Good news for the planet is rare, but Earth’s ozone layer is on track to fully recover within decades as ozone-depleting chemicals are phased out worldwide, according to a new United Nations-backed assessment.
The ozone layer protects the planet from harmful ultraviolet rays. But since the late 1980s, scientists have been alarming the public about a hole in this shield, caused by ozone-depleting substances, including chlorofluorocarbons, called CFCs, which are often found in refrigerators, aerosols and solvents.
International cooperation helped stop the damage. The use of CFCs has been cut by 99 percent since the Montreal Protocol went into effect in 1989, beginning the phase-out of these and other planet-damaging chemicals, according to an expert panel assessment released Monday.
If global policies remain in place, the ozone layer is expected to recover to 1980 levels by 2040 for much of the world, the assessment said.
For the polar regions, the time frame for recovery is longer: by 2045 over the Arctic and by 2066 over the Antarctic.
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Many of the things that we still use today are taken for granted, and we no longer ask ourselves, “Hey, how did this come about?” we can still be grateful to this day.
Books
Although it was written before Rome, the books we know today, the hardbound ones, were created right there. They were known as the codex, which referred to the hard covers that protect the contents inside. Although such books were created already in the 1st century, they came into wider use relatively slowly, and became the standard only in the 4th century.
Apartments
Many apartments of famous Europeans are still visited today as tourist attractions, so people like to visit places where famous people lived who did not even engage in similar jobs, for which Coco Chanel and Sigmund Freud are good examples. Well, the concept of apartments originated in ancient Rome, as a result of population growth and large-scale urbanization.
Over time, the architects there began to build higher and higher buildings in which different families lived in different housing units. And that’s how the Romans invented apartments!
Well, of course, it’s not a newspaper as we know it today, it didn’t look anything like that, and the pictures were clearly not included. Nevertheless, the Romans were constantly informed about events in the empire, and ordinary newspapers were carved in stone and placed in frequent places.
Of course, it should be taken into account that considering the level of literacy, the majority of citizens still had no idea what they were writing. However, it remains recorded that the first newspaper was published in 59 BC, during the reign of Caesar.
The post office
Given the size of the Empire, which spanned three continents, it was necessary to somehow devise and find a way to communicate and transmit messages as efficiently as possible to the most remote parts of the country.
The delivery of state and private letters and messages was the responsibility of the Cursus Publicus courier service, which was founded by Emperor Augustus and which functioned as the first postal service in the world.
Dental implants
Of course, you would laugh at them today, but 100 years before Christ, the Roman writer Celsus created a guide to oral medicine, in which he stated how to treat tooth loss, as well as toothache.
Archaeologists’ discovery from 1998 also tells how they practiced “dentistry” in Rome. Namely, then in France they found the remains of people from the 1st or 2nd century, who had an iron implant, shaped exactly like a lost tooth.
Air conditioning
Well, it wasn’t about air conditioning as we know it today, but the Romans already had an ingenious way to cool down.
Namely, the famous aqueducts were used not only for the delivery of drinking water, but also for cooling the homes of wealthy Romans. Namely, the water would pass through pipes in the walls and floors of Roman houses and thus cool the homes.
Ham
Although the first evidence suggests that ham was invented by the Chinese, it was the Romans who discovered it and introduced it into the lives of Europeans. The reasons for this were, first of all, the need to find food that could stand for days in various conditions, and the meat was salted and dried.
Little by little, that’s how we got to ham, a product that we all happily consume today in various forms.
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Every country has its charms and is special for its traditions, nature, people and laws. No, we’re not talking about laws like, say, the right to education, traffic laws and so on, but it’s also nothing like the Code of Hammurabi.
Here are five unusual laws from different countries:
It is forbidden to replace the bulb if you are not an electrician
In Australia, up until about 20 years ago, it was against the law to change a light bulb yourself if you didn’t have an electrician’s license. According to reports, the reason is the death that can follow as a result of changing the light bulbs.
This would certainly not be possible in our area, but especially since it would be difficult for us to imagine that a chair is only used for sitting, and not for changing light bulbs.
Hell for forgetful husbands
Samoa is a country that is particularly popular because of one important rule: “You must never forget your wife’s birthday.” If the husband forgets once, he can be warned, but for repeating the same thing, he can be arrested. A possible solution for husbands is a safe date tattoo. Samoa is a country that is particularly popular because of one important rule: “You must never forget your wife’s birthday.” If the husband forgets once, he can be warned, but for repeating the same thing, he can be arrested. A possible solution for husbands is a sure date tattoo.
You may not wear masks in Denmark
It’s not just masks, but anything that can cover your face completely. It definitely detracts from the full Halloween experience.
You must walk your dog at least three times a day
In Turin, Italy, people with pets are required to walk them at least three times a day, otherwise they face a fine of up to 500 euros. Italy is considered a country that takes great care of animals, which can be seen in this law.
You must give up your toilet if someone asks you for that service
You read that right, in Scotland, if someone asks you to use your toilet, you have to let them. This is admittedly more of a myth about the law than it is actually real, probably because Scotland is considered a very hospitable country and since ancient times people have had this rule as a sign of their politeness.
So, if you live in this state, chances are, when you hear a bell or a knock at your door, you may find yourself in a situation where your toilet is not always yours alone.
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Research by Chinese scientists indicates that the rotation of the Earth’s inner core has stopped, compared to the mantle, as early as 2009. Thousands of kilometers below the surface of our planet, something strange may be happening. Prevailing scientific theories say that the Earth’s core rotates faster than the core envelope and the rest of the planet, but in the same direction, in which the Earth rotates. However, Chinese scientists claim that new data indicate that this is no longer the case.
“We were very surprised,” said Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, seismologists at Peking University, whose research was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Mysteries of the Earth’s interior
The results of their research could clarify many mysteries of the Earth’s interior, including which part of the inner core is responsible for maintaining the planetary magnetic field and affects the speed of the Earth’s rotation, writes the journal “Nature”.
Scientists discovered the inner core in 1936, after studying how seismic waves from earthquakes travel through the planet. Changes in the speed of the waves revealed that the planet’s core, which is about 7,000 kilometers wide, consists of a solid core, made mostly of iron, inside a shell of liquid iron and other elements. As iron from the outer core crystallizes on the surface of the inner core, it changes the density of the outer liquid, causing turbulent motions that maintain Earth’s magnetic field.
The Earth’s magnetic field
The liquid outer core essentially separates the inner core 2,400 kilometers wide from the rest of the planet, so the inner core can spin at its own pace. In 1996, Song and other scientists began studying earthquakes observed in the same region over three decades, whose energy was detected by the same monitoring station thousands of kilometers away. Since the 1960s, scientists say, the travel time of seismic waves from those earthquakes has changed, indicating that the inner core is rotating faster than the planet’s mantle, the layer just above the outer core. Later studies specified the extent of this “superrotation” of the inner core, concluding that it rotates faster than the mantle by about one-tenth of a degree per year.
The inner core stopped moving relative to the mantle
However, not all scientists agree with that thesis. Other papers suggest that superrotation occurs mainly in different periods, such as the early 2000s, and argue that it is not a continuous, stable phenomenon. Some scientists even argue that superrotation does not exist and that the differences in earthquake travel times are caused by physical changes on the surface of the inner core.
In June of last year, John Vidal and Wei Wang of the University of Southern California published a scientific paper that disrupted established studies in this area. Using data on seismic waves generated by US nuclear tests in 1969 and 1971, they concluded that between those years, Earth’s inner core “subrotated,” or rotated more slowly than the mantle. Only after 1971, as they claim, did it accelerate and begin to superrotate.
Influence on the length of the day and the magnetic field
Song and Yang conclude that the inner core can oscillate with periods of about 70 years – changing rotation directions every 35 years. The scientists conclude that these oscillations could explain the known 60- to 70-year variations in the length of Earth’s days and the behavior of the planet’s magnetic field. Still, many questions remain, such as how to reconcile the slow pace of change Yang and Song report with some of the more rapid changes observed by other scientists. The only way out is to wait for more earthquakes to occur, and to study the data about them.
“The long history of continuous seismic recording is critical to tracking the motion of the planet’s heart,”
Yang and Song say.
Seismologist John Vidal, who has also dealt with this phenomenon, states that he thinks we are on the threshold of a solution.
“But I’m still not sure about that.” We will have to wait,”.
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The so-called “Piltdown Man” is an archaeological discovery of the remains of a skull and jaw excavated in 1912 from a grave in Piltdown, a village in East Sussex. They were presented as a “missing link” – a transition between man and ape and as a fossil previously unknown to science. The world was then amazed by this new discovery.
A part of the skull, several teeth and jaws were discovered. The remains were given the Latin name – Eoanthropus dawsoni. The only problem? It was about fraud! There was no “missing link”. The Piltdown Man wasn’t real.
The archaeological hoax of the century
Scientists immediately questioned this discovery. It has been discussed and debated for decades, but no one has been able to neither dispute nor confirm it with certainty.
The finding thus remained controversial until 1953, when, thanks to new technology, it was definitively declared a hoax! It turned out to be made of the lower jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern man, writes Allday.com.
The hoax is believed to have been masterminded by the “discoverer” of the Piltdown Man – Charles Dawson, an amateur geologist and lawyer who was among the members of the expedition that “discovered” the fossil. It was he who gathered several distinguished scientists to study the remains he found. He died in 1916, long before the findings were disputed.
The “Piltdown Hoax” is probably the most famous of the archaeological hoaxes. The discovery has been debated for over 40 years and, although Donson was the prime suspect, his responsibility has never been proven with certainty.
Asteroids are small, rocky bodies of solar system that inhabit Interplanetary space to the orbit of Jupiter. There are millions of them, and they are often grouped by composition. The planetary scientific community calls them small planets, which is a general term applied to the bodies of the solar system less than the month. Asteroids are mainly made of materials left of the formation of the word inward The solar system.
Most of them circle the sun between Mars and Jupiter, although there are groups that circle closer. Asteroids come in three classes of composition. C-types (chondria) are made of clay and silicate rocks. S-types are so-called rocky asteroids and are made mainly of silicate rocks and blades of nickel and iron. M-types are metal nickel-iron. These categories show how far from the sun are formed in the early solar system.
Introducing you short attractions about Asteroids:
1. Asteroids are small bodies of the solar system that circle around the sun. Made of stone and metal, they can also contain organic compounds (some scientists suggest that their asteroids can bring chemicals necessary to start life on earth).
2. There are millions of them, and they are often grouped by their composition.
3. Asteroids are also called smaller planets or planetoids.
4. There are currently over 600,000 famous asteroids in our solar system.
5. Asteroids are very different in size, some have diameters up to ten meters, while others stretch hundreds of miles. But objects under ten meters in diameter are generally considered meteoroids.
6. Most famous asteroids in the solar system circles around the sun in the belt between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter. This belt is usually called asteroid belt.
7. Asterids are rich with noble metals and other metals, as well as water.
8. Although there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the asteroid belt, only about 200 are known to cross 100 km in diameter, which makes most of the asteroids really small facilities.
9. Current theories suggest that the asteroids were found in the ASOTEROID’s belt, the remains of a planet that failed to form during the development of the solar system.
10. Some asteroids have their own months!
11. While the asteroid strikes were more common in the past, today are not so common.
12. Asteroid’s impact has contributed to extinction some 65 million years ago Dinosaurs. (It was one of several factors that influenced the whole life on earth at the time.)
13. In 1801, the Italian astronomer of Giuzepe Pjaci discovered what the new planet believed for what he believed. The newly surfaceed facility called Cerera, according to Roman goddess harvest. Soon after Cerera’s discovery, similar objects were found. It soon realized that these new objects, in fact, are not planets, but some other kind of heavenly body.
14. In addition to the first discovered asteroid, Ceres is also the biggest known asteroid with 933 kilometers in diameter. In 2006, Ceres received the status of a dwarf planet, together with Pluton, Eris, Makemake and Haume.
15. One feature that these objects shared was their resemblance to remote stars seen through the telescopes of that time (1800s). As a result of their similar appearance as the stars, the facilities are called asteroids, which means in the shape of a star.
16. It is believed that an asteroid is about 0.15 kilometers wide above Siberia, causing damage to a radius of hundreds of kilometers.
17. Most asteroids are irregular in shape because they are too small to make enough gravitational attraction to become spherical shape.
18. Asteroids are not the only things that hit the country. Every day, more than 100 tons of materials with asteroids and comets fall to the ground. Most were destroyed by friction as it passes through our atmosphere. If something hit the ground, it is known as a meteorite.
19. The country suffers a shock from the object size of a football field for once in 2000.
20. Some asteroids are actually exploded comets. The Lads disappeared, and all that remains is stone material.
21. Astronomer William Herschel was the first to covers the word asteroid, which means: as a star, 1802.
22. Apollo facilities are asteroids whose orbit exceeds the orbit of the country.
23. Asteroids can be found almost everywhere, they are even on the orbital path of the planet. This means that the asteroid and the planet go the same way around the sun.
24. Even the country has such asteroids that accompany us.
25. There are no two same asteroids! This is because they formed in different locations at different distances from the sun.
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It was discovered that people will not age at the same pace if they have an uncontrolled level of iron in the blood that automatically affects the development of diseases typical of a certain age.
The level of iron in the blood could be the key to slow down aging, shows a gene study that worked by scientists with University of Edinburgh and with Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany. Scientists identified genes associated with aging, which could help and give an answer to the question – why people old different speed, or why some are getting old, and some have been young and vital long.
The key to longer life could be a normal level of iron in the blood
An international study, published in the journal Nature Communications, using genetic data from more than a million people, suggests that maintaining normal blood iron levels could be the key to slower, better aging and longer life. The findings could accelerate the development of drugs to reduce age-related diseases, extend healthy years of life and increase the chances of living to a disease-free old age, the researchers said. The scientists focused on three measures associated with biological aging – life span, years of disease-free life (health life expectancy), and longevity.
Biological aging – the rate at which our bodies lose vitality over time varies between people and causes the world’s deadliest diseases, including heart disease, dementia and cancer. The researchers gathered information from three public datasets to enable analysis in unprecedented detail. The combined data set was equivalent to studying 1.75 million lifetimes, or more than 60,000 extremely long-lived people.
Iron levels in the blood suppress Parkinson’s and liver disease
A team of scientists has discovered that genes involved in the metabolism of iron in the blood are partly responsible for a healthy long life. The researchers remind us that diet affects the level of iron in the blood and that abnormally high or low levels of iron are associated with some health conditions typical of a certain age, i.e. life span, such as Parkinson’s disease, liver disease and a decline in the body’s ability to fight against infection in old age. In this regard, they state that formulating a drug that could mimic the impact of genetic variation on iron metabolism could be a step in overcoming some of the effects of aging in the future.
The goal of scientists – how to improve health during aging
“These findings are very important because they strongly suggest that high levels of iron in the blood reduce the number of ‘healthy’ years of life. Keeping these levels under control can prevent conditions and damage to the body that come with age. We believe that our discoveries about iron metabolism would could also explain why very high levels of iron-rich red meat in the diet are associated with age-related conditions such as heart disease”,
emphasized Dr. Paul Timmers from the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr. Joris Deelen from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging in Germany pointed out that the goal of scientists is to discover how aging is regulated and to find ways to improve health during aging.
“Ten regions of the genome that we have discovered, which are related to life span, health and longevity are the best candidates for further studies”,
emphasized Dr. Deelen.
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Checking social networks can prevent us from falling into a state of deep boredom, which according to scientists is a great pity.
We all get bored from time to time, and while we are waiting for the bus at the station or in line in front of the counter, it is only superficial. However, these initial feelings can deepen over time and grow into something else, according to scientists.
“Deep boredom may sound like an extremely negative concept, but it can actually be extremely productive if people are given the chance to think undisturbed and develop,” explains sociologist Timothy Hill of the University of Bath in the UK.
Deep boredom and creativity
To examine this nearly 100-year-old concept, Hill and his colleagues explored the lives of 15 people who were given paid time off or worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic. Age, occupation and education varied between the participants, and all were given pre-designed interviews aimed at probing their feelings.
Based on the data they received, it was observed that boredom occurred often, but that for those who experienced it more deeply, it caused a feeling of restlessness and emptiness. All this resulted in repeated attempts to fill that gap through hobbies such as carpentry, cooking or cycling.
However, the main problem in this process is checking social networks, whose content can alleviate superficial boredom and thus prevent falling into deeper feelings, thus also discovering hidden talents and passions. Other studies have also suggested that boredom and mind wandering are key foundations for creativity, which is why so many good ideas come to us while in the shower.
The two pyramids in Helinikon were first discovered in the 2nd century BC. mentioned by the Greek geographer Pausanias. Today there is only one, and what particularly attracts the attention of researchers is that it is still unknown how old it is, nor what its purpose was.
Usually when we talk about pyramids we think of those in Egypt, Mexico or Peru, although their presence has been recorded in other parts of the world. One of them is also found in Europe, more precisely in Argolis and what is even more interesting is not a recent discovery at all because the Greek geographer and traveler Pausanias wrote about the existence of not one, but two pyramids in Helinikon as early as the 2nd century BC.
Namely, in his Description of Greece, he talks about two buildings with a pyramidal structure, one of which is located twenty kilometers southwest of the one that still exists today. His opinion was that soldiers who died in the legendary battle fought in Argos were most likely buried there:
“On the road from Argos to Epidaurus, on the right, there is a building similar to a pyramid, on which Argive shields are carved in relief. Here the battle for the throne took place between Praetos and Akrisius; and the duel, they say, ended in a draw and a reconciliation, because neither neither could win. A common grave was built for those who fell, since they were fellow citizens and relatives.”
Modern researchers doubt this hypothesis, primarily because it is a small structure of about 7 m x 9 m with walls rising at an angle of 60 degrees and whose height does not exceed 3.5 m. The first excavations were undertaken by the German archaeologist Theodor Wiegand at the beginning of the 20th century, and his work was continued by researchers from the American School of Archeology in Athens and concluded that the building was a kind of watchtower.
Controversies related to estimated age
More recent research began in the 1990s under the direction of Greek archaeologist Ioannis Lirikas, who estimates that there are at least 20 other similar structures in Greece. He then discovered in their interior pottery from different periods, lamps, glasses, bowls, plates and large pitos – egg-shaped vessels used to store grains and oil. All the findings were so mixed that it was not possible to determine their age.
In addition, the analyzes that Lirikas and his team conducted inside and around the building using the thermoluminescence technique failed to convince other scientists of the accuracy of the data. First of all, the inner blocks were selected for sampling, seven of which were dated to the period between 2500 and 2000 BC, while the estimated age of the two ceramic vessels was between 3000 and 660 BC. This is considered an extremely wide range that suggests that is perhaps even older than the Great Pyramids, but it is also impossible to say with certainty when exactly it was built.
Archaeologists have confirmed one of the legends of Taiwan: the island was once inhabited by dark-skinned and short people. Scientists say that traces of such peoples can be found everywhere – from Siberia to Great Britain.
An unexpected find
From generation to generation in Taiwan, the legend about the dark-skinned dwarf people was passed down. Its members lived high in the mountains and spoke an incomprehensible language, and then mysteriously disappeared. Until recently, there was no material evidence of this myth. At the same time, scientists doubted that dark-skinned people could once have lived on the island. The Taiwanese natives were believed to be Austronesians, who came there from China. They moved to new territories about five thousand years ago, and then moved throughout Oceania. This year, however, a joint expedition of archaeologists from Australia, Vietnam and Japan found an unusual tomb of a woman in the cave complex of Xiaoma, on the east coast of the island. The deceased was buried in a sitting position, with her knees firmly pressed against her head, that is, in a manner that is not in accordance with the tradition of that region. The results of the radiocarbon analysis showed that the remains of that woman are about six thousand years old, but the scientists were most surprised by her dimensions.
“The length of the femurs was 35 centimeters. The skull was much smaller than usual. Based on those proportions, anthropologists concluded that the woman was no taller than 140 centimeters”,
said the head of the expedition, University of Guam professor Mike Carson.
Archaeologists immediately realized that they were representatives of a legendary people of short stature, and further analyzes of the remains convinced them of this.
“The skull’s DNA testifies that it is genetically close to African specimens from a similar period. Its size and shape are reminiscent of the Pygmies who lived in the territory of modern South Africa,”
the research results stated.
Mike Carson’s team is convinced that the woman from Siaoma Cave is a member of the Negritos, the indigenous people of Asia who came there from Africa. Members of that group are many peoples in the Philippines, some natives of Australia and the Andaman Islands. All of them are characterized by short stature (from 140 to 150 centimeters) and dark skin. Now, when the Taiwanese legend has been confirmed, scientists have an equally important task – to clarify why the Negritos disappeared from the island. For now, they believe that they were suppressed by the Austronesians who settled there.
They are not that small after all
Experts state that stories about dwarf peoples are characteristic of almost all regions of the world. In Europe, for example, stories about gnomes are known, whose prototype, according to many mythology lovers, are the Picts – a tribe that inhabited the northeast of Scotland in the first centuries of our era. Their character was greatly popularized by the poet Robert Louis Stevenson. In his ballad “Heather Ale” (“Heather’s Honey”) the Picts are represented as short people living in underground caves. There are also those who believe that it was the Picts that served John Tolkien as the basis for the creation of Hobbits – dwarf humanoid beings that inhabit Middle Earth. The author himself, however, denied such conclusions in numerous accompanying notes for his legendarium.
The history of the Picts is for the most part riddled with questions. “There are two points of view regarding their origin. According to the first, the Picts are the indigenous inhabitants of Britain, who came there in the early Bronze Age. Based on that, they could be considered the first representatives of Indo-Europeans in Europe. According to another point of view, which is more realistic, they were a Celtic tribe that separated from their relatives quite early,” says historian Klim Zhukov. The main source for the culture of the Picts is the numerous stones with inscriptions that they left in the entire territory they inhabited. Their language has not been deciphered to this day, so it is impossible to read those inscriptions carved into the stone.
However, the memories of their enemies were preserved. Until the 5th century, the dwarf people actively waged war against the Roman Empire. In the works of ancient historians and politicians, memories of “people of short stature” can be found. The revelations of recent years, however, completely deny this fact. In 2016, archaeologists found the skeleton of a man in the village of Rosmark in the north of Scotland, who was determined to have died between 430 and 630 AD. “In that period, the region was inhabited by the Picts.” The man whose skeleton was found had a very solid build and was quite tall for that time – 167 centimeters,” said a participant in the expedition, University of Leicester professor Simon Gunn. Three years later, in another Scottish settlement, Muir Ord, scientists excavated a large necropolis. All the tombs date back to the 7th century, but the main discovery was that the average height of the deceased was between 160 and 170 centimeters. Based on that, it could be said that the legendary ones were not as small as it seems to us.
“I am on the alert, sharpening my claws and fangs,” wrote the famous naturalist Thomas Huxley in a letter dated November 23, 1859, which he sent to Charles Darwin immediately after reading the first edition of The Origin of Species. With expressions of delight, Huxley says he expects attacks on Darwin’s book. A battle is being prepared for the theory of evolution, and the world is beginning to change irreversibly.
However, numerous other changes are on the horizon at that time. Just as the Neanderthals at first could hardly have guessed how the hairless and naked homo sapiens would become almost what it is today, in the middle of the 19th century, few people noticed how one branch of progress was slightly separated from the general flow of the so-called industrial revolution. One that would dominate the world 150 years later.
While Darwin and Huxley corresponded through the very efficient but inherently slow Royal Mail, railways were already spreading across the British countryside. They were followed closely by the first telegraph wires that were already being installed on both continents, in Europe and America. Two years later, in 1861, the first intercontinental telegraph line, which will follow the railroad across the American continent, will start operating.
The era of the telegraph, the dinosaur of communication, begins. Based on the idea of communication with signals, originating from antiquity, which after the Middle Ages would lead to communication with flags in the navy, and in France in the 18th century to sending signals with “semaphores”, the telegraph was the first means of communication by wire.
A series of electrical inventions at the beginning of the 19th century led to the development of the Morse telegraph, which began to be widely used in 1844. Efficient and simple, the telegraph is profitable enough for companies to compete in connecting the world with wires – creating the first global communications infrastructure. A map from 1901 shows the state of the world’s telegraph network 120 years ago.
At the end of the 20th century, the spread of wire communication will be recognized under the name “information revolution”, although, viewed from a historical distance, “evolution” is a somewhat more suitable name. In these external conditions, the letters are also slightly transformed. Messages are written faster. And they reach greater distances.
Over time, the telegraph will give birth, in direct descendants and parallel branches, to a whole series of genera and types of new technologies for transmitting messages – cables, telexes, telephone, radio communication, satellite communication and, finally, forms of communication based on optoelectronics and the Internet.
However, after 180 years since the introduction of the telegraph, it almost completely died out, which is not surprising when it comes to “evolution” – after a period of coexistence, under the pressure of selection, the ancestral species slowly disappear, leaving room for new, more perfect forms.
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press
The telegraph enabled the development of modern media, as we know it today. Via the telegraph, police and newspaper reports arrived from afar and changed the history of modern journalism. Short, compelling news comes from correspondents almost in real time. The press manages to publish same-day or day-later reports on events that just happened on the other side of the world. This technological circumstance dramatically changes the role and even the importance of media, almost as much as Gutenberg’s press changed the role of the book.
Thanks to this, the telegraph introduced standards of communication and ways of conveying news that would persist even after its eventual disappearance at the end of the 20th century. Based on such a tradition, today numerous world magazines that announce the latest news via tweets or in “live blogs” have the word “telegraph” in their name. Traces of evolution, something like rudimentary organs in the human body.
Two planets orbiting a tiny star 218 light-years away appear to be unlike any other in the Solar System. Exoplanets Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d have a radius about 1.5 times that of Earth and appear to consist of thick, steamy atmospheres and incredibly deep oceans.
“We used to think that planets slightly larger than Earth were really big balls of metal and rock, like scaled-down versions of our planet, and that’s why we called them super-Earths,”
said astronomer Björn Benneke of the University of Montreal.
“However, these two planets, Kepler-138c and d, appear to be quite different from that concept: a large fraction of their volume is probably water.” “This is the first time we have observed planets that we can confidently say are water worlds of sorts,” he added.
How the composition of exoplanets is determined
Determining what planets outside the solar system, i.e. exoplanets, are made of usually requires a lot of “detective” work. They are very far away and very faint compared to the light of the stars they orbit. It’s very difficult to get direct pictures, and if we do take them, we don’t see a lot of detail in them. Therefore, the composition of an exoplanet is usually determined on the basis of its density, which is calculated using two parameters – the drop in the brightness of the star during the transit of the planet and the radial velocity of the star, i.e. the so-called oscillation, writes “Science Alert”.
The amount of light blocked during transit indicates the exoplanet’s size, and the star’s radial velocity indicates its mass. Namely, the radial velocity is induced by the gravitational effect of the exoplanet on the star, so the mass of the planet can be determined through this. And once you have the size and mass of the object, you can calculate its density.
What is the density of exoplanets
Gaseous worlds, such as Jupiter, will have a relatively low density, and rocky, metal-rich worlds will have a higher density. At 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter, Earth is the densest planet in the Solar System; Saturn has the lowest density – 0.69 grams per cubic centimeter. Transit data show that Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d have radii that are 1.51 times that of Earth, and their gravitational pull is twice as massive as our planet. This means that their density is about 3.6 grams per cubic centimeter; which is between the rocky and gaseous worlds in density. Jupiter’s moon Europa has a similar density (3 grams per cubic centimeter), which is thought to hide a huge ocean under its icy crust.
“Imagine larger versions of Europa or Enceladus, the water-rich moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn, but are much closer to their star.” “Instead of an icy surface, Kepler-138c and d is surrounded by water vapor,”
said astrophysicist Carolyn Piaulet of the University of Montreal.
Supercritical fluid
According to the expert’s model, more than 50 percent of the volume of these exoplanets is water, which extends to a depth of about 2,000 kilometers. Earth’s oceans, by comparison, have an average depth of 3.7 kilometers. Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are much closer to their star than Earth is to the Sun, so they are much hotter. One orbits the red dwarf in 13 days, and the other in 23 days. This means that the oceans and atmospheres there look completely different than on Earth.
“The temperature in the atmospheres of Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d is probably above the boiling point of water, so there seems to be a very dense atmosphere made of steam.” Beneath such an atmosphere is potentially liquid water at high pressure or even water in a second phase that occurs at high pressures, called a supercritical fluid.”
Last year, the European Commission published a report on the results of legislation aimed at protecting animals used in scientific research. The main goal of this directive from 2013 was to reduce the suffering animals are exposed to…
Statistics collected by the European Commission indicate that the number of animals used in research is declining. This is the first report since the introduction of stricter rules on the use of animals for research purposes seven years ago. According to the obtained data, 9.39 million animals were used for scientific purposes in 2017, which is less than in 2015, when the number was 9.59 million. Although in 2016 the number of animals in experiments was higher than a year earlier, as many as 9.82 million, the report speaks of a positive trend of reducing the use of animals in research.
In the last year for which there are data (2017), animals were used in basic research in 45 percent of cases, while in applied research they were represented in about 23 percent. Almost a quarter of the animals, also 23 percent, were involved in testing drugs and other chemicals, and the rest were used in the study of new types of vaccines, research into learning processes or forensic examinations.
More than 60 percent of all animals used for research in 2017 were mice, 12 percent rats, 13 percent fish, while the share of birds in experiments was 6 percent. Dogs, cats and non-human primates accounted for 0.3 percent of the total. The law stipulates high standards when it comes to housing and care of animals, as well as testing methods that imply the least degree of pain and minimal use of animals.
Member countries were expected to send detailed data on animal experiments.
“This is the most comprehensive and precise approach to collecting and publishing data on experimental animals,”
He suggests it’s a model other countries should follow, though he notes the complex reporting requirements are a huge administrative burden for scientists and their organizations.
In addition to information on the number and types of animals used in scientific research, member states are now required to state how many times an animal has been used as a guinea pig, for what purpose, and how “cruel” the experimental procedure to which the animal was subjected was. The spokesperson of the European Commission believes that such detailed data “enables us to locate far more efficiently where resources should be directed in order to reduce the number of animals exposed to suffering”.
For the first time in history, American scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California have successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction that resulted in the production of a net gain in energy, that is, more energy than they invested. This was confirmed to CNN by a source familiar with the project, and the portal states that the US Department of Energy is expected to officially announce this breakthrough in science on Tuesday. The result of the experiment would be a huge step in the decades-long quest to unleash an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels.
Fusion and fission
For decades, researchers have tried to recreate nuclear fusion, replicating the energy that powers the Sun. Namely, nuclear fusion is a process that replicates the same energy that powers the Sun. It happens when several atomic nuclei join together, forming one heavier nucleus. This process generates a huge amount of energy (depending on the mass of the nuclei involved in it) as heat. In contrast, nuclear fission is the process of splitting a larger atom into two or more smaller ones. It’s the kind of energy that powers nuclear reactors around the world today. As with fusion, the heat created by splitting atoms is also used to generate energy.
— Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (@Livermore_Lab) December 12, 2022
A glass of deuterium to power the house
Nuclear fusion does not carry the same safety risks, and the materials used to power it have a significantly shorter radioactive half-life than fission.
Scientists around the world have studied nuclear fusion for decades in hopes of recreating it with a new source that provides boundless energy without the carbon and nuclear waste made by current nuclear reactors. Fusion projects mainly use the elements deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen.
Unlike coal, you only need a small amount of hydrogen, which is the most abundant in the universe. Hydrogen is found in water, so the things that generate this energy are wildly unlimited and clean – Julio Friedman, chief scientist of “Carbon Direct” and former chief energy technologist of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, told CNN.
How could nuclear fusion turn on the lights?
There are two main ways of generating nuclear fusion, but both have the same result. The fusion of two atoms creates a huge amount of heat, which is the key to energy production. That heat can be used to heat water, create steam, and turn a turbine to produce power – much like nuclear fission generates power.
The big challenge in “taming” fusion energy is keeping it going long enough to power power grids and heating systems around the globe. A successful American breakthrough on that front is a big deal, but it’s still far less than what’s needed to generate enough energy to run one power plant, let alone tens of thousands of them.
It is about what is needed to boil 10 kettles of water. To turn it into a power plant, we need to create a larger energy gain, significantly larger – Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of King’s College London’s Center for Inertial Fusion Studies, told CNN.
Next steps
Scientists and experts now need to figure out how to produce much more energy than nuclear fusion on a much larger scale. At the same time, they need to figure out how to reduce the cost of nuclear fusion so that it can be used commercially.
Scientists will also need to harvest the energy produced by fusion and transfer it to the power grid as electricity. It will take years and possibly decades before fusion can produce unlimited amounts of clean energy, while scientists are in a race against time in the fight against climate change.
This will not meaningfully contribute to the reduction of harmful gases in the next 20-30 years. This is the difference between lighting a match and building a gas turbine – said Friedman.
You snuggled into bed after a hard day and began to drift off to sleep…
However, you suddenly wince because you feel like you’ve started to fall. What causes this phenomenon? This question is one of the most frequently asked on google.com, so all the curious can find out the answer here.
The unusual sudden movement is related to a phenomenon called the hypnagogic state, which is a transitional period between waking and sleep. Accordingly, the twitch is called a hypnagogic twitch.
It is about myoclonus, that is, fast, involuntary muscle movements, writes “Independent”. As you drift off to sleep, two different brain systems balance their roles to bring you into the unconscious state. One of them is the reticular activating system (RAS). This network of cells is located under the cerebral cortex (cortex) and helps maintain alertness.
The second is the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, located in the lower part of the brain, which controls sleep. Scientists believe that these two systems fight for supremacy during falling asleep. At that moment, the level of the serotonin transmitter also drops so that all the major muscles in the body can rest. However, it does not affect the smallest muscles, such as those around the eyes or in the joints, as a result of which the whole body can twitch, writes “DNews”.
According to other theories, it is an evolutionary atavism – it is a system that made the monkeys safe when they fell asleep in the trees. According to the BBC, hypnagogic twitches are most common in children, but most people experience them. However, people are usually not aware of them because they are too deeply asleep at the time of their occurrence.
Unlike the rapid eye movements that occur during REM sleep, this type of twitching does not reflect dream visions.
The results of detailed research by American scientists on the process of biological aging of people showed a radical difference between their biological and chronological pace of aging. Some people age three times faster than their calendar peers who are bypassed by the merciless ravages of time because they have excellent genes or because it is influenced by the environment.
Scientists who participated in the research of 954 thirty-eight-year-olds from the same New Zealand city, during the research took into account 18 biomarkers to establish the speed at which their organisms age.
Among other things, blood cholesterol level, heart muscle health, lung function, state of capillaries in the back of the eye, telomere length, body weight, kidney function, gum health…
Biomarkers were measured in volunteers at the age of 26, 32, and 38, which enabled scientists to precisely determine the rate at which their bodies age.
According to the data published in the professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it was shown that the biological age of the research participants varied between 28 and 61 years.
“The intention of the scientists is to conduct the same research among the elderly population, but if we want to prevent diseases that develop with regard to age, we must focus on studying the biological aging process of younger people.
“Aging increases the risk of developing various diseases, including malignant ones, and we are doing this to try to prevent the simultaneous development of several diseases in old age, and the next step is to find out what affects the pace of aging,”
Most of the research participants were found to be compatible when it came to their chronological and biological age. In individuals, the body, that is, the organism, aged three times faster in relation to their chronological age, and in some – time seemed to stand still.
“If we knew more about the biological aging process, we could treat people more fairly” of the same chronological age, says Moffitt, explaining that for some people, the time to retire at a certain age is actually too early because they are still in full force. Although it is still early to draw concrete conclusions, the research will help in testing methods to slow down the aging process.
“If we really want to find a way to slow down the aging process in order to prevent the development of a number of diseases in old age, we will have to conduct research on younger people. The results of the research give us hope that medicine will be able to slow down aging and enable people to live healthier and more active lives “,
It is estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of Europeans have blue eyes, but the exact reason for blue eyes is not yet known. Scientists believe that it is a genetic mutation and that the gene survived because people with that eye color were considered more physically attractive, so they had more opportunities to reproduce. Eye color is determined by the amount of pigment in the iris of the eye. A lot of pigment means brown eyes, less pigment means green eyes, and little or no pigment means blue eyes.
As many as 16 genes determine eye color, but the two main ones are “HERC2” and “OCA2”, with “HERC2” acting as a switch that activates “OCA2”, which then activates the proteins that produce pigments.
If one of these two genes mutates and stops performing its function, the chain of reactions is interrupted and the proteins do not create pigments. And the result is blue eyes.
Everyone has two of each type of gene in their body, one from their father and one from their mother. If one parent has the mutated “OCA2” gene, and the other all “normal”, the child will also have brown eyes. If both parents have mutated “OCA2”, there is a 25 percent chance that the child will have blue eyes. In theory, a hidden mutated “OCA2” could be passed down through the family for generations without anyone having blue eyes.
Research conducted at the University of Copenhagen looked at the DNA of blue-eyed people and found that 99.9 of them had a mutation in the “OCA2” gene.
Because of this, scientists believe that all blue-eyed people come from a common ancestor, which means that they are, in fact, relatives.
Although it has not yet been constructed in any major scientific center, a time machine is theoretically possible and for centuries it has sparked the imagination of writers and the thought experiments of scientists…
The idea of time travel is almost as old as human civilization. One of the earliest evidences is recorded in the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata. King Reviata travels to another world to face the god Brahma. But when he returned, he realized that centuries had passed on Earth in the meantime.
One of the more famous time machines in science fiction was designed in 1895 by H. Dž. Wells in the novel The Time Machine, which was first published in sequels in Palmal magazine. Wells was also the creator of the term “time machine”, and his work experienced a large number of reissues and film adaptations, and in the following decades, as well as today, he inspired numerous other authors and creators of some new time machines.
However, except in the mind, there was no attempt to build time machines. However, it is still not impossible, at least in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. According to her, if a fast spaceship were to move at a relativistic speed close to the speed of light of 300,000 km/s, more time would pass on Earth than on the spaceship. That phenomenon, predicted by the relativistic equations, is called time dilation and stems from the fact that every reference system in Einstein’s physics has its own time.
This idea encouraged new thought experiments, the more famous of which are the paradox of the time tourist, the paradox of the twins, the paradox of the grandfather…
Here’s an example: suppose that time travel is indeed possible. A man decided to travel back in time, find and kill his own grandfather before he met his grandmother. This would mean that one parent of the time traveler was never conceived. However, we can now conclude that man from the beginning of history could not even travel through time and look for his grandfather, because he could not even be born since one of his parents did not exist.
But if he didn’t time travel for murder, his grandfather is still alive which means our great traveler will still be born, then time travel and kill his grandfather. The conclusion that arises is that, instead of doubting the possibility of the birth of the traveler, the possibility of time travel is questioned. This “paradox of the grandfather” was first discussed by the French writer René Berjave in his book The Careless Traveler from 1943.
This question is, in fact, an example of how a seemingly obvious thesis (which scientists have proven in vain for more than two centuries) not only persists, persistent, widely accepted and rooted, but can have terrible and cruel consequences – inciting wars, social and economic divisions, pogroms and monstrous mass slaughter – without being completely accurate.
It is possible that it not only surprises you, but also slightly annoys you, so you have already attributed it to the “political correctness” of modern researchers, but it is really not a political thing, but a genetic thing. The irony is that the racial division that “blood” inspired so many ideologies was denied precisely by “blood” and hereditary material. Human genes, in fact, stubbornly refuse to show any racial diversity (as is clearly seen in other animals).
Today, by the way, the generally accepted point of view is that race is, above all, a social construct. According to the definition from “Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society” by Richard Schaefer, a race is a group of human beings with similar physical and social characteristics that society generally considers different from other groups.
This becomes clearer if we look at today’s Brazil, where a uniform mutual mixture of people of African, European and American origin has “created” entirely new groups. On the other hand, there is a well-known story about the historical (artificial) division of the inhabitants of the Congo in the Great Lakes region into members of the Hutu and Tutsi races. The division was introduced by the colonial rulers, the Belgians, and it not only became a social reality, but during the conflict in Rwanda it caused one of the most monstrous genocides in human history.
The idea and subsequent search for the biological basis of race began at the end of the 17th century, with the works of the French physician François Bernier. As Europe becomes familiar with the rest of the planet at that time, the increasing interest of science in the inhabitants of the new worlds and the issue of race will begin. One of the most influential biologists of all time, Carl Linnaeus, who founded taxonomy and classified all the living world, will divide people in 1735 into four races according to the “continental” key – Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer, so that each of them is assigned a temperament (where Europeans are active and curious and Africans are lazy and carefree).
Although it seems obvious that one can certainly taxonomically separate the indigenous population in Scandinavia from that in Central Africa, further research will show that all humans are not only part of the same species but also of the same subspecies Homo Sapiens Sapines.
Meanwhile, anthropological research from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (which implied that racial differences were present in genes even though it could not be verified) led to unfathomable horrors. Among other things, in Nazi Germany they served for the adoption of the so-called Nuremberg racial laws, the persecution and extermination of Jews, Slavs, Roma and other “inferior races”.
It has been shown, however, that differences between groups of people are not based on genetics at all. No matter how many attempts were made to find them before (and after) the deciphering of the human genome, it is now beyond doubt that the genes that determine race simply do not exist. This was clearly pointed out in 1972 by Richard Lewontin, a revolutionary American biologist, mathematician and evolutionist, who determined that as much as 90 percent of genetic variability is found within one “race”.
The variability among individuals in the human species, all that diversity in complexion, height, strength, and constitution, is so great that it is impossible to really determine a common genetic basis for any group that we would call a human race. Man is therefore a real celebration of evolution – seven billion people today make up the entire universe of biological diversity. And there is no reason to share it.
An illustration depicting the various peoples of Asia was printed in the famous Nordic Family Book, a traditional Swedish encyclopedia published from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Similar illustrations indicating racial characteristics were an integral part of practically all encyclopedias and textbooks of anthropology everywhere in the world at that time.
We asked Riley Black, a science writer specializing in evolution, paleontology and natural history, to weigh in on the film’s basic premise — that dinosaurs were cloned using DNA taken from mosquitoes.
Time is a critical factor.
The last of the non-avian dinosaurs – undeniably fearsome that haunt museum halls and our dreams – they became extinct 66 million years ago. It’s so far away from us that we can’t even fathom how long it’s been, and we’ve lost any chance we had of cloning dinosaurs in the relatively short time since the late Cretaceous mass extinction.
This isn’t the dinosaur mix you’re looking for…
You may have heard that paleontologist Mary Schweitzer and colleagues recovered some soft-tissue remains from the Cretaceous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus and the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus. These claims have been controversial, but cannot be dismissed. Schweitzer and others have built a stunning argument that in exceptional cases, fragments of the original dinosaur protein may have survived to the present day. But that’s not what we need to clone a dinosaur. The starting point of any dinosaur resurrection exercise is DNA. Unfortunately for paleo geeks like myself, DNA has a relatively short half-life. There is almost no chance of ever recovering the genetic material of the dinosaurs.
Looking at the bones of recently extinct bird-like dinosaurs—specifically, the 8,000- to 600-year-old bones of giant flightless birds called moas that once walked New Zealand—the geneticists calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That’s longer than researchers expected, but nowhere near long enough to allow us to ever get DNA from a Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops (much less much older dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus and Dilophosaurus). Even under ideal conditions where the bones would remain dry and chilled at -5 degrees Celsius or below, the creature’s entire genome would have been wiped out within 6.8 million years, or about 59 million years less than the last non-avian dinosaurs.
Parasaurolophus puzzle
Any ancient dinosaur DNA would show up in tiny and gray, just like the Ice Age mammoths, Neanderthals, giant sloths, and saber-toothed cats that provided the genetic minutiae. The trick is to identify those parts and figure out where they belong in the animal’s complete genome. It requires a baseline derived from a close relative – modern Asian elephants work for mammoths, and our own genome for Neanderthals.
But living bird dinosaurs are so far away Pachicephalosaurus and that their utility in revealing the genome arrangement of non-avian dinosaurs would be quite limited. And that’s not to mention pseudogenes and non-functional parts of the genome. We haven’t even fully sequenced the genome of our own species—we’re still at about 99 percent of the functional part—so we’re pretty far from completely reconstructing an extinct genome.
Raptor by any other name
So a Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurus genome would not be a feat of resurrection, but of reinvention. Even if it were possible to obtain dinosaur DNA, we would have to reverse-engineer dinosaur genomes according to our best possible estimates of their anatomy and behavior. There are more obstacles. Creating a complete DNA profile gets you nowhere if those genetic cues can’t be translated into a viable embryo that will grow to maturity. It is understandable that Michael Crichton and the film adaptations of his work completely obscured this point, especially since researchers cannot clone birds.
It’s easy enough to say – We’ll stick an artificial nucleus in an ostrich egg and the rest will take care of itself, but that ignores the intrinsically biological interactions that actually make up a living, growing organism. Since birds committed the growth of their offspring outside the body, there may not even be a way to successfully clone a bird, so there would be no method by which we could bring back the dinosaurs even if we had all the necessary raw materials.
From a historical perspective, meditation has been practiced for 5,000 years. Meditation has its roots since ancient times. It has also been studied for its physiological effects on people in the modern world.
According to research in psychology, meditation has been practiced for 5,000 years. It became the subject of scientific studies as early as the sixties of the last century, and the practice spread from Western Europe to the USA. Some associate meditation with religion, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and even some Christian religions. People have been meditating since ancient times
How has meditation transformed from ancient times to today?
The proven benefits of meditation have merged ancient religion with modern science.
While meditation was once considered a religious and spiritual practice, it is now used as a modern tool and practice that modern studies have shown can relieve stress, balance emotions, control pain and improve sleep quality, according to the National Library of Medicine.
Meditation has almost become synonymous with better sleep: There are tons of meditation apps on the market (via Medical News Today, one of the most popular, Headspace, reached two million paid subscribers in 2020.
Scientifically proven benefits of meditation
Meditation helps people cope with the fast-paced life in the modern world that lives seven days a week, 24 hours a day. We are attached to our work, constantly on our phones and always planning the next meeting, event, all the while trying to balance work and personal life.
The most common reasons why people decide to meditate is the desire to overcome sudden reactions, to avoid increased aggressiveness, as well as to get rid of anxious feelings and stress. People choose meditation to clear their mind and be more focused. Whoever decides to meditate, you need to include this activity in your daily plan. By the way, meditation is also considered important for the way you communicate with people around you.
Modern society lives
Modern society lives “fast”, so it is meditation that slows people down and keeps them focused
Chances are you’ll thank yourself if you carve out just a little time in your busy schedule for a little meditation. After all, there are many scientifically proven benefits of meditation that can improve our quality of life.
Meditation makes us more self-aware
In order to live in a quality way, it is important to know ourselves and to be in touch with our feelings. If you’re in touch with who you are, chances are you’ll be able to connect better with the people around you – and interactions are important.
According to a study published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, meditation can help define destructive behavior patterns and turn them into healthy habits.
The same conclusion was published in the journal Advances in Mind Body Medicine, where it was pointed out that time spent in silence is good for the mind and body, and a person becomes better and more relaxed.
Meditation reduces feelings of anxiety and depression, improves attention and helps with concentration when it comes to pain. Meditation can also help prevent memory loss and help you get rid of addiction.
People who need an alarm to wake up in the morning are generally more tired than those who wake up without it, the results of an American study conducted on 450 employees working in offices in the United States, in which scientists measured the length of sleep and heart rate with the help of portable devices.
57 percent of them woke up with the help of an alarm and, as a rule, they were more tired than those who woke up naturally because the alarm disturbed their natural sleep cycle,
announced scientists from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, reports Euronews.
In contrast, people who woke up naturally slept longer and consumed less caffeine on a daily basis. Also, they felt less tired during the day.
When we wake up naturally, scientists explain, the body activates the “stress response” shortly before waking up in order to prepare us for it and wake us up.
While waking up with the ringing of the alarm, that natural response of the organism is then skipped and this leads to the interruption of the sleep cycle.
The most affected by fatigue are the so-called night birds, the people who use the alarm to wake up in the morning the most, according to research published in the journal Sleep.
With the morning alarm, we should first think that it is time to get up, and not that we should sleep longer and silence the alarm, because we will not solve the lack of sleep if we press the snooze button.
Those five or 15 minutes of sleep that we get after pressing “snooze”, i.e. delaying the alarm, will undoubtedly not give us the best we should get from the sleep process – the study states.
Snooze the alarm plays no role, Notre Dame professor Aaron Striegel says in the journal Sleep.
The purpose of this research was partly the desire to demystify what happens in such cases. It’s problematic if you need an alarm because it means you’re chronically sleep-deprived,
Genius minds are known for their eccentricity, but there are also many who went a step further with their craziness. Below are the 13 most bizarre habits by famous scientists, composers and writers. Various myths are associated with a large number of famous people from history, which no one is sure if they are really true.
In his book “Daily Rituals”, writer Mason Coury listed some musicians, artists and scientists whose bizarre routines made them as famous as their achievements.
1- The American composer George Gershwin was a workaholic, and he created his works while sitting at the piano in his pajamas and bathrobe. His brother Ira claims that Georges was never relaxed and always had something to do.
2- One of the greatest geniuses ever, Albert Einstein, lived in seclusion. He always had long hair because he did not like to visit the barber, and he considered socks unnecessary, so he never wore them.
3- Poet Edith Sitwell used to start the day by lying in a coffin because it supposedly inspired her to write her somewhat morbid lyrics. She loved to sleep and declared that every woman should spend one day a week in bed.
4- A well-established daily routine helped Charles Dickens write 15 great novels. His desk was always elaborately arranged: there was always a small vase of fresh flowers on it, a large knife for opening a letter, a gilded leaf brooch with a rabbit sitting on it, and two bronze figurines of frogs brandishing swords in a duel.
5- One of the most popular writers of crime novels, Agatha Christie, didn’t have a pen at all, she just created her works wherever she went.
The marble coffee table in the bedroom was a good place to write, as well as the kitchen table between meals.
said Christy.
6- The author of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, Truman Capote, wrote in bed with coffee and cigarettes. But only three cigarettes could be in the ashtrays at a time, and the rest was put away in his pocket. He compulsively added various numbers in his head and did not dial the phone number or the hotel room if he considered those numbers unlucky.
7- The writer Jane Austen did not like anyone but her immediate family to see her while she was writing. She liked the door to her room to creak so she could hear if someone came in, and she wrote on small pieces of paper so she could quickly hide them from prying eyes.
8- The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, slept only three hours a day and claimed that sometimes he had so many ideas in his head that absolutely nothing could be shaken from his thoughts.
9- The poet WH Auden refused to work in the evenings.
10- Only world Hitlers work at night, no honest artist – he said. He also gets his mental energy from amphetamines.
11- The “father of American literature” Mark Twain had a big problem with insomnia, and when he managed to fall asleep it was usually on the bathroom floor.
12- F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of “The Great Gatsby”, loved alcoholic beverages. The problem is that he lived during the prohibition era, so his favorite drink was gin because it worked fast and it was hard to detect that he was drunk. That love for alcohol took him to his grave too early, already at the age of 45.
13- The writer Victor Hugo ate two raw eggs every morning and bathed in ice water. He also visited the barber every day.
In the scientific world, new discoveries are made almost every day. Due to new achievements and discoveries, something that older generations learned in school is now outdated and scientific facts have been changed, writes Business Insider.
For example, we believed that diamond is the hardest mineral in the world, but in fact the hardest structure in the world is ultra-hard nanoconnected cubic boron nitride.
Although it was widely believed around the world that the witches of Salem were burned at the stake, the truth is that they were actually sentenced to death by hanging.
Also, we believed that the pyramids were built by Jewish slaves, but the truth is that they were built by the Egyptians themselves because there were no Jews then. Experts claim that they even got their own crypts in the pyramids.
It was believed that paper could not be folded more than seven times, while a group of students in 2012 failed to fold stacks of toilet paper 13 times.
One of the most commonly used scientific facts believed to be the Great Wall of China is the only structure that can be seen from space, but the first Chinese astronaut himself admitted that he failed to see the wall during his stay in space.
Women scientists lead revolutionary scientific research, however, despite their extraordinary discoveries, women worldwide represent only 30 percent in science, according to data from the United Nations (UN). Female scientists are rarely recognized for their achievements – only three percent of Nobel Prizes in science have ever been awarded to women, and only 11 percent of women are in senior research positions leading projects in Europe.
Globally, the enrollment of female students is particularly low in information and communication technologies – three percent, in natural sciences, mathematics and statistics – five percent and in engineering, manufacturing and construction – eight percent.
Today, women make up half of the workforce, earn more university degrees than men and, according to some estimates, represent the single largest economic force in the world. Still, gender gaps in science persist more than in other professions, especially in cutting-edge, math-intensive fields like computer science and engineering.
Many cultural barriers to women continue to stand in the way of science, from directing girls to other occupations, gender bias, stereotypes and sexual harassment in a male-dominated workplace to possible career restrictions for women due to childbearing. The contribution of women to science that remained unrecorded is not surprising because since the emergence of professional science in the 19th century, women scientists, with notable exceptions, often did not receive credit for their work. Also, the work of those who collaborated with men, most often relatives, was often attributed to the work of their brothers, fathers or husbands.
Science and gender equality are vital to achieving internationally agreed development goals, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, according to the UN. Over the past 15 years, the global community has invested a lot of effort in inspiring and involving women and girls in science. However, women and girls are still excluded from full participation in science.
Ever since the UN General Assembly declared February 11 as the International Day of Women and Girls Scientists in 2015, the goal has been to raise awareness of the issue that celebrates female excellence in science. Throughout history, although famous scientists like Marie Curie and Jane Goodall were eventually recognized for their contributions to science, a significant number of female scientists were overlooked and marginalized simply because of their gender. However, despite the challenges of gender discrimination and lack of recognition in the scientific community, countless inspiring women in these fields have made historic contributions to science and helped advance our understanding of the world around us. Many were not recognized during their lifetime, but their achievements helped new generations of female scientists.
Women in science, neglected in history
One of the closest examples of the omission of women from the history of science in the Balkans is the story of Mileva Marić, a Serbian physicist and mathematician, Albert Einstein’s first wife. The marriage of Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić was the relationship of two brilliant minds, one of which characterized the 20th century, and the other became an example of a stumbling block encountered by female scientists.
Mileva Marić (1875-1948) was a physics student in Switzerland when she met Albert Einstein, who was 17 years older.
Mileva Marić did not publish any research or claim credit for any of Einstein’s discoveries; any work they did together was done in privacy. All arguments for and against her participation in Einstein’s discoveries are circumstantial. But the lack of direct evidence has never stopped debates about her contribution. The letters Milevi wrote to Einstein in which he talks about the ideas of relative motion and molecular forces – for which he later became famous – contain the words “we” and “our” referring to research.
As Nature magazine writes, the controversy about Mileva’s contribution to science and Einstein’s research was stirred up by the biography of Mileva Marić from 1969, prepared by high school teacher Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić. The book claimed that Mileva’s contribution to Einstein’s success was “large and significant”. That assessment was based on the testimony of contemporaries, Mileva’s early academic success, and Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize legacy as part of the divorce settlement. Later, the linguist Senta Troemel-Ploetz and the physicist and parapsychologist, Evan Harris Walker, interpreted the letters the pair wrote to each other as evidence that Mileva’s ideas were central to Einstein’s pursuit of science.
Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a nuclear physicist born in Vienna who was the first woman with the title of professor of physics in Germany.
She worked with fellow scientists Otto Hahn and Otto Robert Frisch and was part of a small team that discovered nuclear fission, a process that would later help develop nuclear weapons and generate electricity.
Meitner not only suffered gender discrimination in the workplace during the 1930s, but also the greater threat of ethnic cleansing. She lost many prestigious academic positions because of the anti-Jewish laws enforced by the Nazis. She eventually fled to Sweden and acquired dual citizenship there.
Although she received numerous prestigious awards later in life, Lise Meitner was not the winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which was awarded solely to her fellow scientist Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission. Many scientists later said that the exclusion of Lisa Meitner by the Nobel committee was “unfair”.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a British chemist who researched DNA.
The data from her research was the first to show the basic dimensions of DNA chains and revealed that the molecule is in two matching parts, which go in opposite directions. Her discoveries were used by James Watson and Francis Crick to supplement their research on the DNA model. These studies were published as supplementary data along with research articles by Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins in the journal Nature.
Many in the scientific community argue that Rosalind Franklin should have received the Nobel Prize together with Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its importance for the transmission of information in the living organism”. Sadly, Rosalind died of ovarian cancer in 1958, just four years before the prize was awarded. At that time, the Nobel Committee could also award the prize posthumously.
Older women with too little physical activity and at least 10 hours of sitting per day have cells that are on average 8 years older than cells of their peers who do not lead such a sedentary life. All this was discovered by scientists at the University of San Diego. The study they made was conducted on 1,500 women aged 64 to 95, and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
We already knew that too much time spent sitting increases the risk of various diseases and slows down the metabolism, but this new research has shown that inactivity and sitting also accelerate the aging process itself, which is an incredibly valuable discovery. Telomeres are the secret of aging. Telomeres, as structures at the ends of chromosomes, naturally shorten and fray as cells age. The discovery that telomere length is related to lifespan has already been awarded the Nobel Prize, so this research is a logical continuation based on that useful knowledge. According to this study, the chronological age of a person does not have to be related to his biological age, and that is why cells age faster, because they have shorter and shorter telomeres.
Faster shortening of telomeres is associated with cardiovascular diseases, various types of cancer and diabetes, and bad lifestyle habits such as obesity and smoking also contribute to their shortening. So, it has been shown that women who sit for 10 or more hours a day, and do not engage in physical activity of moderate to strong intensity for 40 minutes a day, accelerate their aging process by their own inaction. In this way, an average eight-year acceleration of the biological aging of cells is ensured, unlike that of their peers who lead a more physically active life. The University of San Diego has announced a new set of studies that will also study telomere length and the relationship to exercise and sitting in men and younger populations. Until then, while you wait for more evidence against sitting – just in case, move more, you won’t get any rest.
The impact of mental health on aging
A reliable source is a statistical model that measures a person’s biological age instead of chronological age. To achieve this, an aging clock has been devised that uses blood, genetic and DNA testing to measure a person’s biological rate of aging. Smoking is the main physical factor in this case. Mental health concerns include depression, sleep problems, loneliness and feelings of unhappiness.
The modern lifestyle, which brings with it inner psychological restlessness and anxiety, leads to less social contact and withdrawal. This is exactly the scenario that played out at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the consequences of the pandemic on human social life are present even today. The option to access social networks is often cited as an excuse, which is actually a double-edged sword. Sitting in front of a computer or phone screen every day only deepens a sedentary lifestyle, which leads to further alienation of a person from the environment.
Based on the conducted research, it was concluded that loneliness significantly affects the aging process. In addition, factors of the external environment that influence our mood determine our behavior and openness to others. It is desirable to control factors such as quality sleep, physical activity, a healthier way of eating, but also the living environment such as furniture orientation, hygiene and daylighting. Self-control of access to social networks or at least limitation of time spent at the computer is required.
Can pets prevent premature aging?
When human contact is not available, it can be useful to enjoy the presence of a furry friend. Doctors say owning a dog can help reduce the risk of premature death, especially among people who live alone, who are the group most at risk of debilitating loneliness. Previous research has also found that pet owners may have better social and communication skills and engage more in community activities.
Animals can be great conversation starters, and taking care of a pet, by taking it for a walk or to the vet, can discourage sedentarism as well as provide an opportunity to meet new people. If a larger animal, such as a dog or cat, seems too much of a commitment or too expensive, why not consider a small, mostly carefree and much cheaper alternative, such as fish, snails or insects?
Namely, older adults who in one experiment were offered crickets to care for as pets became less depressed and had improved cognitive functioning within 8 weeks of starting the experiment. Or, you can volunteer at an animal shelter or offer to babysit the pets of friends and acquaintances when they’re on vacation, so you can enjoy the same benefits and improve your social relationships.
What exactly is a hallucination and how does it occur? Hallucination is actually the perception of sound, smell or visual effects.
These are effects that occur without specific stimuli and those that are not present. Hallucination can be caused by several things, such as drugs, dreams, or neurological diseases. It also happens that they occur in the form of sound, and in those cases when the hallucinating person claims to hear the voices of the deceased or unreal and mythological beings.
The word hallucination comes from the Latin word alucinari, which translates as “walking in the mind”.
What types of hallucinations are there?
There are different types of hallucinations, depending on the cause that triggers it. Hallucinations are most often caused by drug use or fever. It can occur in people with disabilities and those with impaired hearing. They can also occur as a consequence of a serious illness or a mental disorder, such as schizophrenia.
There is a large number of visual hallucinations, such as a visual disorder called Dysmegalopsia, when things are experienced as visually larger or smaller than they really are. Then the Chromatopsia hallucination, when everything is the same color or the Brobdingnagian hallucination, which makes all people look like giants or Lilliputian, where the situation is reversed and many others.
The most famous visual hallucination is a mirage, its appearance in unusual situations is characteristic, and it reflects the realization of a wish.
In addition to visual hallucinations, there are also auditory hallucinations that are characteristic of schizophrenia and include different voices. When it comes to this hallucination, people often talk to voices, and sometimes they try to physically deal with each other.
People also hallucinate when they feel that insects are crawling on their skin. It is a type of hallucination that is related to the sense of touch.
Psychologists, experts and philosophers have been trying to figure out this phenomenon for a long time. One of the theories is that the hallucination occurs due to a chemical imbalance, because research has shown that during the hallucination, different chemical processes take place in certain parts of the brain.
Countless reasons
dr. Alan Manevitz, a clinical psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York says that a large number of psychiatric and medical conditions are related to hallucinations and delusions.
Such conditions include personality disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, brain tumors, thyroid disorders, epilepsy, some infectious diseases, and medications. Women can develop postpartum psychosis, which can include hallucinations. Doctors advise that anyone who has had such psychotic episodes, such as hallucinations and delusions, should talk to their doctor about it and get tests to see if it’s something serious, if it’s momentary loss of contact with reality or is caused by some other reasons
The Americans Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless, as well as the Dane Morton Meldal, are the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on joining molecules – in the field known as click chemistry.
Click chemistry is a branch of science that deals with the study of how to connect different molecules into a single whole. Their work is used in cell research and the monitoring of biological processes, and it can also be applied to drugs for the treatment of cancer. The Nobel committee praised their work, which they say will make chemistry more efficient, adding that the impact of their research can be seen in science.
“With this year’s prize, we want to show that not everything has to be complicated, but that things can be made easy and simple,” says Johan Acquist, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
The winners will share a prize of ten million Swedish kronor (about 912,000 euros). Bertocci, a pioneer in bioorthogonal chemistry, is the eighth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
“I am delighted, I can hardly breathe,” said Bertossi after being informed of the prize by the Nobel committee.
Her discoveries can be applied in medicine and pharmacology, she explained. This means that scientists can “apply chemical research to the human body by monitoring whether the drug ends up in the right place and keeps it away from where it shouldn’t.” It’s also a “biological tool” that will help scientists spot molecules they didn’t know existed, she added. Barry Sharpless won the Nobel Prize for the second time. 21 years ago, he became a Nobel laureate thanks to his work on chiral catalysts.
Sharpless and Medal worked separately, but they The Nobel Committee last year awarded the prize to scientists for developing ways to construct molecules. Swedish physicist Svante Pabo received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for Neanderthal DNA research.
Three scientists, French Alain Aspe, American John Clausur and Austrian Anton Zeilinger, received the Nobel Prize in Physics on October 4, for research in the field of quantum mechanics – the science that describes nature using particles smaller than atoms.
Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
2021 – Benjamin List and David McMillen, awarded the Chemistry Prize for developing a new way to construct molecules.
2020 – Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the prize for inventing tools to modify DNA.
2019 – John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino shared the prize for their work on lithium-ion batteries.
2018 – Francis Arnold, George P. Smith and Gregory Winter were awarded for the discovery of enzymes.
2017 – Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson were awarded for advancing the picture of biological molecules.
2016 – Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa won the prize for a machine made of molecules.
2015 – Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modric and Aziz Sankar were awarded for their work on DNA repair.
These famous and world-famous (and recognized) attract millions of visitors every year, but have you ever wondered what their history is? During the tour, you will probably be introduced to some lesser-known things by a local guide, but until you visit one of them, here is your chance to learn more about them!
Empire State Building (New York)
It was built by slightly more than 3,400 workers, who (be careful now) built four floors every week! Therefore, it is no wonder that the entire necklace was completed in only 450 days.
At a height of 381 meters, it held the title of the tallest building in the world until 1972. About 40 million dollars were spent on its construction, and today’s value is an incredible 637 million. The building even has its own postal code, and the top was intended as a place where zeppelins would be “parked”.
And yes, let’s also say that there is not 102, but 103 floors, but the last one is reserved exclusively for VIP guests, so any of us mortals will hardly ever visit it.
Eiffel Tower (Paris)
The symbol of Paris is also one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. The tower, made for the World Exhibition in Paris, was built for two whole years, and consists of a total of 18 thousand pieces of iron. After 20 years, it was supposed to be demolished, but the city authorities decided to keep it because of the antenna on top, which was important for the radio signal.
Today, Paris is unimaginable without the tower, and not only is it visited by millions every year, but it is also the workplace for more than 600 Parisians.
Taj Mahal (Agra)
It took 22 thousand people, a thousand elephants, 28 different types of stone and 17 years to build it. The Taj Mahal is famous for its symmetry, and depending on the time of day, it is always a different color.
Legend has it that Shah Jahan tore the fingers and hands of the workers who worked on this building so that they could never build anything as beautiful again. An esthete, but also a rather cruel man.
Trevi Fountain (Rome)
Hardly anyone is not familiar with the legend that says that throwing a coin over the left shoulder into the Trevi Fountain guarantees a return to the Eternal City.
The city authorities have nothing against the fact that tourists have “embraced” the legend, given that every day around 3000 euros are poured into the fountain. So, annually, that fountain brings a little more than a million euros. Not bad, right?
Caritas workers collect all that money every day and donate it to more than 200 countries.
Sagrada Familia (Barcelona)
Whoever visited the Catalan capital, could not remain indifferent to the appearance of the Holy Family. The church is the pinnacle of the work of the great architect Antoni Gaudí, and although construction began in 1882, it is interesting that it is still not fully completed.
The legendary Gaudí worked on it for about 40 years, until his death, and according to the latest information, the cathedral is expected to be completed in 2025. They were alive, then they saw.
Statue of Liberty (New York)
Perhaps the first monument that comes to mind when it comes to the USA is certainly this woman with a torch in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty was made in France and is a gift from France to the USA. The fact that it was disassembled into 350 parts and transported by ship on the way to America speaks volumes for how big it is.
The sculpture represents the Roman goddess of liberty, and the face is modeled after the face of the sculptor’s mother. And yes, if this statue was wearing “shoes”, it would need the number 7801!
Hermitage (St. Petersburg)
One of the largest and most beautiful museums in the world is located in the imperial city of Saint Petersburg. It has more than three million pieces in its collection, including works by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso. The following speaks volumes about the size – if a visitor were to spend only a minute at each exhibit, it would take him 11 years to visit the entire museum.
The museum is specific in that it also “employs” 60 cats in charge of guarding the museum premises from mice.
Leaning Tower of Pisa
One of the most visited attractions in the world in the 1990s was closed to the public because the tower simply leaned too far, and the safety of visitors was at risk.
Noticing this, the Italian authorities came up with a plan to restore and return the tower to the position it had in 1838. The project was created by the architect Mikele Jamoilkovski, the tower was saved, and the entire operation cost 25 million euros.
Since 2001, it has been reopened to the public, so social media has been flooded with images of people “pushing” the tower.
Expressing feelings and emotions has always been considered a sign of weakness, especially when it comes to men. However, over the years, society has begun to realize how wrong that belief actually is. In fact, being able to express and process feelings is very useful for us. Happiness, anger, frustration, excitement – release those feelings! Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of expressing your feelings and emotions.
It’s healthy for everyone
Being able to express feelings of happiness or even sadness is incredibly healthy. Scientists have long believed that what we feel significantly affects the way our body reacts. When we are happy, our body feels nurtured. When we are sad or angry, our body also has to release some tension. Expressing feelings and emotions is important because it serves as an outlet for us. Why is it dangerous to keep all negative feelings to yourself? When you think about it, all that repressed negativity has to “go” somewhere. In the most unfortunate cases, this negative energy manifests as illness.
It helps you develop
Expressing your feelings helps you develop as a person. Some feelings may not be very pleasant, but allowing yourself to feel them makes it easier for you to understand them. Start by asking yourself questions you wouldn’t normally ask yourself. In a way it makes you look at situations without colored glasses and also teaches you to recognize what other people are feeling.
It sets you free
Can you imagine not being able to express your feelings at all? Many children who grow up in “strict families” often do not know what it means to be free. They are mostly protected and occasionally even have to deal with repressed feelings. However, once they are released from control, they feel light and free, and when a person feels that way, the world is new again. The will to live increases drastically. Expressing feelings and emotions is really very important. However, it is also very important that we learn how to do it properly. For example, being angry does not give you the right to destroy someone’s room or to be mean and abusive to others. By directing your feelings in the right way, you will be able to live a meaningful life.
Are emotions good and bad?
We have all been taught that certain emotions are bad, such as fear and anger, and some are good, such as happiness and joy. Do you judge emotions that way? If so, you may be disappointed when we tell you that emotions are neither good nor bad. They are simply our feedback system to ourselves, an alarm of sorts about what is happening to us right now. Imagine looking at a beautiful sunset and feeling absolutely nothing, or holding a newborn child and feeling no joy… Or imagine feeling absolutely no sadness in response to the death of a loved one…
Emotions happen, regardless of whether we are aware of them or not. Therefore, they tell us exactly what is happening to us. Precisely for this reason, we should accept, feel and express our emotions, because then we open up opportunities to improve our life. If we ignore or even worse suppress emotions deep inside or express them in an inappropriate way, what they are not, then we have opened the door for emotions to rule our lives and thereby limit us. A lot of people believe that they should constantly experience pleasure and joy in order to be happy in life. But that’s not the point. These are just one of the many emotions we experience.
Unfortunately, in most cases when we are children we are not taught how to appreciate the emotional part of ourselves or how to accept emotions. Instead, it very often happens that parents punish children because they cry or get angry about something, and then beliefs arise such as it is a weakness to show emotions, real men don’t cry, it’s not nice to see girls who get angry and similar, which is why we experience obstacles in our life. Whatever your belief is, know that it is your belief that determines whether your emotions rule your life.
What role do emotions play in your life? What is your belief about emotions?
Below we present to you 20 short facts about the human brain that you may not have known.
1. Although responsible for only about 2% of body weight, the brain consumes about 20% of the oxygen in our blood and 25% of the glucose (sugar) circulating in the bloodstream.
2. There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, but they make up only 10% of the brain. About 75% of the brain is water.
3. The average weight of the human brain is about 1.3 kilograms.
4. The brain produces a current strong enough to power a 10 to 23 V light bulb.
5. The average adult brain weighs about 1.3-1.4 kg. Height and weight have nothing to do with intelligence quotient (IQ).
6. When the blood supply to the brain is interrupted, after losing consciousness after 8-10 seconds, he can survive without oxygen for only a few minutes because brain cells begin to die after 1 minute without oxygen.
7. A newborn baby’s brain triples in size in the first year of life.
8. The brain has 60% white and 40% gray matter.
9. When you have a headache, your brain doesn’t hurt. The brain has no pain receptors and therefore cannot even feel pain.
10. Although some animals have larger brains, for example the elephant, the human brain accounts for 2% of the total body weight (in the case of an elephant, it is only 0.15%), which means that humans have the largest brain for their body size.
11. Many studies have proven that the brain can easily create a false memory, that is, create an event in your childhood that never actually happened.
12. Laughing activates five different parts of the brain.
13. If it’s healthy, your brain never loses its ability to learn.
14. Research has shown that the hippocampus, the part that deals with visual-spatial awareness, is larger in London taxi drivers than in other people. London taxi drivers spend months and sometimes years memorizing literally every street in London before they get their license.
15. There are certain ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain that cause you to yawn when others yawn around you, but also cause a part of your body to hurt for a moment, even though someone else has hit themselves. Scientists believe that these neurons are also responsible for the general feeling of empathy towards others.
16. Drugs like cocaine activate the pleasure center in the brain (nucleus accumbens), and release dopamine serotonin which makes you happy. The nucleus accumbens is also activated when you help someone in need or donate money/goods to a charity.
17. Every time you remember something or have a new thought, you create a new connection in the brain.
18. There are over 100,000 kilometers of blood vessels in the brain.
19. Numerous scientific studies have concluded that reading aloud to children and talking to them often contributes significantly to the development of their brains.
20. If you want to remember something, create an association because that’s how memory is created.
Your parents often told you about your adventures when you were a child. Of course, you don’t remember it, just like the vast majority of people in the world don’t remember anything before their third birthday.
This phenomenon is called childhood amnesia, and it is still a puzzle for scientists. The fact that we don’t remember early experiences is somewhat paradoxical because in the first few years we acquire many complex skills “for life”, such as walking, talking and recognizing people’s faces. And yet, memories of certain childhood events are lost in adulthood. It’s as if someone tore the first few pages out of our autobiography.
What is the cause of childhood amnesia?
This question has plagued psychologists for more than a century, but we are finally uncovering the pieces of the puzzle. The first serious study of childhood amnesia was the work of French psychologists Victor and Catherine Henri in 1898. Spouses Henri, while talking to 123 adults, realized that their earliest autobiographical memories went back to the age of just over three years. These findings were later confirmed by numerous studies that indicate that the average age for the first memories is between three and three and a half years. However, there is a lot of variability: some people seem to remember events when they were only two years old, while others remember nothing before they were six or even eight years old. At the same time, those early memories are rather hazy.
How did Freud interpret the absence of early memories?
Serious attempts to explain the phenomenon of childhood amnesia began decades after the Henries published their research. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, reflected on the problem of childhood amnesia in his essay from 1905. At the same time, he concluded that we repress our childhood memories because they are full of sexual and aggressive impulses and are therefore too embarrassing to face in later life, reports Jutarnji.hr. However, that idea fell away over time, and the thesis was launched that young children simply cannot form explicit memories of events. The picture changed again in the 1980s, when the first studies of children themselves appeared instead of research on what adults remember from childhood. Thus, scientists have discovered that children younger than two or three years old can indeed recall autobiographical events, but that these memories fade. Then the question arose as to what causes their disappearance.
What did memory research in children show?
Canadian psychologist Carol Peterson from Memorial University in Newfoundland found in her research that children can remember traumatic experiences quite faithfully, even when they happened at a very early age. In a period of eight years, children could remember things that happened to them five years ago, that is, when they were three years old. But, prof. Peterson was also interested in whether eight-year-olds could remember ordinary events from early childhood. Her research from 2005 on 140 respondents showed that children under the age of nine have some memories of their first impressionable experiences. But the older the children, the fainter the memories. Thus, children from six to nine years old could recall events from the time when they were three years old. However, teenagers between the ages of 14 and 16 recalled only individual situations from when they were over four years old.
Two years later, Carol Peterson interviewed the same 140 respondents again. She asked them the same questions: What are their earliest memories? Of course, everything that the children mentioned was also checked by the parents. The results showed that only five of the 50 youngest children, who were between four and seven years old at the time of the first interview, could recall their earliest memories, even after being reminded of what they had said two years earlier.
“The memories just disappeared,” Carol Peterson told Live Science. On the other hand, 22 out of 61 children aged ten to 13 could recall the same memories from their earliest years as two years ago. Children over the age of ten were able to recall, after being reminded, almost all of their earliest memories. By that age, the earliest memories crystallize and those memories stay with us in adulthood.
Does childhood amnesia also exist in animals?
Neuroscientists led by Catherine Akers from Children’s Hospital in Toronto published a study in Science in 2014 that showed that mice also have their own version of childhood amnesia. It is similar with monkeys, our close relatives in the animal world. Scientists cite neurogenesis, the process of creating new neurons, as the main cause of our forgetting early events in childhood. Until the 1990s, the dogma reigned in science was that the number of nerve cells or neurons is determined at the moment of birth and that their number only decreases during life. But scientists have shown that our brain changes throughout life and that new neurons are created even later. One of the places of neurogenesis is the hippocampus, a structure in the brain that is involved in the creation of long-term memories. Neurogenesis in the hippocampus peaks during the first few years. Catherine Akers and her collaborators have shown in experiments on mice that the rapid creation of new neurons in the hippocampus blocks access to old memories.
Is the period of earliest memories the same in all cultures?
Scientists have realized that there are puzzling cross-cultural differences about the age of earliest memories. For example, in one cross-cultural study, researchers found that the average age of first memories for people of European descent was about 3.5 years, and for those of East Asian descent, 4.8 years. Among the Maori in New Zealand, that age is only 2.7 years. – Those differences cannot be explained only by the maturation of the brain – Patricia Bauer, professor of psychology from Emory University in Atlanta, told New Scientist.
Scientists believe that one of the explanations for this phenomenon is storytelling. Compared to East Asian parents, European and North American parents are more likely to discuss the past with their children using more complex forms of storytelling. As a result, their children have earlier memories. Maori storytelling culture is even richer, with detailed oral histories and a strong focus on the past, leading to even earlier memories.
When it comes to autobiographical memory, the early exchange of family memory is important. In North American culture, people are crazy about memoirs and reality TV. It’s all a life story. If society tells you that your memories are important, then you will remember them better – she told New Scientist prof. Ki Wang of Cornell University
So many galaxies and so little time! What can a busy scientist do? A team of international researchers solved that problem by turning to thousands of amateur volunteers around the world for help describing the universe. The result of that appeal is the “Galaxy List”.
Modern instruments allow us to peer deep into time and space, but on Earth it is still only 24 hours in a day. It’s a conundrum that researchers have faced more and more in recent years, as the volume of telescope images has outstripped attempts to organize them.
Now, an international group of scientists has decided to solve that problem by harnessing the power of the crowd and the Internet to help them deal with the vastness of space.
The result of that endeavor is ‘Galaxy Zoo’, a project dedicated to cataloging the heavens. Its second phase has just been completed.
Lucy Fortson, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota in the USA and one of the project leaders explains:
“We find galaxies in two main morphologies or shapes: elliptical and spiral. The complexity of those shapes makes recognizing the differences very difficult for machine algorithms or computers. The best machine algorithm that can distinguish between these shapes, which is available to us, is the human brain. “An Oxford graduate (who worked on the project) and his supervisor were sitting in a pub and thought, ‘You know, if we put this on the Internet, are people going to classify galaxies?'” says Fortson.
The answer was a resounding yes. The first phase of the project, which ended in 2009, asked interested volunteers from around the world to help classify nearly a million galaxies from the near universe. A scientific background was not required. All that was needed were eyes, interest and the ability to register at galaxyzoo.org.
Fortsonova said that it was such a success that the participants asked the organizers to give them more tasks, which the scientists accepted. Now they’ve published their findings in “Galaxy Zoo 2,” a document containing some 16 million classifications made possible by over 83,000 enthusiasts. The project featured 300,000 galaxies with the clearest images and asked volunteers not only to describe their basic shape, but also to provide a more detailed description: Does the galaxy contain spirals and how many spiral “arms” are present? Does the galaxy have “galactic bars” – long, elongated features that represent concentrations of stars? Is a galaxy merging with another galaxy?
The classifications were recorded between February 2009 and April 2010.
Scientists involved in the project say that the new catalog is ten times larger than any previous one. They estimate that it represents the result of thirty years of work by one researcher.
The data should help scientists answer questions that have long fascinated them.
“One of the biggest questions people are trying to figure out is how our universe evolved and how we got to where we are.” One aspect of this is understanding the formation of galaxies. We know that the personality of a galaxy is shaped by its history, and its history is written in the morphology of the galaxy,”
says Lucy Fortson.
Galaxy Zoo relies on responses from large groups, usually via the Internet, to come up with information or data, and is not the first scientific attempt to discover information about the universe.
For years, researchers into the existence of extraterrestrial life have used computer programs from several universities and research projects to scan the radio waves of space for signs of intelligence.
The rigor of science plays a role in projects based on collecting data from large groups of people. In the Galaxy Zoo 2 project, each galaxy was classified between 40 and 45 times to ensure data accuracy. Fortson said her team used “certain methods and formulas” to weed out the classifications of those participants who “weren’t really paying attention.”
The next step, she says, is to provide volunteers with a Hubble Telescope:
“I compared it with the census. We’ve just done an inventory of the present: We’ve gone round and interviewed all these galaxies and seen the diversity, the rich diversity of galaxies in our immediate universe. Now we want to go back in time and make a list of galaxies as they were formed.”
“By comparing the two censuses, we can learn how galaxies have evolved,”
On the eve of the partial eclipse of the Sun, on Tuesday, October 25, there is great excitement among amateur astronomers and lovers of this discipline. In order to observe this wonderful celestial phenomenon, it is necessary to be in a specific place on the planet, and on that specific date when at least three astronomical conditions for the occurrence of an eclipse have been met. And with that, of course, that you are lucky with the clouds.
Every eclipse or eclipse occurs when the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun, so that it partially or “completely” obscures the image of our star, and its shadow falls somewhere on the surface of the planet. Depending on whether you happened to be right there, in the moon’s shadow or in a much wider, surrounding penumbra, called the umbra and penumbra, you will see the Sun’s disk obscured completely or only partially, as will be the case on Tuesday, October 25.
Unfortunately, most of us will not see the arrival of the umbra just above us and the total eclipse, because it is expected in the year when today’s newborns will be preparing for retirement, that is, on September 3, 2081.
Why is it so? Why don’t solar eclipses happen more often? Once a month, for example, every new moon?
Let’s think about the changes of the moon, about how during a conditionally speaking period of 29 days, the Earth’s satellite changes its shape and names – new, first quarter, full and last quarter. No matter what we call them, the moons would not occur in that way if the Moon did not revolve around the Earth and occupy different positions in relation to the Sun, and therefore be illuminated in various ways. And when it is young, invisible, the Moon is actually unlit for us because it stands between the Sun and the Earth, and its dark side is facing us.
But? But, if once a month, at every new moon, the Moon is between the Sun and the Earth, why doesn’t it block the star for the observers and they don’t see the eclipse?
The answer lies in the position of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. Perhaps you did not know, but it is not in the same plane as the Earth orbits the Sun. For reasons still insufficiently explained, the Moon’s orbit is tilted at an angle slightly greater than 5 degrees relative to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. That is why the shadow cast by the Moon “misses” the planet almost always, except when it is found in those places where the plane of the Moon intersects the plane of the Earth’s orbit. Then all three bodies – the Sun, the Moon and the Earth – will be aligned in a line. And then there are eclipses – solar and, on the other hand, lunar (when the Earth hides the Sun).
During the year, 2 to 5 solar eclipses can occur. However, not all of them are total because everything can happen for a total eclipse, but the Moon at that time can be in its elliptical orbit too far to completely cover the Sun even when it completely “enters” its image. That is why there are several types of eclipses. By the way, they can also be seen in different locations on Earth.
One of the biggest mysteries in biology has been largely solved with the help of artificial intelligence, experts announced.
Predicting how proteins fold into unique three-dimensional shapes has puzzled scientists for half a century. DeepMind, a London laboratory that uses artificial intelligence, has solved this problem to a large extent, according to the organizers of the extraordinary scientific competition.
A better understanding of the shape of proteins could play a key role in the development of new drugs to treat various diseases. DeepMind’s discovery is expected to accelerate the study of a large number of diseases, including Covid-19, which has been active in previous years. Their program determined the shape of the protein at a level of accuracy comparable to expensive and time-consuming laboratory methods, they say. Dr Andrei Kristafovich, from the University of California, one of the panel of scientific arbitrators, described the achievement as “truly extraordinary”.
“Being able to explore protein shapes quickly and accurately has the potential to revolutionize scientific life,” he says.
What are proteins?
Proteins are present in all living things, where they play a key role in chemical processes essential to life.
Made from a series of amino acids, they fold in countless possible ways into complex shapes that hold the key to how they perform vital functions. Many diseases are linked to proteins’ roles in catalyzing chemical reactions (enzymes), fighting disease (antibodies), or acting as chemical messengers (hormones such as insulin).
“Even tiny rearrangements of these vital molecules can have catastrophic consequences for our health, so one of the most effective ways to understand a disease and find new ways to treat it is to study the proteins involved.”
says Dr. John Molt of of the University of Maryland, in the USA, chairing the panel of scientific arbitrators.
“There are tens of thousands of human proteins and many billions of them in other species, including bacteria and viruses, but determining the shape of just one requires expensive equipment and can take years.”
How does the competition work?
In 1972, Christian Anfinsen received the Nobel Prize for work that showed that it is possible to determine the shape of a protein based on the sequence of amino acids it is made of.
Every two years, a large number of teams from more than 20 countries blindly try to predict the shapes of sets of about 100 proteins based on their amino acid sequences with the help of computers. At the same time, biologists create 3D structures in the laboratory using traditional techniques such as X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy, which determine the location of each atom relative to each other in their protein molecule. A team of scientists from Casp (Community-wide Experiment for the Critical Appraisal of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) then compares these predictions with 3D structures made using experimental methods. Kasp uses a measurement method known as the global distance test to assess accuracy, ranging from 0-100. A score of around 90, achieved by DeepMind’s AlphaFold program, is considered comparable to laboratory techniques.
What happened this year?
In the latest round of the competition, Casp-14, AlphaFold determined the shape of about two-thirds of the proteins with an accuracy comparable to laboratory experiments.
The arbitrators said that the shape accuracy of most other proteins was also high, though not quite at that level. AlphaFold is based on a concept called deep learning. In this process, the structure of folded proteins is represented by a spatial graph. The program then “learns” using information about the 3D shapes of known proteins stored in the Public Protein Database. An artificial intelligence program managed to do in just a few days what would take years in a laboratory.
How will this information be used?
Knowing the 3D structure of proteins is important for making drugs and understanding human diseases, including cancer, dementia and infectious diseases. One example is Covid-19, in which scientists studied how the spike protein on the surface of the Sars-CoV-2 virus interacts with receptors in human cells. Professor Andrew Martin of University College London (UCL), a former Caps participant and current arbitrator, told the BBC that “understanding how a protein sequence folds in three dimensions is really one of the fundamental questions of biology.”
“The entire way a protein functions depends on its three-dimensional structure, and protein function is important for everything related to health and disease.”
“By knowing the three-dimensional structure of proteins, we can help develop drugs and intervene in health problems, whether it’s infections or hereditary diseases.”
Professor Dame Janet Thornton, of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, said how proteins fold to create “extremely unique three-dimensional shapes” is one of the greatest mysteries in biology.
What will happen next?
And other scientists will want to study the data to determine how accurate this AI method is and how well it works at the level of detail. There are still large gaps in knowledge, including understanding how multiple proteins fit together and how proteins interact with other molecules such as DNA and RNA.
“Now that the problem is largely solved for individual proteins, the way is open to the development of new methods for determining the shape of protein complexes – collections of proteins that cooperate to shape the bulk of the machinery of life and other applications.”
Intelligent people are always expected to be the best, no matter what it is. Because of this, they often feel the pressure of society and have no one to talk to about their weaknesses and insecurities. These are the six negative sides of intelligence.
Smart people often think more than feel
Intelligent people often have trouble not feeling any relief when expressing their emotions. Namely, they express their emotions more verbally, while those who are less intelligent try to express them through physical reactions – hitting, running, screaming, crying, dancing or jumping for happiness.
Ultimately, the emotions of intelligent people remain trapped within them, regardless of their verbal expression. Scientists cannot determine exactly how emotional and cognitive abilities are related, but they have found that highly intelligent people do not need to rely on emotional skills to solve problems.
People always expect them to be top notch in everything
Intelligent people are always expected to be the best, no matter what it is. Because of this, they often feel the pressure of society and have no one to talk to about their weaknesses and insecurities. The problem also arises when parents expect too much from their smart children. Namely, because of their children’s great abilities, parents focus on what their children will do, instead of what their children actually are.
They may never learn to appreciate the value of hard work
Many smart people often feel that they can get by with much less effort than others. But a high IQ does not always lead straight to success. Intelligence can become a problem for people who discover they have it and don’t have to work as hard as others to succeed, and thus never develop a good work ethic. Scientists also claim that intelligent people feel that they don’t have to work hard to achieve what they want.
People can get angry if they are constantly being corrected
When an intelligent person notices that his interlocutor has said something completely incorrect, it is difficult for him to suppress the need for clarification or correction. However, it is important to be aware of the fact that other people may be confused and offended by such behavior, and that there is a risk of losing friends. If you correct people every time you talk to them, they will stop talking or hanging out with you.
They overthink things
A common trait of all intelligent people is spending too much time thinking and analyzing. They try to give everything an existential meaning, which leads to the fact that they are constantly in a vicious circle. Mostly they try to find answers to questions that no one has been able to answer so far, and that can be done in vain. The problem also arises when making decisions. Then smart people try to analyze all the possible consequences, which in the end can lead to the decision not even being made in the end.
They understand how much they don’t know
Super-intelligent people are often aware that there is a lot they don’t really know, and no matter how hard they try, there will always be something they don’t know. This observation, although good, can also be frustrating because the more you learn, the more aware you are of how much more you actually have to learn.
“There is nothing to be afraid of in life. Life just needs to be understood.”
“Life is not simple for any of us. How to deal with it? We must persevere and above all believe in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that it must certainly be achieved.”
Marie Curie is not only the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize, but also the first person to receive the award twice, and the only woman to receive it in two different categories. Secluded, dignified and modest, she gained the admiration of scientists all over the world.
Marie Curie valued education from an early age and as a child stood out above other children. At the age of 5, Maria learned to read and write, listening to her sister learn the alphabet. From the beginning of her schooling, she was a brilliant student, and at the end of high school she was awarded a gold medal for her success. However, her homeland, Poland, was then under Russian domination, and women could not attend university. As her desire for education was strong, Marie Curie (then Sklodowska) found a solution and soon connected with a group of young people who organized their studies in a non-compulsory organization called the Mobile University. In 1891, she went to Paris to live with her sister and studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the Sorbonne. She finished her studies at the Sorbonne as the best student, first in the physics and chemistry class, and second in the mathematics class.
She met her future husband, Pierre Curie, who was then a doctoral student in Becquerel’s laboratory, in 1894 and married him the very next year, after Pierre defended his doctorate.
She began her first research under the influence of Becquerel, who discovered in 1896 that uranium salts emit rays that are as penetrating as x-rays. Encouraged by this discovery, Marie Curie decided to study uranium rays as part of her doctoral dissertation. She showed that this radiation originates from the atom itself. She then continued her systematic studies of radioactive substances, especially uranium, and came to the discovery that uranium pitch has four times stronger radiation than elemental uranium, which led to the conclusion that some other elements are also present. Through various researches, she came to the discovery that this activity of uranium particles is also characteristic of some other substances (thorium) and decided to call this phenomenon radioactivity. Her husband, Pierre Curie was intrigued by her discoveries and decided to join her. In 1898, the Kiri couple discovered the existence of a new element. The newly discovered element was called “polonium”, in honor of Mary, the homeland of Poland. A few months later, they announced other results of their research and the existence of another element. Because of its high radioactivity, it was called “radium”. They came to this discovery after painstaking work in a laboratory located in a shed and extensive research in which they processed 8 tons of uranium ore, and only in 1902 did they isolate one tenth of a gram of radium.
The crown of all research came in 1903. years. Pierre Curie, Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel received the Nobel Prize in Physics, in recognition of their outstanding achievements in the field of radioactivity. Thus, Mrs. Curie became the first woman to be awarded by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.
In the same year, Maria received her doctorate from the University of Paris and became the first woman in France to achieve that academic degree. After these successes, recognitions from other European countries followed.
The Kiri couple not only discovered new elements, but also the effects of radioactivity on cells. They made an important discovery – that sick, cancerous cells exposed to radiation are destroyed much faster than healthy ones. In order to enable the operation of this, the first laboratory in the world, which carried out experiments by treating cancer cells with radioactive substances, it sought the help of other countries, and the USA was one of the countries from which it received valuable help. President Harding, on behalf of the women of America, gave her 1 gram of radium for her institute, which for her was “countless times more precious than gold”.
This discovery played a huge role in the subsequent research and development of therapy for the treatment of many forms of cancer. Radiological therapy is still the main therapeutic method in the treatment of cancerous diseases.
After becoming an unfortunate widow in 1906, Marie Curie was asked to take over her late husband’s university professorship. That’s how she became the first woman professor at the Sorbonne.
She continued to work hard and dedicatedly, and in 1910, with the help of her colleague, she isolated pure metallic radium. The award for all the research and discovery of the chemical elements radium and polonium, for the isolation of radium and the study of the nature of that element and its compounds, arrived the following year in the form of another Nobel Prize. This time it was the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Thus, Marie Curie became the first scientist with two Nobel Prizes.
Through further research, she realized that X-rays can help locate foreign objects in the body and thus facilitate the surgeon’s work. During the First World War, Marie Curie, with the help of her daughter Irene, who she also included in her scientific activities, devoted herself to developing the medical application of radiography. She designed a vehicle that was used for radiography, and which was sent to the front to help wounded soldiers. The vehicle became known as the “little kiri”, as it was fondly called. Marie Curie personally brought him to the front line. The vehicles were equipped with radon, a radioactive gas derived from radium, which Maria personally collected and placed in gas pipes.
At the time when Marie Curie was researching the harmful effects of radiation, they were still unknown, so the Curie couple conducted research without any protection from radioactive substances. It was even said that Marie Curie loved the beautiful blue-green light with which substances glowed in the dark, and that she even carried test tubes with radioactive isotopes in her pocket and kept them in her desk drawer. The intensity of radioactivity to which the Curies were exposed was so high that their laboratory equipment, books and notes are still considered too dangerous to handle.
Marie Curie died of leukemia on July 4, 1934. She was buried in the cemetery in Scow next to her husband Pierre. In honor of their achievements, in 1995 the French moved their remains to the Panthéon in Paris.
Many people think about what happens after death, so they wonder what the last moments look like, whether life really “flies by” before our eyes and what awaits us after the last breath. Scientists have been dealing with this topic for years, and now they have solved the dilemma – does dying look like a process of falling asleep or are we aware that we are disappearing.
Dying is a unique experience for the individual and their loved ones. There is much more than physiological changes that contribute to the experience of dying. For example, a person’s personality, the burden of the disease, the support of family and friends, the duration of the terminal illness and their spirituality – explains Dr. Patrick Steele, a specialist in palliative care. However, there are certain physiological changes that occur universally.
Regular breathing patterns may change. Sometimes it can be faster than normal and sometimes slower. In the final days, there may be periods where there are long gaps between breaths. Breathing can become noisy at the end of life. It is the accumulation of waste products, secretions of the body. It’s often more upsetting for those listening than for the individual dying, Steele describes.
Study organizer Dr. Ajmal Zemar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, says this could mean that the idea that life “flies before our eyes as we die” is grounded in science. As a neurosurgeon, I sometimes deal with loss. It is indescribably difficult to convey the news of death to anxious family members – said the neurosurgeon, adding…
Something we can learn from this research is the following: even though our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us, their brains may be replaying some of the most beautiful moments they experienced in their lives – Dr. Zemar added.
A twinkle in the eye
In addition to Zemar, another team of scientists momentarily restored a faint flash of life to the dying cells in the human eye. In order to better understand the way in which nerve cells are subject to lack of oxygen, a team of American researchers measured the activity in retinal cells of mice and humans immediately after death. They managed to revive the cells’ ability to communicate hours after death. When the cells were stimulated by light, postmortem retinas were shown to emit specific electrical signals, known as beta waves, writes Science Alert. These waves are also seen in living retinas and indicate communication between all layers of macular cells that allow us to see.
This is the first time a deceased donor’s eyes have reacted to light in this way, and some experts question the irreversible nature of death in the central nervous system.
“We were able to wake up the photoreceptor cells in the human macula, which is the part of the retina responsible for our central vision and our ability to see fine details and color,” explains biomedical scientist Fatima Abbas of the University of Utah.
In eyes obtained up to five hours after the death of the organ donor, these cells responded to bright light, colored lights, and even very dim flashes of light. After death, it is possible to save some organs in the human body for transplantation. But after the circulation stops, the central nervous system as a whole stops responding too quickly for any form of long-term recovery.
Different regions and different types of cells have different survival mechanisms, which makes the whole issue of brain death much more complicated. Learning how selected tissues in the nervous system cope with the loss of oxygen could teach us about the recovery of lost brain functions.
In 2018, scientists from Yale University made headlines when they kept a pig’s brain alive for as long as 36 hours after the animal’s death. The feat was achieved by halting the rapid degradation of mammalian neurons, using artificial blood, heaters and pumps to restore the circulation of oxygen and nutrients. A similar technique is now possible in mice and human eyes, which are the only extruded parts of the nervous system. By restoring oxygenation and some nutrients to the eyes of organ donors, researchers from the University of Utah and Scripps Research were able to trigger synchronous activity among neurons after death.
“We were able to get retinal cells to communicate with each other, the way they do in the living eye to mediate human vision,”
says visual scientist Frans Winberg of the University of Utah.
Initially, experiments showed that retinal cells continued to respond to light for up to five hours after death. However, the crucial intercellular beta-wave signals quickly disappeared, apparently due to the loss of oxygen.
Buried in a shallow grave deep inside a remote Indonesian cave, archaeologists have found the bones of a young person they say could change the history of medicine.
Using radiocarbon dating techniques, scientists estimate that the body had lain untouched for 31,000 years inside Liang Tebo Cave in Borneo’s East Kalimantan province, according to research published in the journal Natur.
The most striking aspect of this discovery is that the young man or woman’s lower left leg is missing, with signs that it was carefully amputated when the person was a child or early teenager. The patient survived the surgery and died of unknown causes when he was between 19 and 21 years old, the scientists said. The skeleton was found in 2020 by Australian and Indonesian archaeologists, who say the amputation reveals considerable surgical skill and is the earliest example of this type of operation. This discovery, according to CNN, changed our understanding of the sophistication of Stone Age people.
“It is significant because it significantly changes our species’ knowledge of surgery and complex medicine,”
said Maxim Aubert, a professor at the Center for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland.
“They had to have a deep knowledge of human anatomy, how to stop the blood flow, how to anesthetize the patient, prevent sepsis. All that became the norm only recently,” said Aubert. Experts believed that human ancestors did not know how to perform difficult procedures like amputation until the advent of agriculture and permanent settlements transformed human society in the last 10,000 years. Before this discovery, the oldest known example of amputation was an elderly farmer whose left forearm was removed just above the elbow 7,000 years ago in present-day France, the study said.
It was only 100 years ago that surgical amputation became the medical norm in the West. Before the development of antibiotics, the study states, most people would have died during the amputation.
“Blood loss, shock and subsequent infection were the main sources of death until relatively recently in human history.”
said Tim Maloney, a researcher at Griffith University and one of the study’s co-authors.
Community Care
This person had his lower left leg amputated as a child and survived six to nine years after the operation, according to experts. There were no signs of infection in the bones, and new bone growth formed in the amputated area – something that takes a long time. In addition, while the rest of the skeleton was the size of an adult, the amputated bones stopped growing and retained the size of a child. The surgeon or surgeons who performed the operation 31,000 years ago, probably with knives and scalpels made of stone, must have had a detailed knowledge of anatomy and the muscular and vascular system in order to discover and connect the veins, blood vessels and nerves and prevent fatal blood loss and infection , according to the study.
After amputation, care was vital, and the wound had to be regularly cleaned and disinfected.
“I think what’s most amazing is that this is real, direct, tangible evidence of a really high level of care in the community,”
said Maloney.
To live with an amputated leg in mountainous terrain for years, an individual would need a lot of constant help and care from their community.
“That this child survived the procedure and was estimated to have lived many years afterwards is astonishing,” said Charlotte Roberts, a professor in the Department of Archeology at Durham University in the UK, in a commentary published with the study. She was not involved in research. Roberts agrees with the assessment that the limb was deliberately removed – an accidental injury would not show a clean slash. Nor is it likely that the foot was cut off as punishment, given that the person lived for years after the amputation and was carefully buried, said Roberts, who trained as a nurse before becoming an archaeologist. The Australian team said it’s possible these hunter-gatherers had knowledge of medicinal plants, such as antiseptics, that grew in the rainforests of Borneo.
An exciting region for discovery
The child’s remains were dated in two ways: radiocarbon dating of charcoal remains in the sediment layers above, on, and below the skeleton; and a tooth dated by measuring the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes, the chemical elements found in tooth enamel. It is also the oldest known deliberate burial in island Southeast Asia, with limestone markers placed on top of the grave, the body placed in a bent, fetal position and a large globule of ocher – a mineral pigment used in Stone Age cave art.
The skeleton was discovered in a region that has become an exciting site for paleoanthropology: Liang Tebu, a large limestone cave with patterns of human hands on the walls, located in a remote, mountainous area that can only be reached by boat at certain times of the year. The world’s oldest figurative rock art has been found in caves elsewhere in Indonesia, and extinct human species such as Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis have been found on islands in the same region.
“From this area, people traveled by boat to cross the islands of South Asia to reach the mainland of Papua and Australia (the first successful great sea voyage),” Aubert said. “They were advanced artists, and now we know they had advanced medical knowledge. “
“At Liang Tebo, we came across this prehistoric person who was amputated 31,000 years ago less than a meter from the surface and we know we still have 3-4 meters of sediment to excavate before the bedrock,” he added. due to the spread of covid, and archaeologists based in Australia rushed home to avoid a border closure that would last more than two years. “We want to go back. Maybe we will find more human remains, and maybe the remains of unknown species,” they said.
It is even more interesting that the mathematical statistics on the growth of mankind confirm that the whole of mankind originated from one small group of people several thousand years before Christ. Similar conclusions were reached by Italian and Japanese geneticists. However, such facts are not welcomed by the public, because they defy the established dogma of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The grandfather of researcher Robin Simmons worked as a doctor in Eastern Turkey and Russia between 1904 and 1910, at the very foot of Great Ararat – the place where, according to local tradition, the ark of Noah and his family landed after the Great Flood. Some of the Kurds and Armenians there whom he treated told him exactly that – that Noah’s ark was preserved on that mountain, high up on the north side, just below the pass of the extinct double-peaked volcano, and showed him that spot on an old photograph Ararata also found out that the old names of the places in that area largely contain memories of the Ark – Noah’s Village, the First Vineyard, the House of Sam – Sam was one of Noah’s sons, the ancestor of the Semites, the City of the First Market, the Place of the First Descent… Most of these names today they are no longer used, but they are very specific in the Old Armenian language.
There are, however, other legends about the place of Noah’s landing. The Koran, for example, also talks about the Ark – but it says that it landed on Al Qudiya, a mountain about 300 kilometers south of Ararat, while the Iranians claim that Ararat is on their land – Mount Kuh e Alwand. There is a famous story about the months-long expedition of the soldiers of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, who allegedly entered the Ark and photographed it, mapped the position, somewhere in the rugged, canyon-crisscrossed upper regions of the Armenian side. This expedition was undertaken just before the October Revolution, during which, it is thought, the majority during the campaign itself, they were killed, and photographs, maps and artifacts disappeared. Relatives of several survivors confirmed the authenticity of that expedition.
The Engineer’s Story
American Ed Davis, was in 1943 an army engineer of the US army, who built supply roads in Turkey and Russia. Doing some favor to their driver’s village, which is near Ararat, the driver’s relatives offered to take him to the place where the Ark can be seen, which prayed under the ice in retreat. On the way, they stopped in a village where there was a cave with supposed artifacts found in the ice, which appeared in the Ark after the melting of the ice. There were oil lamps, clay barrels and antique tools. After traveling for several days, on horseback and on foot, they reached a cave that was decorated with some beautiful old writing, which is thought to be located at a height of about 2500 meters on the western wall of the Ahora Gorge. Indeed, explorer Ed Crawford later discovered a cave in Ahora Gorge with apparently pro-Assyrian petroglyphs that can be interpreted as an immediate post-Flood religious text. The next day, a guide showed Davis a horseshoe-shaped crack in the ice and said: There’s Noah’s Ark. At first Davis couldn’t see anything, but soon he caught sight of him. It was in his words: A huge, rectangular, man-made structure partially covered in ice and rock, lying on its side. At least 30 meters was clearly visible. I could even see the inside, a part of it had been broken through – through that hole, some tree trunks were sticking out, and water was coming up from under the structure. Inside the collapsed section, which he was told was the largest, Davis saw at least three stories. The guide told him that near the top there is a residential area of 48 rooms. He also told him that inside there were cages as small as a fist, but also large enough for a family of elephants. They planned to rappel down the next day, but the weather turned so bad overnight that they had to turn back.
Satellite images
George Stephan is a military-trained specialist with 30 years of experience interpreting all types of satellite imagery who says he has access to every square foot of planet Earth. He says: I was looking at the mountain, from a height of 3050 meters above the summit, using the PAMS system (special photo analysis of material spectrum). I am one hundred percent convinced that there are two man-made structures, one below the other, on the 3,962-meter elevation on the northern side of the mountain. Both look as if they were once joined, as there is a spectral trail between them…
When he marked the locations of the anomalies he found on a topographic map of Ararat, they turned out to be the same ones that Robin Simmons had been marked by his grandfather. However, things do not add up to Davies’ story – he did not mention crossing the ice plains.
Aerial shots
A few months later, Simmons and Adams flew over Ararat in a plane, but the Turkish authorities did not allow them to land. By taking videos of it, and especially of Ahora Gorge, they soon identified the wanted point, a frozen wave-like formation hovering over something embedded in the glacier. Circling above the mountain, Simmons was trying to find a trace of the second, broken-off part of the object that George Stephan determined was about 335 meters below, in a steeper part of the glacier. And indeed, there he managed to photograph a similar structure with a broken end and a roof covered, barely visible in the ice wall. Still circling above the terrifying Ahora Gorge, Simmons surveyed a spot that matched Ed Davis’ description from a height of about 750 meters. And indeed, another similarly anomalous object protruded from the steep ground, with what looked like a pointed roof and vertical walls, the end of which appeared to be broken. If it was also the Ark, then, according to Davis, there would have to be another similar part beneath it, trapped even deeper in the ice. All three objects were remarkably similar, and all could in fact have been parts of the Ark, which the Bible says was about 150 meters long – or even two feet longer if the cubit measure is in fact a royal cubit.
What exactly is hidden there
But the story gets even weirder. According to one source, who spoke to Simmons only on condition of complete anonymity, in 1974 an American special operations team was engaged in recording a Russian radar system that tracked flights from Turkey to what was then USSR. Returning via Ararat, in order to escape detection, the team was caught in a storm and found shelter in a crevasse. When they entered it, they thought it was an old Byzantine sanctuary – but they realized that the altitude was too high for such a thing, so they unanimously concluded that it was – the biblical Ark. Their report, code-named Black Spear, also reached the US president, because Simmons was told by a friend of the president’s adviser that the adviser had seen the still-secret Oval Office report, which included specific mention of what the operatives in question believed. that a part of the real Noah’s Ark is preserved, trapped in the ice. Another similar story, full of details, was disclosed. Between December 1959 and April 1960, one pilot made about fifty flights from a secret Turkish base into the Soviet Union, in order to distract the Soviets from simultaneous American flights. Returning to Turkey through the Russian-Iranian border zone, next to Ararat, on the left side, he says, he often saw and photographed an oblong, rectangular coffin-like object, which protruded from the ice at about 4,500 meters. height. Now, according to him, those recordings are stored seven floors below the Pentagon.
-The question arises, why is all this being covered up? -Who cares if the Flood and the Ark remain only legends? Could the findings from the Ark deal a decisive blow to the already shaky Darwinian theory and who knows what other valid scientific theories? And maybe they would also fundamentally shake the ruling political systems in the world. -Is that perhaps why Greater Ararat is inaccessible for research today? Because the Ahora gorge is a prohibited zone for any climbing and photography. The approaches are mined, and the place is secured by military fortifications.
Three major religious holidays this year happened at the same time. Those who think that the reconciliation of religion and science would be a way for humanity to successfully face climate change, the fair distribution of resources and the adaptation of society to technological changes are not rare.
In a rare occurrence, which occurs only every thirty-three years, the three major holidays of the monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – happened at the same time this year. Last Friday and this Friday, Christians of the western and eastern churches commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus, and on Sunday they celebrate Easter, marking their faith in his resurrection. Also, on the previous Friday, the Jews celebrated the eve of Passover, commemorating the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and the end of their slavery. That same weekend, Muslims around the world marked another Friday, their weekly holiday, as part of the month of Ramadan, which began on April 2 and ends on May 3. This rare merging of holidays is possible because unlike the Christian calendar, which is determined by the movement of the sun, the Islamic calendar is aligned with the moon and the lunar year. Twelve months in the solar year last 365, in the lunar year, on the other hand, only 354 days. Thus, the Islamic holiday cycle follows the Western calendar for three decades.
Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It is held with church services and traditional meals. The holiday is also an occasion for celebration in the commercial sector through the sale of Easter fashion products, Easter baskets and chocolate bunnies. Many Christians also practice Great Lent, which begins 40 days before Easter. The idea is that the renunciation for Lent reflects the sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth during his 40 days in the desert. Great Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, continues with the observance of Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, and Easter Sunday, the day of his alleged resurrection.
Ramadan is celebrated during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, fasting from dawn to sunset. It is a period in which Muslims seek forgiveness for sins committed, pray for spiritual guidance, and use the month to refocus on their faith through self-restraint and good deeds. Passover is an eight-day festival of the Jews, whose observance includes abstaining from leavened foods, observing days of rest, and retelling the stories of the exodus from Egypt. The Seder, the traditional Passover meal, is held on the first night of Passover. This year, Vaisakhi, the great holiday of another monotheistic religion – Sikhism, was held on the same days. On April 13, the Sikhs celebrated with this holiday the creation of the Khalsa Panth, an order of initiated Sikhs dedicated to the service of the One Creator and humanity, founded in 1699. Before that year, this date was celebrated as a harvest festival in the Punjab region, and many observe it not only as a religious, but also as a cultural holiday.
Tao of Psysics
Besides such an impressive conjunction of important religious holidays can serve as a big metaphor and an opportunity for noble and more than necessary calls for reason, brotherhood and understanding among all people and stopping conflicts and wars, imperial ones and religious ones, at the same time it can also be an occasion to shed more light on another great divide within contemporary society – that between religion and science.
After a long, centuries-old tradition of the sharpest conflicts in which, as a rule, science and scientists suffered, many believe that the time has come for these two, in many aspects, opposing views of reality to find points of contact or at least ways for peaceful coexistence. Those who think that such a historical reconciliation, no matter how much the term is overused, is the only way for humanity to successfully face the biggest challenges such as climate change, the fair distribution of resources and the adaptation of society to frenetic technological changes. One of the first steps in the 20th century in this direction was made by the American physicist of Austrian origin Frittjof Capra. During his travels in Asia, he noticed great similarities in the way the religious and philosophical schools of the East described reality, and the language used by modern physics for the same purpose. In the following years, he translated these insights into a book that has preserved its iconic status to this day. Capra published his Tao of Physics: Exploring the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism in 1975 in New York. The book became an instant hit, especially in artistic and intellectual circles, and over time has seen numerous reprints, and has been translated into 23 languages around the world.
In the atmosphere of awakening the interest of the Western public in the traditional philosophical, religious and artistic concepts of the East, The Tao of Physics, somewhat surprisingly, also met with a lot of positive reactions from the scientific community. Nevertheless, there were completely expected negative reactions from the ranks of scientists, who had absolutely no right to put their methodical scientific work on the same level with the discoveries made in the flash of religious revelation.
Thus Nobel Laureate Leon M. Lederman, a physicist and former director of Fermilab, criticized The Tao of Physics and several similar books that appeared at the same time, such as The God Particle, by Garry Zukava: “Although they begin with reasonable descriptions of quantum physics [the authors of these books] later they construct elaborate elaborations completely devoid of understanding how carefully theory and experiment are woven together and how much blood sweat and tears go into each painful advance.” Capra later summarized his motivations for writing the book: “Science does not need mysticism, and mysticism does not need science either.” But people need both.”
During his research, he recognized two basic principles in modern physics, which were also constant motifs of Eastern philosophies – the fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence of all phenomena and the essential dynamic nature of reality. Capra talked about the ideas from the book in 1972 with the famous physicist Werner Heisenberg in one of his interviews:
“I visited him several times in Munich and showed him the entire manuscript, chapter by chapter. He was very interested and open. He told me that he was aware of the parallels I wrote about from before. While working on quantum theory, he traveled to India and was the guest of Rabindranath Tagore with whom he discussed Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these conversations helped me a lot when working on my own theory, convincing him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were not so incredible. He discovered that, in essence, there was an entire culture based on very similar ideas. And Niels Bohr also had similar experiences during his trip to China.”
In the previous part, we emphasized that the world is full of mysteries that science cannot explain, so we bring you some more of them.
Cocaine in Egyptian mummies
We all know that Columbus came to America with his crew thinking that he had discovered India. He may not have found the western route he was looking for, but he certainly found all sorts of interesting things. Let’s say a bunch of plants and animals that Europeans have never seen. And while the natives happily discovered European diseases such as smallpox brought to them by sailors, Columbus smoked tobacco and chewed coca leaves. Thinking people, this is not so bad! Everything else is history. And that is the history we learn in school. Cocaine, just like the coca plant, originates from South America. Which was discovered in the 15th century. But in 1992, German scientists did a little research on Egyptian mummies and discovered traces of hashish, tobacco and cocaine. And that in hair, skin and bones. Okay, hashish comes from Asia and the bourgeois from Egypt could get their hands on it. But tobacco and cocaine are from the New World. Of whom not only the ancient Egyptians had not heard, but no one had heard of in this part of the planet for, say, 3,000 years. The discovery is as incredible as if we found out today that chocolate is, say, from Jupiter. So how is that possible? No one understands. However, there are several theories. Although it is unlikely that archaeologists would have a party with hashish and cocaine in the pyramid and then put drugs in the bones of the mummies.
Hebrew text in New Mexico
Imagine that you are an archaeologist from America, when a local from New Mexico tells you that there is something you should look at. You take a gun, put on a hat and then in the middle of nowhere near Albuquerque you find a 90 ton rock with some text on it. This is exactly what happened to Professor Frank Hibben in 1933. Okay, Native Americans are known to have lived in the area for a long time, so the inscriptions on the stone shouldn’t be strange, right? But Frank immediately realized that the writing was not in Native American. He was on hiber. More specifically, the ancient version of the Hebrew language. And the text was the 10 commandments of God. It is even more interesting that some Greek letters were also used, which means that the author mixed Greek and Hebrew. Which is again typical of ancient times. The stone was basaltic and the same as the surrounding soil, which means it was not brought from somewhere else. Okay. But maybe some Jew in his moments of leisure went to the middle of the desert and carved the 10 commandments of God in stone? A perfectly logical explanation. But geologists have recently investigated the entire site and concluded that the text is at least 500 years old and perhaps even 2,000 years old. Which, you understand, is completely impossible.
Roman statues in Mexico
Somewhere around the second grade of elementary school, almost everyone will realize that Rome and South America are not very close. Even if by Rome we understand all the conquered territories of the Roman Empire. They may have sent their legionnaires to Africa and Asia, but Latin America was not really in their plans. Because they didn’t even know it existed since everything west of Europe and Africa was just the deep blue sea and Neptune’s realm. But then what is a sculpture from Rome doing in an old temple in Mexico? So up to this head with a characteristic appearance for Rome and the second century. It was not clear to anyone how this was possible until 1982. When a group of underwater researchers discovered a pile of ceramic jars in the sea off Rio de Janeiro.
A strange coin in North America
In 1957, archaeologists dug in Maine in the North-East of America. They were looking for artifacts from the Native Americans who lived there. And they found one coin that wasn’t quite Native American. Viking already. But the Vikings lived on the other side of the ocean. In Europe. The coin was discovered to have been made during the reign of King Olaf Kyrra in Norway sometime in the 11th century. And it was found in America among 30,000 artifacts of ancient Indians. It is very likely that the Vikings were the first to reach America. Although there is no definitive evidence for that theory.
A strange language in New Mexico
That New Mexico again. It’s not at all strange that aliens landed there at Roswell. Well, you see, in the wastelands of America there is a tribe of Indians who speak a strange language. The language commonly called – Japanese! The Zuni tribe may not exactly speak literary Japanese, but the similarities between the two languages are frightening, linguists say. Here are some examples. Clan is called kwe in Zuni and kwai in Japanese. Clown is newe a na zuni niwaka. The priest is Shawani and the Zuni is Shiwani. And similar words are just the beginning. Even crazier is that their syntax is almost identical. Both languages thus put verbs at the end of sentences, which is not a very common thing. It is interesting that the Zuni language has nothing in common with other Native American languages from its environment.
Why is there more matter than antimatter?
According to our current understanding of physics, particles, matter and antimatter are equal but opposite. When they meet, they are supposed to destroy each other and after that destruction, nothing remains. Most of that destruction happened at the beginning of the universe. However, enough matter remained to form billions and billions of galaxies, stars, planets and everything else. Most explanations revolve around the meson, a short-lived subatomic particle made of one quark and one antiquark. B-mesons decay more slowly than anti B-mesons, which may have led to enough B-mesons surviving to go on to form all the matter of the universe. B-, D- and K-mesons can oscillate and become antiparticles and then particles again. Research shows that B-mesons probably assume the “normal” state more often, and this may be the reason why there are more ordinary particles than antiparticles.
Where is all the lithium?
In the beginning, temperatures in space were incredibly high, and isotopes of hydrogen, helium, and lithium were widely synthesized. Hydrogen and helium are still present in large quantities and make up almost the entire mass of the universe, while we can only find and see about a third of lithium-7. There are indeed many explanations for why this is so, including hypotheses involving hypothetical bosons known as axions, or hypotheses that claim lithium is trapped in the star’s crust and undetectable by our present-day telescopes and instruments. However, so far there is no main theory to explain the absence of lithium from space.
Why do we sleep?
We know that the human body regulates the biological clock (a 24-hour cycle that also occurs in the absence of light) that maintains sleep and wake cycles, but we don’t really know why. While we sleep, our body regenerates tissues or undertakes other maintenance activities, and we spend a third of our lives sleeping. Some organisms have no need for sleep at all, but why do we? There are several different theories regarding sleep, although none of them satisfactorily answers this question. One of the theories is that animals that can sleep have developed effective methods of hiding from predators, while others that have not developed these methods must remain alert and awake and their organism regenerates in other ways, not through sleep. However, although we do not know why we sleep, more and more research is being conducted on the importance of sleep and how sleep affects important elements in our body, such as brain plasticity.
How does gravity work?
We all know that the Moon’s gravity causes ocean currents, that the Earth’s gravity keeps us on the surface of the planet, and that the Sun’s gravity keeps the planets in their orbits, but how much do we really understand about gravity? That powerful force comes from matter, and therefore, a more massive object has a greater ability to attract other objects. However, while scientists understand much of how gravity works, they don’t quite understand why it exists in the first place. Why are atoms mostly empty space? Why is the force that binds atoms different from gravity? Is gravity actually a particle? These are questions that simply cannot be answered with our current understanding of physics.
Where is everyone?
The visible universe has a diameter of 92 billion light years and is filled with billions of galaxies, stars and planets, but the only evidence of life in all that unimaginable vastness is right here on Earth.
Statistically, the probability that we are the only living beings in the universe is actually very impossibly small, so why haven’t we discovered any life forms yet? This question is known as the Fermi Paradox, and it gives us several suggestions and explanations as to why we have not yet encountered extraterrestrial life; some more likely than others. We can probably argue for days about the possibility that we are missing the signals, or that the signals exist and we don’t understand them, or that “aliens” can’t or won’t contact us, or—an extremely unlikely possibility—that Earth is the only planet ever to support life.
What is dark matter made of?
Approximately 80 percent of the mass of the universe is dark matter. Dark matter is a rather unusual phenomenon, because it does not emit any light. Although it has been theorized for sixty years, there is no hard evidence that it exists. Most scientists believe that dark matter consists of loosely bound massive particles, which can be up to 100 times more massive than protons, but which our instruments for detecting baryonic matter (visible, normal dark matter) cannot detect. Our candidates for the composition of dark matter are axions, neutralins and photins.
How did life originate?
How did life originate, where did it come from? Those who believe in the primordial soup model believe that the early Earth was abundant with different elements and that over time they developed increasingly complex molecules that fueled the emergence of life. It could have taken place in the depths of the ocean, in clay or under the ice. Different models give varying degrees of importance to lightning and volcanoes in the swamp of life. Although DNA is the primary basis for current life on Earth, some scientists have suggested that RNA may have been the primary basis for the first forms of life. Furthermore, scientists wonder if nucleic acids once existed independently. Did life flourish only once, or is it possible that it arose and disappeared, and arose again? Some believe in the panspermia model, according to which microbial life came to Earth via meteorites and comets. If that is true, it again does not answer the question of how that life came into being.
Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in the 19th century was a favorite place of world archaeologists, because many valuable gold objects could be discovered in this area. Unfortunately, due to the high value of the items found, it was also a favorite of numerous robbers who emptied, stole and sold everything could be sold. The saddest thing of all is that most of the found and stolen things are never written down. When Howard Carter arrived in Egypt in 1891, he was convinced that an undiscovered and unrobbed tomb was hidden there, but no one agreed with him. Thanks to his persistence and dedication, but also to the financial resources of Lord Carnarvorn, who supported his work, in November 1922, the English archaeologist finally found what he was looking for. In the ruins of the Valley of the Kings, he discovered hidden steps that led to a 3,300-year-old tomb above which was written the name Tutankhamun. The sealed area consisted of four rooms, which the archaeological team began to explore.
On February 16, 1923, he finally stepped into the last room – the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, and what he found there changed the face of archeology forever. Since the Egyptians considered the pharaohs gods, after death they mummified their bodies and filled the tomb with gold, clothes, weapons, jewelry and other valuable items.
Carter and his colleagues found untold wealth in the tomb. He had a gold death mask on his face, which today is considered the most famous object found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Although there was an inscription above the sarcophagus: Death will overtake those who disturb the pharaoh’s sleep, at first no one paid attention to it. But considering that 12 people from this expedition died suddenly within six weeks of the opening of the tomb, stories about Tutankhamun’s curse began to spread. Two months after the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Lord Carnarvorne also died. The day after Lord’s death, his close friend George Gold came to investigate the matter. He entered the pharaoh’s tomb, a few hours later he developed a high fever and died.
By 1930, 22 people had died who participated in the opening of the tomb, which further spread the story of Tutankhamun’s curse.
So is there any truth behind this curse? Can a person really get sick from an ancient grave?
The European and American public, already affected by Egyptomania, was also gripped by the idea of the curse of the mummy. Newspapers sensationally published news about the death of members of the expedition and their relatives. Richard Bethell – Howard Carter’s assistant, Bethell’s father – Lord Westbury, A.C. Mace – Carter’s partner and Elizabeth Carnarvon are victims of Pharaoh’s revenge against journalists. Judging by the list of victims, native Egyptians were not affected by the curse. Carter, who was as popular for surviving the curse (at least until 1939, when he died) as for finding the mummy, hated the sensationalism created around the excavation. He was deeply disturbed by the public’s desire to hear so much about superstition. He even tried to convince people that pharaonic curses did not exist at all in Egyptian rites for the dead. Inscriptions on graves often contained protective formulas, messages to frighten enemies from this or that world, but usually contained good wishes for the buried.
But like all curses, the one about Tutankhamun’s tomb stuck in the public imagination. Eighty years after the opening of the tomb, the British Medical Journal published a scientific study on the curse of the mummy. Mark R. Nelson of Monash University in Australia, examined the survival rate of 44 Westerners who according to Carter’s records were in Egypt during the excavation and inspection of the tomb. It’s Nelson assumed that the curse as a physical entity had the power to harm only those who were physically present at the opening of the chamber or casket (thus excluding Lord Carnarvon’s dog). Nelson defined several specific dates for the exhibition: February 17, 1922 – the opening of the third door, February 3, 1926 – the opening of the sarcophagus, October 10, 1926 – the opening of the coffin and November 11, 1926 – the examination of the mummy. Of the 44 Westerners identified, 25 were present during the opening or examination. These 25 lived an average of 20.8 years after exposure, and those who were not exposed lived an average of 28.9 years after 1926. The average age at death for those who were exposed was 70, and for those who were not exposed for 75 years. Nelson determined through this research that there is no such thing as a curse.
Could exposure to poisonous pathogens in the tomb lead to the death of an already sick man?
Carter claimed that the grave was free of bacterial matter, but modern research shows that bacteria that attack the respiratory organs may be present in ancient tombs. Sarcophagi contain formaldehyde, hydrogen sulphide and ammonia gas – all substances that damage the lungs. Ancient meat, fruit and vegetables found in burial offerings, not to mention mummified human bodies, can attract dangerous molds such as Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus, while bat droppings can grow fungi. But regardless of the potential for unpleasant micro-organisms, experts believe that Lord Carnarvon’s death is not linked to the tomb. He died outside the research season, at a time of year when it is too hot to dig in Egypt. He could have been exposed to bacteria, fungus and mold for months before his death.
How did the screw get into the 300 million year old rock? Why did the builders of the pyramids in Mexico bring material from thousands of kilometers away in Brazil? The world is full of mysteries that scientists cannot yet explain, and here we present some of them.
Chinese mosaic lines
These unusual and beautiful lines were carved in China’s Gansu Sheng desert. Some sources indicate that they were created in 2004, but this has not been officially confirmed. They are located near the Mogao Caves, which are protected as a world heritage. The lines cover a large expanse, but despite the uneven and inaccessible terrain, they retain linear proportions.
A mysterious stone doll
A small human figure was discovered in Nampa (Idaho) during the drilling of a well and caused great interest to scientists in the last century. An indisputable work of human hands, it was found at a depth of 97 meters, which leads to the conclusion that it was created long before the arrival of man in this part of the world.
The first stone calendar
In the Sahara desert, in Egypt, there is the oldest “astronomically arranged stones” in the world: Nabta. More than a thousand years before Stonehenge was created, people arranged stones here in a circle, on the shore of a lake that has long since dried up. More than 6,000 years ago, three-meter-high stones were dragged from a distance of one kilometer. Although the desert in the western part of Egypt is completely dry, this was not the case in the past. There is convincing evidence that there have been several wet periods in the past, the last being 130,000-70,000 years ago. At that time, there was a savanna here, where numerous animal species lived, such as buffalo and large giraffes, various types of antelopes and gazelles.
A 300 million year old iron screw
In the summer of 1998, Russian scientists, who were searching for meteorite remains 300,000 kilometers southwest of Moscow, found a part of the rock, which contained an iron screw. Geologists estimate that the stone is 300-320 million years old. At that time, not only were there no intelligent life forms on Earth, there were no dinosaurs either. The screw, on which the head and groove are clearly recognizable, is about one centimeter long and about three millimeters in diameter.
Sliding stones
Even NASA cannot explain this phenomenon. It is about the stones that slide on the dried lake bed in the American National Park “Death Valley”. Lake Racetrack extends over an area of 4 km from north to south and 2 km from east to west and is covered with mud. Stones, sometimes weighing hundreds of kilograms, slide over the sediments, leaving behind grooves, but no one has yet had the opportunity to see when this happened.
The power of the pyramids
The walls of the pyramids of the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan are made of the mineral micaschist, although the nearest quarry is thousands of kilometers away in Brazil. Today, this stone is used in technology and energy production, so the question arises as to why the builders went to such lengths to incorporate this material into the walls of their city.
Dog suicides
Overten Bridge, near Milton (Scotland), built in 1859, became famous because of a series of unsolved cases of “suicides” of dogs, who jumped from it into the abyss. The incidents were first recorded in the 50s and 60s of the last century, when it was observed that dogs – usually breeds with elongated muzzles, such as collies – suddenly jump from a bridge 15 meters into an abyss.
A petrified giant
A fossilized Irish giant from 1895, about four meters tall, was discovered in Antrim (Ireland), during blasting in a mine. Interestingly, he has six fingers and toes.
Pyramid from Atlantis
Scientists are still investigating the remains of megaliths found in the so-called the Yucatan Channel, in the waters of Cuba. American archaeologists, who discovered the site, immediately announced that they had found Atlantis.
Giants in Nevada
A Native American legend about 3.6-meter tall red-haired giants who lived in this area before the Indians settled it was confirmed when in 1911 the mummified remains of a giant human jaw were discovered in a cave. In 1931, two skeletons were found in the bed of the lake, one of which was 2.8 and the other 3.5 meters high.
A mysterious wedge
In 1974, an aluminum wedge was discovered under the 20,000-year-old remains of a mastodon on the banks of the Morish River in Transylvania, not far from the town of Ajuda. It was covered with a layer of oxide one millimeter thick, which indicates that it is 300-400 years old. Aluminum is usually found mixed with other metals, but this was pure aluminum. The three-hundred-year-old artifact is a mystery because aluminum was not discovered until 1808.
Loladof’s plate
It is about a 12,000-year-old stone vessel, which Polish professor Sergej Loladof discovered in Nepal. It seems that Egypt is not the only place visited by aliens in ancient times. On the plate is a clearly visible plate in the shape of a UFO, and there is also a being that looks remarkably like “little gray”.
This ruler belonged to a long line of Greek Macedonians whose ancestor is Ptolemy I, one of the most trusted lieutenants of Alexander the Great. The Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt from 323 BC. to 30 B.C. and most of its rulers remained faithful to Greek culture. In fact, Cleopatra was known as one of the first members of this dynasty to speak the Egyptian language. Although she came from the Ptolemaic family, which cultivated incestuous marriages, she did not have certain physical defects. On the contrary, in addition to her physical beauty, she was also gifted with a very good intellect when it comes to diplomacy and head of state. It is interesting that although she was staying in Rome, during the murder of Julius Caesar, the government did not prosecute her.
Cleopatra, along with Mark Antony, took her own life in 30 BC. after Octavian’s forces exiled them to Alexandria. While Antony is believed to have stabbed himself in the stomach, Cleopatra’s method is less well known. Legend has it that she died after letting a poisonous snake bite her hand, but the ancient chronicler Plutarch claims that what really happened is unknown. He says that Cleopatra is known to have hidden poison in her combs, and the historian Strabo states that she probably applied a deadly cream. With this in mind, many scientists suspect that she used a needle dipped in some kind of poison.
A tunnel discovered under an Egyptian temple
Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist from the University of Santo Domingo, has been searching for Cleopatra’s lost tomb for almost 20 years. Now she believes she has made a crucial breakthrough. Martinez and her team discovered a 1,305-meter tunnel, located 13 meters underground, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced recently, and architectural design experts called the discovery an engineering marvel. “The excavation revealed a huge religious center with three sanctuaries, a sacred lake, more than 1,500 objects, busts, statues, gold objects, a huge collection of coins depicting Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and Ptolemy,” Martinez told CNN. .
“The most interesting discovery is the complex of tunnels that lead to the Mediterranean Sea and submerged structures that have not yet been explored,” she added.
Exploring these underwater structures will be the next phase of her search for the lost tomb of the Egyptian queen – a journey that began for her in 2005.
“I admire Cleopatra as a historical figure. She was a victim of Roman propaganda, with the aim of spoiling her image,” Martinez said.
“She was an educated woman, probably the first to be formally taught at the Museum in Alexandria, the cultural center of her time,” says Martinez, who noted that she admired Cleopatra as a student, but also as a person who spoke several languages, was a philosopher and a mother. .
When her partner, the Roman general Mark Antony, died in her arms in 30 BC, Cleopatra took her own life soon after by allowing herself to be bitten by a snake, according to popular belief. That moment has been immortalized in art and literature – but, more than two millennia later, little is known about where their remains actually are.
A series of clues led Martinez to believe that Cleopatra’s tomb could be located in the Temple of Osiris in the ruined city of Taposiris Magna, in northern Egypt, where the Nile River empties into the Mediterranean Sea. As he explains, Cleopatra in her time was considered the human incarnation of the goddess Isis, as Antony was considered the embodiment of the god Oris, Isis’s husband.
I will discover hope from dreams
Martinez therefore believes that Cleopatra may have decided to bury her husband in the temple in order to keep everything in line with this myth. Of all the 20 temples around Alexandria she has studied, she says no other site, structure or temple has such a perfect combination of conditions for this – as the temple of Taposiris Magna. In 2004, Martinez presented her theory to Zahia Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist who was then Egypt’s minister of antiquities. Her project was approved a year later. And after years of searching, Martinez feels he’s getting closer to his dream discovery. Excavations so far have revealed that the temple was dedicated to Isis – which Martinez believes is another sign that the lost tomb is nearby.
According to a statement from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the Egyptian coast has been affected by earthquakes for centuries, causing parts of Taposiris Magna to collapse and sink under the waves. Although “it’s too early to know where these tunnels lead,” Martinez believes that if they lead to Cleopatra, it will be the most important discovery of the century.
Often when we fall in love we cannot explain our choice, this does not mean that there is no explanation for it, but that we should dig deeper. Every man and every woman has an inner opposite, said the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in Caseville, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant minister. During his high school education, he first wanted to study archaeology, then philology, and finally opted for medicine. After completing his medical studies in Basel, he decided to specialize in psychiatry. After he received his doctorate and became an assistant professor at the University of Zurich, he married Emma Rauschenbach, with whom he had five children and who was his collaborator for the rest of his life.
The year 1907 represents a turning point in Jung’s life. That year he met Sigmund Freud in Vienna. On that occasion, they talked for a full 13 hours. The admiration was mutual. Jung said that Freud was the first significant man he met. However, in 1912 there was a divergence due to conflicts on the theoretical and personal level. After that, Jung founded his own, analytical or complex psychology, in order to point out the difference in relation to psychoanalysis.
When Jung tells us about male-female relationships, he says that a man has a female part, and a woman has a male part – this is a hidden code by which we unconsciously search for our partner.. Here is his precise quote: “Each man carries within himself the eternal image of a woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a particular female image. This image is the imprint or “archetype” of the experience of all female ancestors, the repository, so to speak, of all the impressions that women have ever acquired.”
Carl Gustav Jung called the female part in a man “anima”, and the male part in a woman – “animus”. From this it follows that in the human soul there is that “other half” that all people want so much to find in the outside world. And this also means that each person carries in his soul the image of the partner with whom he will be happy and whom he will love.
That is why love with another person happens suddenly, and she cannot explain the reason for her choice. After all, the picture in our soul is vague and defies any logic, analysis or explanation. And love happened because the outer woman matched some part of the image of his inner woman. And there lies the main unsolvable problem: no external woman will ever fully correspond to this internal image, but it can only be some features and character traits that associate us with the woman from the internal image.
Although there are those similarities, the rest of that person can be completely unacceptable to a man and this is one of the main reasons why we say we fall in love with the wrong people. This is the reason for constant quarrels and conflicts between lovers and futile attempts to change partners. Every person unconsciously wants to change his partner because of that vague image of an ideal partner that he carries in his soul. But no one has ever succeeded in this. However, the attempts do not stop, and each new one brings additional disappointment. Below are additional quotes from Jung that are mutually related to male-female relationships:
I can’t love anyone if I hate myself. This is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are distinguished by their special morality, because they radiate an atmosphere of self-inflicted torture. It is not a virtue but a vice.
The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
Where love reigns, there is no will to power: and where power prevails, love is lacking. One is the shadow of the other.
Without love, nothing is possible…because love makes a person willing to risk everything.
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks beyond his heart-dreams. Who looks inside the heart – wake up.
Any way you shake it, the meter is an extremely important unit of measurement. It is one of the seven base units used in the International System of Units, commonly known as the metric system. Almost every country on Earth uses a meter to measure distance. And before the Americans, Liberians or Myanmar (the only three countries in the world that still officially use the Imperial system) shout: We don’t use the meter! We use our feet! We would ask them to consider this: The US government officially defines a foot as 0.3048… meters. That’s right, even if you don’t want to, the meter is how we define length and distance almost everywhere on Earth. But where did the meter come from? Who decided how long a meter is? How do we know something is exactly one meter? Well, the story of this simple measurement is long, incredibly overcomplicated – and absolutely fascinating.
40 rods to a pig’s head
Let’s go back to the beginning, to before the meter even existed. That was in the days when measurements were more of an art than a science. When a foot was… the length of one’s foot. Whose leg exactly? No one can say. When an inch was the length of your thumb, or the king’s thumb, or even three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end, lengthwise. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that these measurements are not very precise. To make matters worse, the measurements varied greatly from region to region. Maybe you use an inch of barley, but they use a thumb-inch, or maybe they don’t use inches at all, but something else entirely. According to one author, a quarter of a million different measurements were used at one time in France alone. Hey, those were the old days – what else could you expect? But then the old days became the not-so-old days, and science became more and more complex. People began to realize that these inconsistent and highly imprecise measurements made scientists’ jobs difficult. They began to call for a universal measure. One measurement to rule them all. This is the beginning of the metro’s life, but it took centuries to get to where it is today.
Very close…
So we had the idea of coming up with a single, universal measurement of distance, but how did we decide what it should be? Well, one of the first ideas came from the English architect Christopher Wren in the late 1600s. He proposed that the new universal measure should be the length of the second pendulum. Basically, if you make a pendulum that takes exactly one second to swing completely in one direction, the length of that pendulum will be one meter. Sounds like a pretty good idea, right? After all, this would mean that everyone on Earth could build their own seconds pendulum and know exactly how long meter long. Perfect! No more grains of barley! Well, not quite. Unfortunately, the pendulum per second varies depending on where you are you find in the world – not very much, but enough that it cannot be a universal measure.
The metric system is a tool of the devil
A bunch of other ideas were thrown around, but no one made much headway. Then something happened – and that something was called the French Revolution. France ushered in what it hoped would be a new age of science and knowledge. As such, the French Academy of Sciences has decided that it is high time to settle this whole thing with universal measures once and for all. After years of talks, they finally appointed a commission to actually do it. This commission was headed by a man named Jean-Charles de Borda. If there’s one thing this guy likes, it’s decimalization. That is, he liked things that could be divided evenly, and we can partly thank him that there are 1,000 grams in a kilogram, 1,000 meters in a kilometer, etc. Now, if Borda had his way, we would have 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute. and 400 degrees in a circle—not all of his ideas stuck—but his committee eventually decided to define a meter: It should be exactly one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.
Dunkirk to Barcelona
Now that that was decided, all we had to do was measure the distance from the North Pole to the equator, do some quick calculations, and above all change – oh, we have a universal measure. Simple, right? It is not OK. In the late 18th century, measuring such a great distance was no easy feat. In the end, a plan was made. Instead of measuring the end, the researchers would simply measure the distance from Dunkirk, France to Barcelona, Spain. These two cities were located on the same longitude, so if you knew exactly how far apart they were, you could calculate the distance from the equator to the North Pole.
Grueling Work
Two astronomers, Pierre Machen and Jean-Baptiste Delambre, were hired to make the measurements. Mechain started down to Barcelona, and Delambre to Dunkirk, and they went about their business. But unfortunately, exploring so many kilometers was still an extremely daunting task. Plus, the aforementioned French Revolution ensured chaos reigned in the countryside. It’s not exactly the easiest environment to do tedious and precise calculations.
Holy meter
The time has come to make a meter. Using Mechain and Delambre’s measurements, mathematicians were able to calculate the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Then they divided that by ten million and we ended up with. Meter. Universal measure. With the magic number finally found, the Academy of Sciences had a physical object, a rod made of platinum, made to that exact dimension. Since then, that bar, known as the meter des Archives, has been the literal yardstick for one meter. First of all, the number that Mechain and Delambre came up with? That’s wrong. There were small errors in the calculations, which threw everything off. These errors would haunt Mechain for the rest of his life, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and died while in the field, trying to correct the calculations. Now the number was not far off: it was shorter than a real meter by only two tenths of a millimeter. But remember, the whole point of this was to make a meter that was exactly one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Why go through all that work just to get it wrong? Well, maybe you skipped all the measurements and just made a meter of some arbitrary length and called it a meter.
In fact, it was more than a century before we invented the ideal solution: the laser. The laser allowed scientists to measure the distance light particles travel, and since the speed of light is constant, we finally had a perfect way to define a meter. A way that will never change and could be repeated all over the world. That is why the definition of a meter used today is the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1 / 299 792 458 seconds. It may sound complicated, but it’s something that will never change. Sure, it doesn’t have the same kitschy appeal of barley grains, but oh well. You can’t have everything.
During the entire history of the world, death occupied many scientists who were looking for a solution to prevent it. We present to you one scientist from the present and one from the past who have a positive attitude towards the given problem.
The first one we are talking about is Nikola Tesla, who by all accounts stood out from other scientists because his attitude towards spirituality had its own specificities, but also a peculiarity when he approached metaphysics. He was of the view that the mental component associated with the spirituality of the human being enables progress. This is what set him apart from Einstein who denied the mental component. Studying the mechanisms of his psychic life, Tesla discovered that a series of images from the “other reality” are always related to events in the “real reality” and that there is a fairly regular correlation.
He managed to come to the realization that his every thought was caused by some external impression.
Tesla tells us:
“Not only thoughts, but also actions are caused in the same way. After some time, it was perfectly obvious to me that I was only an automaton endowed with the ability to move, responding to the stimuli of the sensitive organs and thoughts and acting accordingly. The practical result of this knowledge was, many years later, the discovery of teleautomatic control, the laws of which I finally became aware, although I had previously carried them within me in the form of vague and unfinished ideas.”
Tesla continues and says that “death does not exist, and with this knowledge, the fear of it also disappears. And remember: not a single human that existed died. They turned into light and as such continue to exist. The secret is that those light particles return to their original state. Returning to one of the previous energies. Christ and others knew that secret. I was searching for how to preserve human energy. It is one of the forms of light. In the Soul, it is sometimes equal to the supreme light of heaven . I didn’t search for it for myself, but for the good of everyone. I believe that my discovery will make people’s lives easier and more bearable and direct them to spirituality and morality.“
Today, there are scientists who share a sketchy opinion with Tesla, such as Robert Lanza, an assistant professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. One of the principles of quantum physics is that certain events cannot be overlooked with one hundred percent certainty. On the contrary, there are a number of possible events, each of which has a different probability of occurrence. According to the so-called “many-worlds” interpretation, each of these events actually represents one universe, that is, a world. Such a point of view is also supported by the new scientific theory of biocentrism, introduced by Lanza himself, according to which there is an infinite number of parallel worlds. Everything that could ever happen takes place in one of those worlds. For example, if we had four possible choices when choosing a college, although we think we chose only one, all four scenarios actually took place, but each in one of the parallel worlds.
All these worlds exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in them, but death does not exist in any of these scenarios. Lanza concludes that although our bodies are doomed to self-destruction, that subjective feeling of living “who am I?” it’s just 20 watts of energy emanating from the brain. Given that one of the most certain scientific laws is that energy is never lost, it cannot be destroyed or created, it means that the energy of the feeling of living does not leave with death either “Everything we see and experience right now is actually a whirlwind of information produced in our brain, and time and space are just the means by which we unite all that information within the same framework,” Lanza points out. It means that we actually live in a timeless and spaceless world, and in such a world death does not exist.
Even Albert Einstein admitted that his old friend “departed this strange world a little before me. It doesn’t mean anything. People like us… realize that the difference between past, present and future is actually just a stubbornly persistent illusion”.
The universe is constantly surprising us, always destroying what we think we know in every aspect of the endless abyss that surrounds us. Carl Sagan described it best: Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. Whenever we go looking for proof of a certain concept or idea, something completely unrelated to what we thought we understood is turned upside down. The universe will naturally contain some of the strangest coincidences and phenomena you’ve ever seen, from unicorn-shaped galaxies and Mickey Mouse-shaped craters on Mercury to nebulae and shooting stars. Here we will look at 6 of the strangest phenomena in the universe!
A 186-year-old tornado on Jupiter
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a high-pressure storm on the giant planet Jupiter that is said to be as bad as Earth’s worst hurricanes. It’s so big you could fit three of our Earths in it. In 1979 Voyager 1 took amazing photos of this phenomenon. With these and other photographs of Jupiter, they have allowed scientists to see different colors in the clouds around the Great Red Spot, suggesting that the clouds rotate counterclockwise around the spot at different altitudes. Big red spot has been observed from Earth for about 400 years as large enough to be seen by ground-based telescopes. In 1665, Giovanni Domenico Cassini is said to have been the first to officially observe this miracle. Obviously this is quite difficult to confirm, but one thing is for sure, this dwindling power plant is dying, getting smaller and smaller over time. Nevertheless, it is still one of the strangest spectacles in the universe.
The largest reservoir of water in space
The largest and most distant reservoir of water in space ever discovered was found in 2011. The water is equal to 140 trillion times the water in Earth’s oceans. Water surrounds a quasar containing a giant black hole called APM 08279+5255 – 20 billion times the size of the Sun and more than 12 billion light-years away. The quasar is powered by a supermassive black hole that slowly engulfs the surrounding gas-filled disk or dust, producing huge amounts of energy. The energy production of this quasar is equal to one thousand trillion suns. All the water vapor in the Milky Way is 400 times less than in this quayar. Water vapor surrounds the black hole in a gaseous circle that reaches hundreds of light years, a light year is about six trillion miles. Although the gas is -53 degrees C and 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere, it is five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what is typical in galaxies like the Milky Way. Measurements of steam and other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest that there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its mass, but who knows what will happen to it until then.
A supermassive black hole defies science
The largest black hole in the universe was discovered in 2015, J0100+2802 inside the largest quasar, with the highest brightness of any known quasar. J0100+2802 is puzzling astronomers because, with a mass of 12 billion suns and a luminosity of 420 trillion suns, it is 7 times brighter than the previous brightest quasar. It was formed only 900 million years after the Big Bang and should not be anywhere near the size it is for its age. This black hole is located 12.8 billion years away from Earth. Xiaohui Fan, author of the study that discovered this phenomenon, summed up its impressiveness perfectly: “How could a quasar so bright and a black hole so massive form so early in the history of the universe, in an era shortly after the earliest stars and galaxies had just appeared? ” The significance of this finding cannot be understated as it has forced astronomers to rethink their understanding of quasars and their formation.
Diamond planet
55 Cancri e, discovered in 2004, is a planet in the Milky Way that is at least one-third diamond. 55 Cancri e is known as a super-Earth, with a radius twice that of Earth and a mass eight times greater. It orbits its host star, 55 Cancri which is found about 40 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cancer, in just 18 hours, remember it takes Earth 365 days to orbit our Sun.
A big cloud of raspberry flavored rum
Sagittarius B2, a giant molecular cloud of gas and dust found about 390 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, contains massive amounts of ethyl formate. Ethyl formate, a chemical compound, is responsible for giving this behemoth its raspberry and rum scent. Sagittarius B2 has a mass that is 3 million times that of the Sun and spans an area of about 150 light years. Temperatures in the cloud range from 27 degrees C to -233.2 degrees C. Don’t get too excited as there are plenty of other chemical compounds, including propyl cyanide. This alcoholic wonder contains billions of liters of alcohol. The composition of Sagittarius B2 was studied in Spain by astronomers using the IRAM radio telescope. The cloud actually contains enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400 trillion trillion beers. To consume that much, every person on earth would have to drink 300,000 pints every day for a billion years.
A planet of burning ice
Gliese 436 b is a planet about the size of Neptune and was first discovered in 2004. It was found about 30 million light years from Earth and is about 20 times larger. It orbits only 6.9 million kilometers from its star and lasts 2 days and 15.5 hours, while the Earth orbits about 150 million kilometers from the Sun. Gliese 436 b has a minimum surface temperature of 245 degrees C. The water that exists on the planet, known as ice-X, is held together by enormous gravitational forces despite the extreme temperatures. The substance, of course, is not ordinary ice, its compressed water is similar to the way diamonds form from carbon. These forces prevent water molecules from evaporating and escaping the planet, instead becoming tightly packed deep inside.
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