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Science

This category contains 25 posts

Brain cell

On the left is a picture of a single brain cell. On the right is an image of the universe.

Are we in someone’s brain? Are the planets that we are familiar with just atoms for another, much larger, universe?

 

 

That Pale Blue Dot in the image above is earth. This image was shown by Carl Sagan in 1994. It was taken by Voyager 1 when it was floating away from earth.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Pluto is no longer a Planet

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Important Snooty Scientists have finally concluded that Pluto is not a planet. This is because its orbit overlaps Neptune’s Orbit.

The official definition of a planet is now:

A celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Better pick up a sharpie and start correcting all the science text books published since 1930.

[ Link ]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 1% [?]

New Sea Urchin Species Found on Ebay

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I guess you really can find any thing on Ebay. Scientists are now calling the little guy pictured above a Coelopleurus exquisitus (Zootaxa, vol 1281, p 1). They recently determined that this species of Sea Urchin was completely unknown to science until it was spotted on Ebay.

[ Link to Auction ] Sold for about $150

[ Link to Article ]

via

 

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Are you a Conformist?

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Just click on the rectangle provided and then you’ll see where others clicked.

[ Link ]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Ultraviolent Sun

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NASA released this ultraviolet photo of our sun taken by the TRACE project.

Even on a normal day, our Sun is sizzling ball of seething hot gas. Unpredictably, regions of strong and tangled magnetic fields arise, causing sunspots and
bright active regions. The Sun’s surface bubbles as hot hydrogen gas streams along looping magnetic fields. These active regions channel gas along magnetic loops, usually falling back but sometimes escaping into the solar
corona
or out into space as the solar wind. Pictured above is our Sun in three colors of ultraviolet light. Since only active regions emit significant amounts of energetic ultraviolet light, most of the Sun appears dark. The colorful portions glow spectacularly, pinpointing the Sun’s hottest and most
violent regions
. Although the Sun is constantly changing, the rate of visible light it emits has been relatively stable over the past five billion years, allowing life to emerge on Earth.

[ Link ]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Population in Perspective

There are over 6.5 billion people alive in the world today. If one person was the size of one pixel then how much space would the entire human population take?

Click HERE to find out.

edit: Some people have said that loading this page slows down their computer. Please save all your work before clicking on the link because it’s a large page and it might cause your browser to slow down for a little while.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 1% [?]

What do you and the King of Thailand have in common?

You both are related! Actually, everyone is related.

 Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman’s family has African roots.

“No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu,” Olson and his colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.

There is a mathematical certainty that due to human migratory patterns and due to the nature of a family trees exponential growth that every single human shares common ancestors with everyone. If you go back in time far enough (5000 B.C.) we will be able to find a person who is a common ancestor to every single human being alive today!

[ Link ]

Note: If you are the king of Thailand then please ignore the title. And oh yeah… please tell all your subjects to visit gargles.net. kthx bai!)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Candy Lovers! Rejoice!

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Eat all the candy you want and then don’t brush! Apparently, a new Canadian tool can regrow human teeth!

“Right now, we plan to use it to fix fractured or diseased teeth, as well as asymmetric jawbones, but it may also help hockey players or children who had their tooth knocked out,” Jie Chen, an engineering professor and nano-circuit design expert, told AFP.

Chen helped create the tiny ultrasound machine that gently massages gums and stimulates tooth growth from the root once inserted into a person’s mouth, mounted on braces or a removable plastic crown.

The wireless device, smaller than a pea, must be activated for 20 minutes each day for four months to stimulate growth, he said.

I hope this is released for the public soon!

[ Link ]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 1% [?]

A New Mentos and Coke Trick

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All the previous Coke and Mentos tricks that I’ve seen used to have the coke bottle open. This time these kids have closed the coke bottle top. Watch:

via

edit: a Digg.com user ( imightbewrong ) writes:

For those who are curious about how its done
all you need is a plastic bag, 2 mentos, 1 2 liter diet coke (most sodas work)
1. open the 2 liter and lodge a piece of the plastic bag in the “neck” of the 2 liter, right at the top
2. gently drop the 2 mentos on top of the bag in the bottle
3. screw on the cap and shake it up until the mentos fall to the botton (you’ll see em on the bottom)
4 the bottle should feel very pressurized now, slowly twist the cap off about 1 rotation (it needs to be loose or you’ll have to slam it 10 times)
5. Slam it on the ground like in the video and watch it fly!

Kids! Don’t try this at home! The thing might shoot toward you and that would hurt… a lot!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Charles Darwin’s Turtle Died :(

Harriet, Charles Darwin’s pet tortoise, died in an Australian Zoo this week. She was 176 years old.

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Darwin found Harriet during his scientific journeys to the Galapagos Islands. Back when this turtle was born the map of the USA looked like:

us_1830

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 3% [?]