A dose of surprising reality packaged for easy consumption
• Taking It Slow
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Did you ever wonder if rocks could think and talk? If you watch them very, very closely for a long time they don't seem to move. But maybe you just didn't watch long enough?
Foolishness! Your DNA would actually stretch to the sun and back about 4 times! DNA is a fine, spirally coiled thread in the nucleus of every living cell that serves as a guidebook so the cells "know" what they're supposed to do. The strands are so fine you need a high power electron microscopes to see them. The human genome , the genetic code in each human cell, contains 23 DNA molecules each containing from 500 thousand to 2.5 million nucleotide pairs. DNA molecules of this size are 1.7 to 8.5 cm long when uncoiled, or about 5 cm on average. You have about 10 trillion cells in your body , so if you stretched the DNA in all the cells out, end to end, they'd stretch over 744 million miles. The moon is only about 250,000 miles away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back alomst 1500 times. The sun is 93,000,000 miles away, so your DNA would reach there and back about 4 times! Interestingly, no more than 1.5 percent of the human genome contains DN
Really! The Earth's core is hotter than the outer layer of the Sun. The Sun's huge boiling convection cells , in the outer visible layer, called the photosphere , have a temperature of 5,500°C. The Earth's core temperature is about 6100ºC . The inner core, under huge pressure, is solid and may be a single immense iron crystal . The outer core is liquid, and probably acts as a dynamo creating our magnetic field. But before you get the wrong impression, keep in mind that the core of the Sun is a broiling 15,000,000ºC. That's enough to vaporize rocks in a comet that gets too close, and enough to give you a nasty burn 93,000,000 million miles away after just a few minutes exposure when you're sun bathing. TH
Grandson Bailey, When we last saw you, you asked me what was beyond the edge of the Universe, and I didn't have a very good answer. To be honest, I felt like a baseball player that had practiced and practiced (I've read a lot of books and thought a lot about the same question myself), but suddenly I was standing in the outfield and a high fly ball was headed my way (your question)...and I dropped the ball. Your question is a really good one and a very hard one to answer because the ideas aren't simple and they aren't easy to understand--even for me. But I've been thinking about what you asked, and I'm really, really glad you did because it made me think hard about the question again too. Next time we see each other, maybe we can talk about this more, but here's my answer: think about the earth. It's a big ball, and when you look toward the horizon it looks like you can see where the earth stops. But you know from driving and flying that there's no ed
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