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The label ‘homo sapiens’ for our species.
Retinal photosynthesis, also known as the Purple Earth Theory. Colours are weird. Earth plants absorb red and blue light, they look green to us because that’s the wavelength of light that cannot be used by the chloroplasts.
It’s hypothesized that this was advantageous on Earth because blue light goes further into water than the other wavelengths, facilitating the development of photosynthetic algae
Retinal photosynthesis is another viable chemical chain reaction that could be used to create ATP (usable biological energy) from light.
It’s another molecule similar to chlorophyll, but it absorbs green light instead of red/blue - alien planets might be purple!
There’s a viable parallel evolutionary pathway that leads to plants with magenta leaves
If math is actually uncovering fundamental laws of the universe, rather than just describing it at various scales, then there’s a chance we can rewrite reality with our own set of rules that would render the current ones incompatible (by Gödel’s-IT).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
There are more hydrogen atoms in a molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
Not just that, it’s twice the amount!
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes
Something should be done about this
Stop fucking clapping then
🤣 in Solar system only one star… the Sun! Go to school!!!
so it’s right
it was a stupid and meaningless statement… 🤣
The fact that there is no discernable difference between an alive body or a dead body when it comes to chemical makeup.
All the pieces are there. All the atoms and molecules are still in the same places. Yet despite this the body is still dead.
When you say “All the atoms and molecules are still in the same places”, I can’t say I agree. It is the change of chemical composition that renders our body dead. Or should I say, death is defined to be such a chemical composition.
When the moon is at its farthest orbit from earth, all of the planets in the solar system can fit in between earth and the moon.
Just in general how spread apart everything is in space is wild. As big as planets and stars are, there’s still unfathomably more nothing in between them all. And that’s in a solar system where it’s comparatively “dense” compared to interstellar space let alone intergalactic. It makes the vastness of the ocean look tiny.
The fact that planes are kept in the air by the shape of their wings, which forces air to go over at a pace when it can’t push down on the wing as hard as it can push up from underneath. It’s like discovering an exploitable glitch in a videogame and every time I fly I worry that the universe will get patched while I’m at 10,000 feet.
I remember reading a couple years ago that’s not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is “close enough” and “seems right”, and it really doesn’t matter unless you’re a plane wing designer.
The basic way an airplane works actually is simple and intuitive: it meets the air at an angle and deflects it downward. The equal and opposite reaction to accelerating that mass of air is an upward force on the wing.
There is, of course a whole lot of finesse on top of that with differences in wing design having huge impacts on the performance and handling of aircraft due to various aerodynamic phenomena which are anything but simple or intuitive. A thin, flat wing will fly though, and balsa wood toy airplanes usually use exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Simplified_physical_explanations_of_lift_on_an_airfoil
“With a big enough engine you can make a barn door fly.”
Tbf, you can make anything fly if you give it enough thrust. Wings just make it easier.
BEHOLD THE CUBE PLANE
You joke, but lemme introduce you to Tacit Blue:
Yes, this thing did actually fly.
Stealth demonstator aircraft from the early 80s.
How do we stop radar? By obliterating the air around us with cube. Lol
That is actually pretty neat though!
I dunno whether it counts: but that science has effectively cured AIDS.
In 2004, 2.1m people died from it. Twenty years later that figure was a little over a quarter at 630k. The goal for 2025 is 250k. I think that’s absolutely remarkable.
As a child in the 80s I was terrified of AIDS. It made me low-key scared of gay men because the news made it sound like I could I could get it from any one of them. And here we now are, able to provide a medication that can almost completely ensure that you will never be infected by HIV.
Astonishing, really.
Yeah.
There’s waaay worse things you can catch.
I’m terrified of going into lakes and rivers because of what might find its way into my skin.
The size of the universe and the distance between everything in it. It takes about 8 minutes for light from our own sun to reach us. And the observable universe is about 5,859,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than that! That is quite a trip. I would need about 293,283,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 charging stops with my electric car to get to the end. I think I’ll pass.
(Someone smarter than me will probably find out that my math is wrong)
What I find mind blowing about the scale of the universe, is that on a logarithmic scale from the smallest possible thing to the largest possible thing, humans live at almost the exact centre.
Awesome!
Biological evolution
For the sake of discussion, let’s say on the one hand a magic man intelligently designed life and all that. And on the other hand we have it arise and evolve over the course of billions of years of random atomic interactions and genetic mutations. I honestly find the second one far more amazing, wondrous, amazing, and mind blowing.
That our species took millions of years of evolution and the chance for it to be exactly this way was so infinitesimal… And yet here we are, chasing arbitrary numbers on paper-slices and in some bank-account while also being sexists, racists, whatever-ists and destroying the very rock we exist on. Yet things like star trek are called utopia not actual-ia.
This always baffle me.
That time passes differently in galaxies with different gravities. One of these galaxies is Mormon heaven.
…wtf?? How do you have negative one downvote?
I saw that recently too. There’s some bug somewhere.
If you downvote it it goes back up to zero and everything.
Wait what
Gravitational time dilation is an effect of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Places with stronger gravity would then have time pass more slowly compared to earth. The opposite is also true.
I think it’s the Mormon bit that’s being questioned.
Kolob is a planet or star where God resides. Time moves very slowly there. Hence the high gravitational field. Probably because God is massive. I don’t know. I’m not a Christian scientist.
Ironically Christian Scientists are actually a distinct sect/cult of US Protestant Christians and would be very angry at the Mormon idea of Kolob if they heard about it.
They also put out a pretty decent newspaper The Christian Science Monitor. At least they did 30 years ago. They don’t take much medicine either, which, fine I guess.
The problem is that they will tell people to pray away cancer, that diseases and injuries and such can be healed spiritually.
That means you can end up with kids who need actual medical help, and won’t get it, and will then be told that they’re sick because they didn’t pray hard enough, that their soul is impure and that’s why they’re sick.
the implication of einsteins mass-energy equivalence formula is mind-blowing to me. one gram of mass, if perfectly converted to energy, makes 25 GWh. that means half the powerplants in my country could be replaced with this theoretical “mass converter” going through a gram of fuel an hour. that’s under 10 kilograms of fuel a year.
a coal plant goes through tons of fuel a day.
energy researchers, get on it
Because this is a science thread I’ll be a bit pedantic. Mostly because I think it’s an interesting topic. It’s a mass-energy equivalence (≡) and not just an equality (=) they are the same thing.
So it’s meaningless to say convert mass into energy. It’s like saying I want to convert this stick from being 12 inches long to being 1 foot long.
You can convert matter (the solid form of energy) into other types of energy that are not solid. But the mass stays the same.
It’s like when people say a photon is massless. It has energy and therefor mass. It just has no rest mass. So from the photos frame of reference no mass but from every other fame of reference there is mass.
thanks! love me some science pedantry.
What do you think fusion research is?
Studies into how to make a more efficient kettle.
Just a fancier way to spin turbines with steam
A Planck length is the smallest length possible, a smaller length simply can’t exist.
At least that’s what scientists believed until they studied OPs penis, then they found out something smaller does in fact exist.
Dude! I told you in confidence not to share that info.
I guess I have no choice but to share that @[email protected] has the world’s biggest human anus. It’s been a scientific mystery about how it got to be so big.
