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Totally Awesome Tidbits

Now that's old...

6/28/2022

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California's regal coastal redwoods were around before Julius Caesar ruled Rome!
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Time...

5/22/2022

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Time is just a coordinate.            POW!
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The Sun Is Not On Fire.

4/5/2022

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​The sun is not on fire. There is no oxygen in space and fire—or combustion--requires oxygen. The sun does not burn, it fuses. The sun’s glow is from nuclear fusion taking place at its core. Every second the sun converts 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium. And those flares that look like flames shooting off the surface of the sun? They are powerful bursts of radiation created by solar quakes and eruptions. All that violent action makes a lot of sound waves. All that heat makes the sound waves move super fast. The waves smash into one another vibrating the sun like a guitar string. The sun is 100 times louder than a rock concert. It’s a good thing sound can’t travel through space, or we wouldn’t be able to hear anything else. What? What did you say? I can’t hear you over the noisy sun! 
NASA video of solar flares:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8csg9YSMkk
 
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Checkmate

10/3/2021

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​I love playing chess. I’m not very good at it, but the game never bores me. I think I found a clue as to why. There are many more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe. That’s a lot of games. Mathematicians have a value for the number of possible games (of course we do). It’s called the Shannon Number—somewhere between 10 to the 111th and 10 to the 123rd (which is a notably humongous range.) There are 10 to the 81st atoms in the observable universe—but then again, if you took away all the space between the atoms, they would fit inside an apple…so there’s that.
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The Blue Whale

10/1/2021

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​All animals are awesome, of course. But if we are rating by size nothing beats the Blue Whale. They grow as long as three school busses parked end to end and weigh as much as a four-bedroom house. (And sadly, as much as the trash left on the moon.) Their heart alone weighs more than my Toyota Prius and their arteries are so big we could swim in them. Hardly a tidbit, but totally awesome for sure.
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Footprints in the Sand--23,000 Years Ago?

9/24/2021

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​Young children jump and twirl and play. An adult puts the baby they are carrying down for a moment. We can see their prints in the sand. This happens every day at the beach, right? Well apparently, it also happened 23,000 years ago in White Sands, New Mexico. The accepted theory was that humans didn’t make their way to the Americas until around 13,000 years ago—certainly no earlier than 16,000 years ago. Scientists may have to rethink the how and the when of our arrival. How do we know how old the footprints are? By grass seeds found in the same layers as the footprints. All living things absorb carbon while they are alive and once they die the carbon-14 decays at a measurable rate. The footprints themselves were never alive, of course. But the seeds were…and they’re talking.

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Big numbers...BIG!

9/16/2021

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I am reading this fascinating book by Bob Berman called Zoom. In it he has some mind-boggling facts. Ten snowflakes—just ten—contain as many molecules as there are grains of sand on the entire earth. Can you imagine how many are in this picture???
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4.76 Billion Miles....

9/16/2021

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The Hubble telescope is so powerful it can detect the light from a single match on Pluto.
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