Category: Natural History

The Fallacy of Moss Always Growing Upon the North Side of Trees

1 Comment

Moss does not only grow on the north side of trees, as it is commonly believed by many. Moss typically grows on the north side but this rule only applies in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, moss mostly grows on the south side of trees. The reason for this inversion is that in the northern hemisphere, because of the tilt of the Earth on its axis, the sun almost always appears to be a little south of directly overhead. That’s why rooms with windows facing south are brighter than rooms with windows facing north. This is important for moss because the north sides of trees within the northern hemisphere are shadier and therefore wetter. The south sides of trees get more sunlight, so water evaporates faster there

Civilizations Mastery of Metal By Manipulating Fire

Leave a comment

The more carbon rich a fuel is, the more heat it produces. Typical wood fires burn at 700 degrees Celsius, however 6000 years ago, ancient people discovered the adaptation of burning wood in a low oxygen environment, only partially burning, but in doing so creating a much purer carbon rich fuel; charcoal. Charcoal can burn at temperatures upwards of 1100 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt ore out of rock. The mastering of metal produced tools, finance, and weaponry, forever changing the evolutionary story of human beings. By the Middle Ages, the production of charcoal for metal smelting and metal work was a major industry

 

The Discovery of the Route Which Allowed Explorers to First Climb Mount Everest

Leave a comment

British born George Mallory, the person tasked with heading the team who first set out to climb Mount Everest in 1921, overlooked what is now used as the doorway to Mount Everest, the entry point of East Rongbuk Glacier. When Mallory first viewed this entry point, a narrow cliff within the mountainside wall, he dismissed it as too modest and small to warrant further investigation. Canadian Oliver Wheeler however was educated in the science of topography and geography from his father who surveyed the Canadian west coast Rocky Mountains and because of this, he did not view the dimensions of the cut to be as important as the pulse of water pouring out of that cut every afternoon. This enormous volume of expelled water signaled to Wheeler that a glacier had to be present at the head of the valley as it was the only possible explanation which fit. On July 30, 1921, Wheeler set out for the East Rongbuk Glacier and as he anticipated, he was able to make it up the ice field within 6 short days. As the East Rongbuk Glacier widened and curved around, it came directly to the base of the North Col, a sharp edged pass carved by glaciers in the ridge connecting Mount Everest and Changtse (pronounced “chang-see”). This opening became the key to unlocking Mount Everest and is still leveraged by climbers into the modern day. 6 days after setting out, on August 4, 1921, Wheeler sent a dak runner, which is essentially a Tibetan messenger, with a sketched map indicating his discovered exploit of the armor of Mount Everest for Mallory

The Reason the True Age of the Universe Can Be Definitively Proven

Leave a comment

This discovery of the speed of light provided a satisfactory explanation as to why the world becomes dark at night. This is immensely important as the further a star is from an observer, the longer it will take for light to arrive from that point, to the observer themself. If the universe was infinite in its age, all of the light ever created would have had time to reach the Earth which would cause the night sky to be ablaze with starlight, photons emitted from every single possible part of the universe. This clearly is not the case so it is abundantly evident that the universe must have had an origin point. Scientists use the term “observable universe” as it’s entirely possible and likely that matter exists outside of what can be observed predicated upon the theory that as the universe expanded, light from this matter would have to travel increasingly larger distances to reach an observer. Because of constant expansion, this light has not yet had the chance to reach the Earth and perhaps never will, causing it to be outside of an observers field of vision and therefore unable to be proven in its existence using current methods and technologies

 

The Cosmic Web

Leave a comment

The Cosmic Web is a scientific approximation of what the universe may look like at the largest scales, with massive clusters of galaxies linked together through vast filaments, with each containing trillions of stars. It would take light nearly 10,000,000,000 (10 billion) years to cross the distance of the Cosmic Web image

 

The Ability of Quantum Theory to Explain the Existence of All Matter

Leave a comment

The theory of quantum mechanics is the most accurate and powerful description of the natural world which scientists have at their disposal. Quantum fluctuations are written into the stars as modern day theories explain that as the universe sprang from a vacuum, it expanded very rapidly, which means that the rules of the quantum world, should have contributed to the large scale structure of the entire universe. The universe is shaped by quantum reality, essentially the quantum world inflated many, many times in that nothingness has shaped everything, with this concept now being definitively proven as fact. Quantum physics provides a natural mechanism through quantum fluctuations to see into the early universe with small irregularities that would later grow to create galaxies. The idea that a cluster of gas and dust like the Milky Way Galaxy, a collection of billions of stars, could begin life simply because of small quantum fluctuations, is absolutely mind boggling, as these tiny fluctuations within the vacuum of space were only present upon a submicroscopic scale, yet had the ability to grow into some of the largest objects in the universe. This is possible because the Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter but as the universe cooled down, matter and anti-matter annihilated almost perfectly, but not quite, as every 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) annihilations will lead to 1 particle of matter being left behind and this is what has built the matter of the physical world, everything from stars to the Earth to the smallest life forms and inanimate objects. Everything within the universe which is physical to the touch is simply debris of an enormous collision between matter and anti-matter at the beginning of time

The Usage of 5D Crystals as a Means of Computational Storage

Leave a comment

Quartz is being used to create the most powerful data storage device ever developed, the 5D Superman Memory Crystal, a technology which could store data for up to 13,800,000,000 (13.8 billion) years, the calculated age of the universe. The 5D quartz crystal is a method of ensuring a large density of data can be saved within a relatively small object. This is an incredibly secure and long lasting method of saving data as the information is physically encoded into the crystal itself, remaining indefinitely until the quartz itself is destroyed, a very difficult task in and of itself. In 2018, technology entrepreneur Nova Spivack used a 5D crystal to create a permanent space library, sending it to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket. Quartz is highly stable because it is a crystal, remaining unchanged for billions of years meaning if data is inserted, theoretically it could survive for billions of years. For a quartz crystal approximately 2.5 centimeters by 2.5 centimeters in diameter and 5 millimeters thick, 30 terabytes of data can be held, which is 30,000 gigabytes or 800 Blu-ray discs or 600 smartphones worth of information. This means that the entire British library could be fit into 1000 5D crystal slides, a small enough volume to fit within a single shoebox. A traditional storage medium like a compact disc, stores data in individual pixels, with 1 pixel able to hold the equivalent of 1 bit or 8 bytes of information. In a quartz drive however, each voxel can hold 8 bits or 64 bytes of information. The technology required to achieve this feat however is still in its infancy with scientists still discovering new ways to refine manufacturing, the writing and reading of data, and storage capabilities

The Invention of Star Luminosity Mapping to Measure Immense Distances in Space

Leave a comment

Henrietta Leavitt, a brilliant scientist who worked at the Harvard Observatory discovered the true size of the universe because of her ability to objectively measure the true brightness of stars. Leavitt became enamored and fascinated by a type of star referred to as a “cepheid variable” which means a “star which pulses within the night sky”. Leavitt’s revolutionary breakthrough occurred when she realized that the intensity of brightness is precisely linked to how quick or slow at which the star blinks. If 2 points of light blink at the same rate but with different intensities, it would stand to reason that the brighter star is closer to the observer than the dimmer one. This allowed Leavitts to measure the distance to stars which lay far beyond the reaches of parallax distance

The Projected Impact of Trees Upon Climate Change

1 Comment

Throughout history, it is estimated that human beings have cut down 2,000,000,000,000 (2 trillion) – 2,500,000,000,000 (2.5 trillion) trees. This means that even if human beings plant 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) trees within the coming decade(s), this would only replace 40% – 50% of what has been taken from nature. Drones are now being used to plant trees, capable of planting 120 trees per minute per drone at 10% of the traditional cost to do so. If humanity were to plant 20,000,000,000 (20 billion) trees per year for 50 years, which is a sustainable rate, this still only equates to 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) trees which once again would only replace 40% – 50% of that which has been taken. It would take 9000 drones operating 200 days per year to accomplish this feat. Drone production for this project would not require drones more complicated than a modern day smartphone. Trees, plants, grasses etc. are essentially crystallized air, and are more than 95% formed by air. This means that the mass of a tree is equitable to the mass of oxygen which it has been crystallized from, effectively adhering to the Law of the Conservation of Mass, the First Law of thermodynamics. The average tree weighs 2 tonnes with 50% of this weight being carbon, which means that 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) trees is directly equitable to 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) tonnes of carbon. The land requirement to produce such an ambitious project would take half the land mass of Brazil, with larger trees actually requiring less land, paradoxically

Timbuktu, Mali and its Cultural and Commercial Traditions

Leave a comment

Timbuktu, Mali is located at the precise point where the Niger River flows northward into the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, which is an incredibly difficult place to reach and is why it is often used in the English language as a representative of a far away place. In Timbuktu, men keep their faces veiled while in the presence of women at all times, not even lowering their veils to eat, instead taking in food from underneath the veil. Women predominantly make familial decisions and hold the position of power within society. Timbuktu is made up of various ethnic tribes including the Kel Tamasheq, Songaï (pronounced “sore-eye”) (sometimes spelled as “Songhai”) and Arabs primarily. Timbuktu was founded by the Tuareg people however their numbers are vastly outweighed by the 3 main tribes of Timbuktu during the modern era. Despite once being a trading hub of both of salt and gold, Timbuktu now primarily trades in salt as the price of gold has made gold inaccessible for the average inhabitant. Timbuktu is slowly being buried in the sands of the Sahara Desert as these sands blow in and slowly but surely bury Timbuktu’s structures a little bit at a time. Fortunately, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization has been helping to preserve the city of Timbuktu and its buildings from the elements of sand, wind, and rain which have eroded its structures made from natural materials, mainly adobe and mud brick