But one answer invokes wonder and awe in me, every time I think of it. A song by one of my favorite bands that contains the line “I am made of the stuff of the stars and the oceans flow through my veins.”

This is literally true. You ARE made of the stuff of the stars. Let me explain.

The universe began with the Big Bang (more on that later). But the Big Bang only made hydrogen atoms. After an extremely long time, these hydrogen atoms started to come together to form huge clouds. These clouds condensed until the pressure in the middle was so high, the nuclei of the atoms started to fuse together. This is nuclear fusion, and it’s what powers stars. Nuclear fusion is what makes all of the heat and the light from our Sun and from every other star in the universe.

In nuclear fusion, two hydrogen atoms are fused together to make helium. That’s what our Sun is doing. But our Sun is a middle aged star. When a star gets older, at some point it uses up all of the hydrogen it has. So it starts to fuse helium together to form bigger atoms. And when it runs out of helium it fuses those larger atoms together into even larger atoms. This is how all of the elements in the universe, other than hydrogen, were made.

At some point, a star can’t continue. Nuclear fusion can no longer occur. Everything collapses and the pressure builds up until the star explodes in a spectacular nova, spreading all of the atoms throughout the universe. This has already happened to all of that first generation of stars.

Eventually these heavier atoms came together to form rocky planets, like Earth. And on Earth, those atoms came together to form cells, and all of the living things on Earth, including you.

Stars were born, lived and died to create the atoms in you. You are literally a child of the stars. It took a star’s death to make you. You are an amazing, wonderful, miraculous being.

For further reading about how stars and space can create the stuff of life

xkcd comic about earthquakes and Twitter

read it at the xkcd site

Earthquakes

I had another article written for today, but I thought that with yesterday's earthquakes, understanding earthquakes would be a better idea. Oh, and if you think earthquakes NEVER happen in your area, follow the link at the bottom of the article.

Yesterday, April 4, 2010 a large earthquake occurred in Mexico and was felt in a large area, including L.A.

The Earth’s crust isn’t a solid piece of rock. It’s broken up into pieces of different sizes called tectonic plates. These plates float on magma that’s about the consistency of corn syrup. As the pieces float, they bump and jostle and slide past each other. But they don’t do it smoothly. The edges of these huge stone plates are rough and jagged, and they catch on each other. Movement grinds to a halt, and the pressure builds. Eventually the strain becomes too much, and the rock gives away. The plate jumps forward and releases all of the pressure at once. Just like a rubber band that breaks when it’s stretched too far, the rock stretches and breaks and whips around.

The energy and the motion ripple out from the center in three types of seismic waves. The Primary waves travel the fastest. They move the ground back and forth. Then the Secondary waves move things side to side. Finally the Surface waves move like water waves, both up & down and back & forth at the same time. Because they move in two directions at once, surface waves can cause the most damage.

Earthquakes happen all the time, but most of them are too small to feel. Here’s a map of all of the earthquakes on Earth in the last 7 days.
Earthquake data by country

It Came From Outer Space...or Did It?

Science Fiction Plot:

Imagine a life form that consists of thousands of individuals that come together and ‘melt’, forming one giant gelatinous blob, with the ‘brains’ of the individuals floating freely in the mass. Now imagine that the individuals were fungi, but they formed the ‘blob’ it could move to a limited degree.

It really exists – they’re called slime molds.

Good explanation

A video of slime mold

Your Relative, Yeast

Yeast - you know, that stuff that makes bread rise, or ferments beer. It's a simple, single celled organism in the Fungi Kingdom. And if you asked most people what it has in common with them, they'd probably say "nothing."

The truth is, you both have a lot in common.
1. You're both made of cells.
2. Your cells contain smaller units called organelles that perform special jobs, just like the organs in your body do.
3. You both perform complex chemical reactions, like fermentation in yeast and cellular respiration in you.
4. You both grow.
5. You are both capable of reproduction.
6. You both respond to changes in your environment.
7. You both use DNA as an instruction manual to tell your cells how to do their jobs.

But wait, there's more. 30% of your genes are similar to the genes of yeast. And not just similar, VERY similar!

What the...?!? How? Why? Well, it seems that, no matter how complicated or how simple an organism is, at the heart of matters, we're all made of cells. And cells work in fundamentally the same way. There are certain things that all cells need to do, in order to stay alive. Once cells "figured out" how to do these things, they just kept the instructions the same. So the genes that tell cells how to do all of these things are the same, whether they're in our cells or those of yeast.

So the next time you're eating bread, or drinking beer (if you're old enough) take some time to thank your relative, the humble yeast.