The energy in that single neutrino was staggering beyond staggering: It contained 1000 trillion times as much energy as a photon of visible light. If that neutrino had hit someone they would have felt it. A blow from a single subatomic particle.
Tag: science
Asperitas
that’s some rad-looking clouds
As the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, saw these submissions trickle in, he realized his group had collectively stumbled onto something interesting: A new type of cloud. This formation wasn’t listed in the International Cloud Atlas, published by the World Meteorological Organization since 1896. So Pretor-Pinney devised a name for this cloud — “Asperitas”, derived from “a passage in Virgil describing a roughened sea”. He’s been working for years to get it accepted into the next edition of the Atlas.
Tabletop Cosmology
Huge supercolliders aren’t the only way to search for new physical phenomena. A new generation of experiments that can fit on a tabletop are probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy and searching for evidence of extra dimensions.
Medieval Fonts
Medieval script tells time, although usually not very precisely. Take for example the 3 major script families from the medieval period: Caroline minuscule, Pregothic script, and Littera textualis or Gothic script.
Despite the fact that these 3 families are relatively easy to distinguish and identify, they were used for extensive periods of time: Caroline from c. 800 to c. 1050, Pregothic from c. 1050 to c. 1250, and Gothic from c. 1250 to c. 1500. In other words, merely identifying the family of handwriting is not enough to pinpoint when precisely a book was made.
Do psychedelics make you weird?
the explanation that weird people gravitate toward psychedelics, even in the sciences, is a strong one. But it’s sufficient that I am hesitant to repeat the common view that psychedelics are not at all dangerous, or that they have no permanent side effects. There seems to me at least a moderate chance that they will make you more interesting without your consent – whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on exactly how interesting you want to be.
Multiprotein genes
individual genes can create many different versions of the molecular machinery that powers the cell.
Desert irrigation
A series of canals brought the water, trapped underground, to the areas where it was needed; anything left was stored in surface reservoirs. To help keep it moving, chimneys were excavated above the canals in the shape of corkscrewing funnels. These funnels let wind into the canals, which forced the water through the system.
Ching Shih
Though the name under which we now know her, Ching Shih, simply means “Cheng’s widow,” the legacy she left behind far exceeded that of her husband’s. Following his death, she succeeded him and commanded over 1800 pirate ships, and an estimated 80k men. In comparison, the famed Blackbeard commanded 4 ships and 300 pirates within the same century. As a result, Ching Shih is known as one of the most successful pirates in known history.
100B Galaxies
Just by taking this observation and applying some high school math, we have discovered that the Universe has something like a 100B galaxies in it. And each of those galaxies has billions of stars. There are something like a sextillion stars in the Universe. And it’s reasonable to think that most of those stars have planets, perhaps multiple planets. How many are Earth-like? How many have life?
Life over 9 orders of magnitude
The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the 10^-19m scale of quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 10^26m away. In these 45 orders of magnitude, life is confined to just 9 orders of magnitude, in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure 10^-6m and the height of the largest trees reaches 100m. The honey fungus is 4km across. Known sentient life is 3 orders of magnitude.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 