Things about science and nature you find interesting
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that the moon can be used to fuel our planets energy use for 10000 years because it has been exposed to helium3 through millions of years. and about 40 litres of helium3 can fuel our energy use for a year.
i am amazed by how huge the universe is.
recently, i was also wandering where you would appear if you was consumed by a black hole.
i am amazed by how huge the universe is.
recently, i was also wandering where you would appear if you was consumed by a black hole.
Yes but as I said to the other fellow, that success doesn't actually mean much when we are trying to explain how it got there. Look at the examples of bees I gave. You know what north is. You know what a mile is. So if I told you to head 5 miles north you would know where to go. But only because you have been to a school/otherwise had education on this. Bees don't have that. They do a little dance which tells other bees the exact direction and distance of good flowers. How do the bees know this 'language'? Has it evolved? If so how? The queen isn't involved in this dance, and the drones all die without reproducing?Assassinator said:
This is where you are going wrong. This is the exact opposite of the theory of natural selection. Species don't evolve, families do. Only the strongest lion, the fastest cheetah, the smartest hyena, live to pass on their characteristics to the next generations of lions, cheetahs, and hyenas. The result is an improved gene pool in the next generation, which in turn means only the fastest gazelle, strongest water buffalo, and smartest babbons survive to leave pass on their traits. Because the prey has improved, only the strongest lion, the fastest cheetah, the smartest hyena...........Assassinator said:
......and on it goes. That is the theory of natural selection. The entire species doesn't move forward because of the good genes of one lion. Only that lions family will, and in so doing it will ensure the death of other lions (its rivals). This is why male lions, when they take a new pride, will slaughter all the infants.
Phototropism, the Citric Acid Cycle, photosynthesis, plant physiology, and biofuel synthesis are what made me want to be a botanist.
Good question, I couldn't answer it. Why don't you contact an entomologist ;-) They're the insect experts, doubt you'll find them here. In any case, when I read the wikipedia article about the 'waggle dance', I stumble upon this PloS ONE article [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0002365]. It seems that bees can actually learn. How big that part is, I don't know. But then again, I'm not a bee expert. Maybe you can get some better answers from these guys [http://www.benhs.org.uk/], or some of these folks [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apiology] (well most of those are dead XD).cuddly_tomato said:
PS: Drones are the shaggers, they hump the queen. Workers are the one's who are infertile.
Hmmm, yes, I should remember that "species" isn't a term wich exists in nature, it's something we made up to classify animals. It's about gene pools, things like 'species' and 'genus' are just man-made terms. Anyway, your last 2 sentences almost answer your question about the effectiveness from hive species: it's not about the genes of 1 individual, it's about the family. Hive species like ants and bees take that to the extreme. FOR THE HOOORDE, so to speak (we're still on a gaming website
).
Ha! I was just thinking about this today as I drove through the mountains with the roof off in the gorgeous weather. Mountains in general are incredibly interesting to me. They're just so huge and the little rivers and creeks in them are constantly changing them. I'm not exactly a science guy, but put me on a mountain, and I'll turn into one.
You should check http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8nYTJf62sE&feature=related out. That's one of the things that interest me; Big Bang, Origin of Life, Evolution. But what really amazes me is the Human Brain, something that does the most for us in our life, yet we hardly know about it.VTSK said:
I think that the whole messages in water thing is pretty crazy....also certain things in quantum physics like string theory (what little bit I understand)....stuff like this sends my mind spinning
Most of the things that I find interesting about science are also horribly horribly terrifying to think about. Like in quantum physics. Scientists have found that at a quantum level, all things that we know to be constants in the universe, like gravity and time, and causality, all basically say "f*ck off" and dissapear. At the quantum level, particles can just randomly up and dissapear, like, just completely cease to exist. Now, by proxy, this means that there is an infinitely small but none zero chance that you can wake up tommorow and your keys will be missing...or, you know, your car, your house, your leg, your liver, your heart, your mom, your dad, your entire street, your entire town, your country. Hell, the whole damn world could cease to exist, just blink out, and it could happen at any time. Now you can take solace in that it is an infinitely small chance that any of that can happen.
But it is non-zero.
Then this all becomes even more terrifying when you consider the ways that your brain messes with you. Stuff like Change Blindness.
To put it simply, your brain is a lazy bastard. Actually, that's not really fair to say, truth is, if your brain actually tried to process everything in your field of vision, you'd go insane. So, it picks and chooses, and then the rest it just makes up. Fact of the matter is, if you were sitting here reading what I've just wrote and I were to go back and edit it, you'd probably notice, but only because you were sitting there when I did it and you actually saw the change take place. Now, if you were to get up, go answer the phone, and come back in a few minutes, then I'd be able to change every word of this and you'd probably never notice. Escapist could change the background to Hello Kitty instead of the Red Faction thing they have up now, and it wouldn't sink in. Experiments have been done on this that end up going out to the BSI extreme, things like having two people behind the counter at a student book store, one standing at the register, one hiding beneath the counter, students would ask for a form, guy would say hold on, duck down, other guy would pop up, and nobody would freakin' notice. They went as far as to have the switch be from a man to a woman, from white to black, and everything in between, and nobody noticed it. Derren Brown did this bit on his show Mind Control, where he'd have somebody ask a stranger for directions, then have a board move between them and replace the person with somebody different. Same results.
So while I've been typing this, a photo on your desk just dissapeared, of course you wouldn't notice it, because you didn't watch it happen. So your brain will just say that there never was a photo there and life will go on.
Then there's psychology. Just, some of the experiments and the results of them that end up saying that you are just an animal and that the only reason people don't just up and kill other people is the fear of reprisal. Which means that the only thing that's actually wrong with sociopaths isn't some lack of remorse, but this lack of fear. Seriously, the Milgram Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Good Samaritan Experiment. I could name tons more, but they all come out to be the same damned depressing thing.
But it is non-zero.
Then this all becomes even more terrifying when you consider the ways that your brain messes with you. Stuff like Change Blindness.
To put it simply, your brain is a lazy bastard. Actually, that's not really fair to say, truth is, if your brain actually tried to process everything in your field of vision, you'd go insane. So, it picks and chooses, and then the rest it just makes up. Fact of the matter is, if you were sitting here reading what I've just wrote and I were to go back and edit it, you'd probably notice, but only because you were sitting there when I did it and you actually saw the change take place. Now, if you were to get up, go answer the phone, and come back in a few minutes, then I'd be able to change every word of this and you'd probably never notice. Escapist could change the background to Hello Kitty instead of the Red Faction thing they have up now, and it wouldn't sink in. Experiments have been done on this that end up going out to the BSI extreme, things like having two people behind the counter at a student book store, one standing at the register, one hiding beneath the counter, students would ask for a form, guy would say hold on, duck down, other guy would pop up, and nobody would freakin' notice. They went as far as to have the switch be from a man to a woman, from white to black, and everything in between, and nobody noticed it. Derren Brown did this bit on his show Mind Control, where he'd have somebody ask a stranger for directions, then have a board move between them and replace the person with somebody different. Same results.
So while I've been typing this, a photo on your desk just dissapeared, of course you wouldn't notice it, because you didn't watch it happen. So your brain will just say that there never was a photo there and life will go on.
Then there's psychology. Just, some of the experiments and the results of them that end up saying that you are just an animal and that the only reason people don't just up and kill other people is the fear of reprisal. Which means that the only thing that's actually wrong with sociopaths isn't some lack of remorse, but this lack of fear. Seriously, the Milgram Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Good Samaritan Experiment. I could name tons more, but they all come out to be the same damned depressing thing.
We'll probably never know precisely; there are a number of plausible theories but most of them follow the same basic process: starting from amino acids*, in the presence of heat energy, by chance encounter some of them combine to form self-replicating molecules (of which DNA and some proteins are examples, albeit fairly complex ones). From that point on, natural selection takes over. The molecules are in competition to fill the limited space and capture simple molecules in order to build copies of themselves, so the faster-replicating ones thrive. Some molecules enter symbiotic relationships with other molecules, each exploiting the other in order to replicate even faster. Some molecules adapt to attack other molecules, break them up chemically into smaller molecules to use to build copies of themselves. In response, other molecules adapt to construct defensive barriers around themselves. A few hundred million years later, this process has finally produced what we recognise today as a single-celled organism. Then a similar process to that which acted at the molecular level, acts at the cellular level: some cells join together in mutually beneficial alliances, creating multi-celled organisms.VTSK said:
We're the product of an evolutionary arms race that's been fought continuously for billions of years. We are machines developed, by an autonomous, spontaneous process, to be the most efficient replicators of small collections of amino acids (genes) in a specific environment (gaseous oxygen, 1 atmosphere of pressure, 1 g of gravity) and in the presence of other, similar machines also being driven by the same process to be the most efficient replicators of small collections of amino acids. And all because the statement "anything that reproduces faster will reproduce faster" is true by definition. And I think that's the coolest thing ever.
* so where did amino acids come from? You might also ask where did water come from; where did oxygen come from; where did the planet come from; where did the universe come from? You're getting into chemistry, physics and philosophy which, while similarly awesome, are not the subject of this post. But in a universe that's 13 million millennia old and 800 billion trillion kilometres in diameter (= 2 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion cubic kilometres in volume) and who knows how many alternate universes, it's not unlikely that you'd find a clump of amino acids somewhere.
Also science doesn't disprove creationism. Nothing does. Nothing can. Ever. That's the whole problem with creationism.
And yeah, the brain. Another example of the complex emergent properties of simple systems. Those are what do it for me. How a blob of 100 billion neurons, taking 10,000 electrochemical impulses as input, performing some simple operation on that data to produce one electrochemical impulse as output, when interconnected in a certain way can produce sentient life. It boggles the mind. And it is the mind!
Black matter...
Can't be seen, can't be felt or tampered with, can't be contained by anything man made..
Still they're looking for it...That's fascinating..
Maybe they'll search for God next...
Can't be seen, can't be felt or tampered with, can't be contained by anything man made..
Still they're looking for it...That's fascinating..
Maybe they'll search for God next...
Well I don't think it's infinitely small, just very very very tiny indeed; I'm not sure there is such a thing as infinitely small; that would be zero. But essentially yes, you are right. If you look at it through the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, your leg just disappeared. But it occurred in only a tiny tiny fraction of the colossal number of worlds into which your world split at that moment, and you now find yourself in one of the majority of those worlds, where your leg is still attached. There was however a ridiculously tiny probability that you would find yourself in one of those ridiculously tiny minority of worlds where your leg disappeared. From your perspective, the only thing that categorically can't disappear is you, because you wouldn't be in the world where that had occurred and so would not be able to observe it having happened.Rocksa said:
