Tag: dark

The Condition of the Earth After the Chicxulub Asteroid Collision Which Caused the Extinction of Dinosaurs

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Immediately after the Chicxulub Asteroid collided with the Earth, heat from the fireball produced reached temperatures of 5500 degrees Celsius and produced a shockwave which broke the speed of sound, causing gale force winds equivalent to a hurricane. Everything within 965 kilometers was instantly decimated. Within 11 minutes of impact, the sky began to darken as debris which had been pushed up into the atmosphere started to settle back down. As these small spheres the size of a grain of sand descended back down to Earth, they heated up upon re-entry, identical to that of an asteroid, which provided the illusion of billions of simultaneous shooting stars. The energy produced during this re-entry barrage of heat was more intense than the sun for a brief period of time and made the sky glow red, as if it was comprised of liquid magma. This debris reflected heat back towards the Earth and effectively caused the Earth to act as an enormous radiator. To add to this damage, wildfires began sprouting up due to the intense temperature which caused heat and smoke to fill the atmosphere, compounding the damage already done. Strong winds helped perpetuate these fires and because so much of the Earth was affected, it only took a few hours to become globalized, engulfing the entire Earth in a mass fire which burned hotter than a regular fire due to the inability to dissipate heat sideways. In addition to this, gypsum which contains sulphur, blocked the sun and cooled the Earth over the long term. Gypsum had a seismic effect upon the world’s oceanic ecosystems as ocean acidification occurred due to sulphuric rain being produced by the gypsum within the atmosphere. The reflecting of the sun caused 75% of all plants to die as the Earth only received as much light during mid day as what is present during a cloudy, moonless night of the modern day

How Phosphorescence Works

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Glow in the dark products work because of a chemical additive which allows the product to absorb energy on one frequency, and reemit it as visible light which is a different frequency. Zinc sulphide and strontium aluminate are the most commonly used phosphors for photoluminescent products as they reemit energy over a considerably long period. When light is shone upon a glow in the dark object, incoming photons excite the phosphor molecules and these molecules then release that energy taken in by releasing photons and creating a dim light glow. Different phosphors release energy at different rates and thus, the slower a phosphor releases energy, the longer it will glow. The human eye is most sensitive to green light in the dark which is why night vision technology was traditionally created with a green tint

The Evolution of the Eye

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The eye has developed within the animal kingdom for one reason only; to detect the world around the observer. The first evolved eyes were simply an apparatus which had a light sensitive cell referred to as “rhodopsin”. Eventually as time progressed, eyes developed a spherical shape which allowed more light to be captured so that the difference between light and dark was more distinct. Following this, eyes evolved the ability to develop a pupil which acts as a biological aperture which can constrict and dilate letting either more or less light into the eye. This system works in theory but the real world application developed a problem in that when constricting the pupil to focus on an object being looked at, less light is let in which restricts vision. Nature eventually alleviated this issue by placing a lens behind the aperture of the pupil which allowed for precision detail, clarity, and focus. This system was so effective that evolution produced some form of it for nearly every animal and insect on Earth, some being more adept than others, but all using the same principal of light and focus to observe information around them