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Wow! Really?

A dose of surprising reality packaged for easy consumption

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Showing posts from October, 2008

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• How High Is Up?

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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

Just 1 second of the Sun's energy output would power the US for 9,000,000 years

Really . Or to use a more “explosive” illustration, multiply the world’s entire nuclear stockpile seven million times and detonate it. That’s also about one second’s solar output. Or put another way … well, you get the point; the Sun puts out a lot of energy. We only avoid being incinerated by this 800,000 mile wide, 100,000,000 degree inferno because, like a light bulb, the Sun radiates in every direction. That, and the fact that we are 93,000,000 miles away, allows us to experience sunshine as a gentle blessing rather than an incinerating white-hot blast. But where does so much energy come from? That question stumped scientists from the late 1800’s until the early 1900’s. By then science had come to realize that the earth was billions of years old, not just thousands as previously believed . But they couldn’t figure out what could have powered the Sun that energetically for so long. The general answer came with the new science of nuclear physics and with Einstein’s postulation

Everyone on Earth would fit in a cubic mile

Really. You could put the entire population of the Earth in a space one mile wide, one mile deep, and one mile high (one cubic mile). We'd all fit in one small corner of the Grand Canyon, which would take about 2500 cubic miles of dirt (or people) to fill. How do we know? One cubic mile is 147,197,952,000 cubic feet. If, on average, one human being takes up a space 2 feet by 2 feet by 6 feet it means we occupy 24 cubic feet per person. Sure, kids will have extra room and some of us will be a bit squished (or a lot if you're a flabby American); but on average that's about right. So divide 147,197,952,000 by 24 and you get 6,133,248,000, which means that in the year 2000 when the world population reached 6 billion we'd all have fit in a cubic mile, with room left over for another 133 million folks. The population now has reached over 6.7 billion so today there'd be a little overflow. But now consider this. If we all stood side-by-side, shoulder to shoulder (and u

What's Outside The Universe?

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

Your Veins Would Stretch 100,000 Miles

Really. An adult has 100,000 miles of blood vessels - enough to stretch around the equator four times. Most of the blood vessels in the human body are microscopic capillaries. They're short but there are a lot of them - about 40 billion. So, even though they're small, they're so numerous they constitute the majority of the body's 100,000 miles of vessels. To propel blood on this long journey the heart pumps about 4,000 beats an hour; 100,000 beats a day; 30 million times a year; and 2.5 billion times in a 70 year lifetime. In that period it would have pumped about 1 million barrels of blood - that's enough to fill more than 3 supertankers. Whew! In view of all that hard work, "have a heart" and treat that life-giving pump well. It sure has done a heck of a job for you. PB

An appendix is a good thing

No not a book appendix, silly. The one in your belly. It's been dissed all these years—everyone says it's superfluous, has no function, tits on a boar, that kinda thing—but it's actually useful, it turns out. And not just the way Alfred Sherwood Romer and Thomas S. Parsons suggest in The Vertebrate Body (1986), p. 389: "Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession.” Docs at Duke University Medical School published a report this week that say it produces and protects good germs for your gut. But it can kill ya. In fact, over 300,000 were hospitalized in the U.S. with appendicitis in 2005, and about 300 to 400 Americans die of appendicitis each year. Remember , there are more bacteria cells than human cells in your body—10 to 1, actually. (Ewww.) But what happens if the bacteria in your intestines die or are, to use a delicate word, purged? Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery clear your guts of useful bacteria (oh yeah,

Earth's Core is Hotter Than the Sun

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

Los Angeles Is Moving To San Francisco

Really! The San Andreas fault , which runs roughly north-south, is slipping, causing Los Angeles on the Pacific tectonic plate to move towards San Francisco, stuck on the North American plate, at about the same rate as your fingernails grow. In about 15 million years LA will be the home of the Golden Gate Bridge . Projections indicate that the Gulf of California will expand while Baja California and the California coast (including San Diego and Los Angeles) will continue northwestward toward the Aleutian Trench . As the area slides past San Francisco, it will become an island. A study by Yuri Fialko , an associate professor at the Scripps Institute near San Diego, shows that the San Andreas fault has been stressed to a level sufficient for the next "big one", an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or greater. It could be tomorrow or it could be 10 years or more from now. Click the image below to see a computer generated model of how it might happen. Fialko calculated the rate

Earth's curve tilts bridges

Really. The top of towers of the Verrazano - Narrows Bridge at the mouth of the Hudson river in New York City are tilted almost two inches further apart than the base thanks to the curve of the Earth's surface. Actually, there are a lot of amazing things about that not-so-famous bridge. When it opened in 1964, at 4260 feet it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, exceeding the Golden gate completed in 1937, by 60 feet. Today it's the longest single span in North America and the seventh longest in the world. (The longest is the 6,529 foot Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, completed in 1998.) The Verrazano - Narrows Bridge contains enough concrete to construct a single lane highway from New York to Washington, and if the wires that make up the suspension cables were laid end-to-end they would reach 143,000 miles, more than halfway to the moon. On hot days, the double-decker road bed expands almost six feet and sags 12 feet lower, something that ships passing underne

The Greenhouse Effect is Good

Really. Without it, we would all be dead. The greenhouse effect helps regulate the temperature of our planet. It is essential for life on Earth. Without it , we'd all be popsicles. The temperature of the Earth would be about 32 degrees below freezing -- zero degrees Fahrenheit! What is the greenhouse effect? Heat from the sun is absorbed by water vapor, carbon dioxide and trace gases. These heated gases then radiate heat back to the planet's surface. The term, "greenhouse effect" is misleading because a real greenhouse does not behave like the atmosphere. A greenhouse warms like a blanket, suppressing the exchange of air between the inside and outside--this isn't how the atmosphere keeps the Earth warm. The atmosphere doesn't suppress heat exchange, it helps it. Our concern isn't that we have a greenhouse effect, but whether it's increasing so much that it is hurting the Earth, our only refuge in the cold universe. PB