I’ve Been Thunderstruck

Most people would assume that a pound of gold is heavier…after all, it’s a metal, and feathers are inherently light. The trick here, though, is that the system for measuing weight is different for the two objects. Gold is measured using troy pounds, while feathers are measured using avoirdupois pounds. A troy pound has 12 ounces; avoirdupois pounds have 16 ounces. A troy pound contains 372 grams in the metric system; an avoirdupois pound contains 454 grams. Each troy ounce is heavier than an avoirdupois ounce. Thus, a pound of feathers weighs more than a pound of gold!

[Source : The Handy Science Answer Book]

The eye’s retina is part of the brain, and the retina’s cells are derived from brain tissue. Retinal cells and the cells that connect them to the brain are the least amenable to being manipulated outside the body. That is why we cannot currently do eye transplants.

[Source : The Handy Science Answer Book]

The stomach holds a little under two quarts (1.9 liters) of semi-digested food that stays in the stomach three to five hours. The stomach slowly releases food to the rest of the digestive tract. Fifteen hours or more after the first bite started down the alimentary canal, the final residue of the food is passed along to the rectum and is excreted through the anus as feces.

[Source : The Handy Science Answer Book]

In tribute to the Large Hadron Collider, we learn today that absolute zero is the theoretical temperature at which all substances have zero thermal energy. Absolute zero is equivalent to 0 degrees Kelvin, -459.67 degrees F, or -273.15 degrees C.

Originally conceived as the temperature at which an ideal gas at constant pressure would contract to zero volume, absolute zero is of great significance in thermodynamics and is used as the fixed point for absolute temperature scales.

The Large Hadron Collider supercools the magnets it uses to 1.9 degrees K. That’s pretty darn cold!

[Source : Wikipedia and The Handy Science Answer Book]

I found this image to be pretty amazing…I bet you do too!

Ever wonder what a square foot, or a yard equals in "sensible units?" As in things that really matter? Well, head over to sensibleunits.com and you can find out things like:

• 1 Square Foot Equals
• 2.1 CDs
• 1.3 Large Pizzas
• 1.2 Tennis Racquet Heads
• 1 Yard Equals
• 7.6 CDs Side By Side
• 18 AA Batteries End to End
• 4.2 Average Soccer Ball Diameters
• 1 Centimeter Equals
• 1.0 Stacked CD Cases
• 29 Human Female Fingernail Thicknesses
• 1.3 Dry Basmati Rice Grains End to End

The possibilities are endless…give it a shot!

Ever wonder what really defines a meter? Or a second? Or a twip? From Charlie Emrich in the September 2007 issue of Wired comes this list of standards.

• Meter
• Standardized in 1983
• Measures length
• Defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792/458 second
• Second
• Standardized in 1967
• Measures time
• Defined by the time it takes for a cesium-133 atom to cycle 9,192,631,770 times between two specific quantum states
• Ampere
• Standardized in 1948
• Measures electrical current
• Defined by the current required to create a force of 2×10E-7 newtons per meter between two parallel wires
• Kelvin
• Standardized in 1954
• Measures temperature
• Defined by 1/273.16 the temperature of the triple point of water - when it’s simultaneously gas, liquid and solid
• Mole
• Standardized in 1971
• Measure amount of stuff
• Defined by the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon 12 (6.022×10E23)
• Candela
• Standardized in 1979
• Measures brightness
• Defined by the intensity of a 1/683-watt yellow-green light spread over a square meter, seen from a meter away

Now for some more interesting, obscure units of measure.

• Gou
• 180 milliliters - better known as a rice cup for an electric cooker
• Pack Year
• cigarette consumption based on one pack a day for a year
• Nibble
• typically four bit of binary code, or half a byte
• Score
• 20 of something
• Hand
• 4 inches of horse height
• Twip
• 1/20 of a typesetting point
• Thrave
• 24 sheaves of wheat
• Shake
• 10 nanoseconds
• Mickey
• ratio of computer mouse movement to onscreen cursor movement
• Jansky
• strength of radio signals from space
• Butt
• two hogsheads, or about 126 gallons, of booze
• Smoot
• a measure of length developed by some MIT students, equal to 5′ 7" - the height of one Oliver R Smoot

There was an interesting little article in the December 2006 issue of Wired about Fiction vs Fact for several things you’ve heard of before. Check out these excerpts from the article by Aria Pearson:

Fiction: If you fall into quicksand you’ll be sucked under and die.

Fact: You’ll only sink up to your waist.

Fiction: Sitting too close to the TV will ruin your eyes.

Fact: It causes fatigue but no permanent damage.

Fiction: Benjamin Franklin’s kite was struck by lightning.

Fact: The kite picked up electricity from the air, causing an arc between Franklin’s hand and a key tied to his end of the string.

Fiction: A penny dropped from the top of a skyscraper can kill someone.

Fact: It could never pick up enough velocity to kill, just to bang you up a little.

Fiction: Swimming after you eat will cause cramps and lead to drowning.

Fact: These is a very slight risk of cramps, but only for vigorous swimmers.

Fiction: There’s a dark side of the moon.

Fact: The entire lunar surface receives sunlight during the moon’s monthly orbit around Earth.

Fiction: Swallowed chewing gum takes seven years to digest.

Fact: Gum is not digested. It passes through the gastrointestinal system, usually within 24 hours.

Technorati Tags: science debunked,fallacies,fictions,gum,quicksand

The 2008 Summer Olympics in China are a big deal…no doubt about that. The Chinese have gone done a huge amount of work in preparing for what’s often considered the greatest sports gathering on the planet. New venues have been built, the city is being cleaned up for its guests, and athletes all around the world are tuning up for their moment in the sun. And the Chinese hope that it will be sunny, but if not they have a plan…

The Chinese are going to control the weather.

According to this article published recently at TechnologyReview.com, the city’s branch of the national Weather Modification Office has prepared a three-staged plan for helping guide Mother Nature in the right direction.

First, Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will track the region’s weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city’s weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird’s Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won’t fall until those clouds have passed over.

Given that August is typically part of the rainy season in Beijing, with daily chances of rain exceeding 50%, the Chinese government would seem to have its work cut out for it. Doubters of this sort of science might point to our own inability to control the weather, but these facts may indicate the Chinese have a jump on the rest of the world:

The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country’s north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People’s Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain–an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China’s second largest, four times over. Furthermore, while Qian’s weather engineers in Beijing have been testing their capabilities for the past two years, the Chinese say that during the past five years, similar efforts have already helped produce good weather at national events like the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai, and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.

Most eyes in the world will be on the athletes competing in China in August. But, for a few scientists and other meteorologists across the world, their eyes will be in the sky…and they hope to not see any rain.

It seems that Boston Dynamics, "an engineering company that specializes in robotics and human simulation," has created the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth, called "BigDog." Here is the video that can be found on YouTube:

Quite honestly, this thing is amazing. I have never seen a robot move with the precision, and "normalcy" that this one does. It walks exactly like a dog. The freakiest moment of the video, though was when it was slipping on the ice, and trying to recover it’s footing. At that moment, it looked more like a real animal than a noisy robot. I think these guys have their finger on the pulse of the future, and we’ll be seeing quite a few of their creations on the battlefield, as the project was funded in part by DARPA.