My Science School

The 1967 article “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells” in the Journal of Theoretical Biology by Lynn Margulis (then Lynn Sagan) is widely regarded as stimulating renewed interest in the long-dormant endosymbiont hypothesis of organelle origins.

In 1966, as a young faculty member at Boston University, Margulis wrote a theoretical paper titled "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells". The paper, however, was "rejected by about fifteen scientific journals," she recalled. It was finally accepted by Journal of Theoretical Biology and is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. Weathering constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis was famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time. The descent of mitochondria from bacteria and of chloroplasts from cyanobacteria was experimentally demonstrated in 1978 by Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff. This formed the first experimental evidence for the symbiogenesis theory. The endosymbiosis theory of organogenesis became widely accepted in the early 1980s, after the genetic material of mitochondria and chloroplasts had been found to be significantly different from that of the symbiont's nuclear DNA.

 

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Helium is used as a cooling medium for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and the superconducting magnets in MRI scanners and NMR spectrometers. It is also used to keep satellite instruments cool and was used to cool the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that powered the Apollo space vehicles.

Because of its low density helium is often used to fill decorative balloons, weather balloons and airships. Hydrogen was once used to fill balloons but it is dangerously reactive.

Because it is very unreactive, helium is used to provide an inert protective atmosphere for making fibre optics and semiconductors, and for arc welding. Helium is also used to detect leaks, such as in car air-conditioning systems, and because it diffuses quickly it is used to inflate car airbags after impact.

A mixture of 80% helium and 20% oxygen is used as an artificial atmosphere for deep-sea divers and others working under pressurised conditions.

Helium-neon gas lasers are used to scan barcodes in supermarket checkouts. A new use for helium is a helium-ion microscope that gives better image resolution than a scanning electron microscope.

After hydrogen, helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. It is present in all stars. It was, and is still being, formed from alpha-particle decay of radioactive elements in the Earth. Some of the helium formed escapes into the atmosphere, which contains about 5 parts per million by volume. This is a dynamic balance, with the low-density helium continually escaping to outer space.

It is uneconomical to extract helium from the air. The major source is natural gas, which can contain up to 7% helium.

 

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Alpha-Tocopherol is the orally bioavailable alpha form of the naturally-occurring fat-soluble vitamin E, with potent antioxidant and cytoprotective activities. Upon administration, alpha-tocopherol neutralizes free radicals, thereby protecting tissues and organs from oxidative damage. Alpha-tocopherol gets incorporated into biological membranes, prevents protein oxidation and inhibits lipid peroxidation, thereby maintaining cell membrane integrity and protecting the cell against damage. In addition, alpha-tocopherol inhibits the activity of protein kinase C (PKC) and PKC-mediated pathways. Alpha-tocopherol also modulates the expression of various genes, plays a key role in neurological function, inhibits platelet aggregation and enhances vasodilation. Compared with other forms of tocopherol, alpha-tocopherol is the most biologically active form and is the form that is preferentially absorbed and retained in the body.

Vitamin E is a supplement used to prevent or treat a lack of vitamin E in the body. A low body level of vitamin E is rare. Most people who eat a normal diet do not need extra vitamin E. However, vitamin E supplements are used in premature newborns and in people who have problems absorbing enough vitamin E from their diets. Vitamin E is important in protecting your body's cells from damage. It is known as an antioxidant.

Vitamin E is available under the following different brand names: Aquasol E, alpha-tocopherol, and tocopherol.

 

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One of the many beautiful things about our planet is the changing seasons. At a period of time in the year, the Sun shines bright upon us making us rush to the nearest ice cream cart, at some other time we just want to stay at home tucked under layers of blankets.

As you experience the different seasons each year, have you wondered what causes them?

 A little tilt

Many believe that Earth’s seasons are caused due to Earth’s orbit around the Sun. because of its lopsided orbit (not a perfect circle), there are times when the Earth is closer to the Sun than other times. However, this is not the main reason. Earth has different seasons because of its tilted axis. Earth’s axis is an imaginary pole going right through the centre of Earth from top to bottom. Earth spins around this pole each day making different parts of the planet experience day and night. It is because of this tilted axis that Earth experiences different seasons.

Throughout the year, Earth’s tilted axis always points in the same direction. That’s why, as it orbits the Sun, different parts of the planet get the Sun’s direct rays. Sometimes the North Pole is tilted towards the Sun, giving us summer in the northern hemisphere, and sometimes the South pole tilts towards the Sun, giving us winter in the northern hemisphere.

But what caused the tilt?

Millions of years ago, when Earth was younger, it was hit hard by a big thing. That big thing is today known as the planet Theia. Theia carshed onto Earth and blasted a big hole on the surface of the planet. This sent huge amounts of dust and rubble out into space, which many scientists believe eventually turned into our moon. This major blow by Theia caused Earth’s axis to tilt, thereby giving us our seasons, and may be even our moon.

 

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Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish, including bony fish (Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha). According to FishBase, 33,400 species of fish had been described as of October 2016, with approximately 250 new species described each year.

The study of fish dates from the Upper Paleolithic Revolution (with the advent of "high culture"). The science of ichthyology was developed in several interconnecting epochs, each with various significant advancements.

The study of fish receives its origins from humans' desire to feed, clothe, and equip themselves with useful implements. According to Michael Barton, a prominent ichthyologist and professor at Centre College, "the earliest ichthyologists were hunters and gatherers who had learned how to obtain the most useful fish, where to obtain them in abundance and at what times they might be the most available". Early cultures manifested these insights in abstract and identifiable artistic expressions.

 

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Horology is the study of the measurement of time. Clocks, watches, clockwork, sundials, hourglasses, clepsydras, timers, time recorders, marine chronometers, and atomic clocks are all examples of instruments used to measure time. In current usage, horology refers mainly to the study of mechanical time-keeping devices, while chronometry more broadly includes electronic devices that have largely supplanted mechanical clocks for the best accuracy and precision in time-keeping.

People interested in horology are called horologists. That term is used both by people who deal professionally with timekeeping apparatus (watchmakers, clockmakers), as well as aficionados and scholars of horology. Horology and horologists have numerous organizations, both professional associations and more scholarly societies. The largest horological membership organisation globally is the NAWCC, the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, which is USA based, but also has local chapters elsewhere.

There are many horology museums and several specialized libraries devoted to the subject. One example is the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which is also the source of the Prime Meridian (longitude 0° 0' 0"), and the home of the first marine timekeepers accurate enough to determine longitude (made by John Harrison). Other horological museums in the London area include the Clockmakers' Museum, which re-opened at the Science Museum in October 2015, the horological collections at the British Museum, the Science Museum (London), and the Wallace Collection.

 

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Cartography or mapmaking is the study and practice of making maps. Map making involves the application of both scientific and artistic elements, combining graphic talents and specialised knowledge of compilation and design principles with available techniques for product generation. Maps function as visualization tools for spatial data. Spatial data is stored in a database and extracted for a variety of purposes. The traditional analog methods of map making have been replaced by digital systems capable of producing dynamic interactive maps that can be manipulated digitally.



Modern Cartography like many other fields of "information technology" has undergone rapid changes in the last decade. Rather than merely drawing maps the cartographic process is concerned with data manipulation, data capture, image processing and visual display. Cartographic representations may appear in printed form or as dynamic images generated on a computer display screen. Computer assisted mapping systems have added a new and exciting dimension to cartographic techniques and traditional methodologies have to be augmented with new skills. The fundamental nature of cartography has changed with the evolving technologies, providing cartographers with new methods for visualization and communication of spatial information.

 

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Mycology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of fungi, including their genetic and biochemical properties, their taxonomy and their use to humans as a source for tinder, traditional medicine, food, and entheogens, as well as their dangers, such as toxicity or infection.

Fungi are fundamental for life on earth in their roles as symbionts, e.g. in the form of mycorrhizae, insect symbionts, and lichens. Many fungi are able to break down complex organic biomolecules such as lignin, the more durable component of wood, and pollutants such as xenobiotics, petroleum, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. By decomposing these molecules, fungi play a critical role in the global carbon cycle.

Fungi and other organisms traditionally recognized as fungi, such as oomycetes and myxomycetes (slime molds), often are economically and socially important, as some cause diseases of animals (such as histoplasmosis) as well as plants (such as Dutch elm disease and rice blast).[citation needed]

Apart from pathogenic fungi, many fungal species are very important in controlling the plant diseases caused by different pathogens. For example, species of the filamentous fungal genus Trichoderma considered as one of the most important biological control agents as an alternative to chemical based products for effective crop diseases management.

Field meetings to find interesting species of fungi are known as 'forays', after the first such meeting organized by the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club in 1868 and entitled "A foray among the funguses".

Some fungi can cause disease in humans and other animals - The study of pathogenic fungi that infect animals is referred to as medical mycology.

 

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On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source code of World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis, making it free software. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days (the rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer).

Tim moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open web standards. He remains the Director of W3C to this day.

New permutations of these ideas are giving rise to exciting new approaches in fields as diverse as information (Open Data), politics (Open Government), scientific research (Open Access), education, and culture (Free Culture). But to date we have only scratched the surface of how these principles could change society and politics for the better.

In 2009, Sir Tim co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation with Rosemary Leith. The Web Foundation is fighting for the web we want: a web that is safe, empowering and for everyone.

 

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One of water’s important properties is that it is composed of polar molecules. The two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom within water molecules (H2O) form polar covalent bonds. While there is no net charge to a water molecule, the polarity of water creates a slightly positive charge on hydrogen and a slightly negative charge on oxygen, contributing to water’s properties of attraction. Water’s charges are generated because oxygen is more electronegative, or electron loving, than hydrogen. Thus, it is more likely that a shared electron would be found near the oxygen nucleus than the hydrogen nucleus. Since water is a nonlinear, or bent, molecule, the difference in electronegativities between the oxygen and hydrogen atoms generates the partial negative charge near the oxygen and partial positive charges near both hydrogens.

Water is not attracted to everything. Because water molecules are polar, they are more attracted to molecules that are also polar or that have a charge (like an ion). Some kinds of molecules, like oils and fats, are nonpolar. These nonpolar molecules have no charge, and so water is not very attracted to them. 

Molecules of nonpolar compounds, such as oil and gasoline, even when mixed well into water, tend to separate from the water when the mixing stops. Water molecules tend to hold on to each other and squeeze out nonpolar oil and gasoline. Because of density differences between water and oil, this means that they form two separate liquid layers. For example, in oil-based salad dressings, the oil and water components separate into two layers and require mixing before being used. 

 

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Palynology, scientific discipline concerned with the study of plant pollen, spores, and certain microscopic planktonic organisms, in both living and fossil form. 

The term is commonly used to refer to a subset of the discipline, which is defined as "the study of microscopic objects of macromolecular organic composition (i.e., compounds of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen), not capable of dissolution in hydrochloric or hydrofluoric acids". It is the science that studies contemporary and fossil palynomorphs, including pollen, spores, orbicules, dinocysts, acritarchs, chitinozoans and scolecodonts, together with particulate organic matter (POM) and kerogen found in sedimentary rocks and sediments. Palynology does not include diatoms, foraminiferans or other organisms with siliceous or calcareous exoskeletons.

Palynology as an interdisciplinary science stands at the intersection of earth science (geology or geological science) and biological science (biology), particularly plant science (botany). Stratigraphical palynology, a branch of micropalaeontology and paleobotany, studies fossil palynomorphs from the Precambrian to the Holocene.

 

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Our Sun is surrounded by a jacket of gases called an atmosphere. The corona is the outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere.

The corona is usually hidden by the bright light of the Sun's surface. That makes it difficult to see without using special instruments. However, the corona can be seen during a total solar eclipse.

The corona reaches extremely high temperatures. However, the corona is very dim. Why? The corona is about 10 million times less dense than the Sun’s surface. This low density makes the corona much less bright than the surface of the Sun.

The corona’s high temperatures are a bit of a mystery. Imagine that you’re sitting next to a campfire. It’s nice and warm. But when you walk away from the fire, you feel cooler. This is the opposite of what seems to happen on the Sun.

Astronomers have been trying to solve this mystery for a long time. The corona is in the outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere—far from its surface. Yet the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the Sun’s surface.

A NASA mission called IRIS may have provided one possible answer. The mission discovered packets of very hot material called "heat bombs" that travel from the Sun into the corona. In the corona, the heat bombs explode and release their energy as heat. But astronomers think that this is only one of many ways in which the corona is heated.

 

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Well, that my friend is the natural convection fan also known as roof ventilator.

Natural convection is the phenomenon of heat transfer by which a movement of fluid (convection) is caused entirely by fluid itself without forcing it to do so by external means. So let us try to understand what happens in a factory without proper roof ventilation.

Industrial activity generates a lot of heat and as the hot air being less dense will rise up due to buoyancy. It loses its heat to the roof and then falls down. This cycle continues and the process is called as Rayleigh Benard convection. You can observe this in the before part of the image that follows. Even though the hot air loses its heat to the roof, there will be no effective ventilation provided as the heat loss is partial which causes the temperature of the room to increase. Another characteristic feature of Natural convection is that the velocity of flow is very less.

The hot air which is near the roof will find itself a way to escape to the atmosphere by rotating the rotor which is located in the ventilator. The breeze outside also has an effect in rotation of the rotor. This causes a reduction in pressure in that region and causes more air to escape through the ventilator leading to an increase in ventilation of the building.

 

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You need three things for a fire, right? Fuel, oxygen, heat. So if hydrogen is flammable, and oxygen is in there, why doesn’t water burn when it gets hot?

The answer is somewhat counter-intuitive: water is already burnt.

Burning something is the process chemists, physicists and engineers (heck, even biologists…) call oxidation. Oxygen is a hungry little atom and just wants to react with and bind to everything. When this happens slowly it might be called rust:

But it’s the same thing underlying it all: oxygen is binding with everything and oxidising it.

So what’s this got to do with water? Water is what we call completely oxidised hydrogen. Burnt hydrogen. When you burn hydrogen it produces heat and water vapour.

So water can’t burn anymore because it’s already as burnt as it can get. Strange but true.

 

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Iron mining in Western Australia produced 826 million tons of iron ore in 2018, which will convert to roughly several hundred million tons of iron metal. (Note that ratio of ore to metal.) The scale of Australian extraction of iron ore is quite impressive. Those piles in the first picture? That’s iron ore, a mountain of it.

Iron ores are easily accessible, easily converted to iron metal, and can be found in vast quantities. Iron ore is so plentiful that Australia makes a profit selling the ore at $100 to $170 (Australian dollars) per ton. That’s pennies per pound of iron ore, never mind the cost per troy ounce.

Aluminum is also produced in huge quantities, with tens of millions of tons of metal made per year. Aluminum is found in a number of rich deposits of bauxite (available by the tens of billions of tons around the world) that converts from 2 tons of bauxite to 1 ton of aluminum metal.

But gold?

Gold’s yield from rock is measured in ounces per ton of ore. Gold mines may have to extract up to 100 tons of rock to get an ounce of gold.

If those 826 million tons of Australian iron ore were gold-bearing rock instead then you might get as little as 230 tons of gold from them. (Current global gold production is about 3,100 tons per year.)

Further, gold deposits are not as common as iron ores or aluminum ores.

That’s why gold isn’t going to be treated as an inexpensive metal like iron or aluminum. It just isn’t as common or easily found. Iron and aluminum actually make up a significant percentage of Earth’s mass; gold does not.

Gold is subject to some odd consumer demand that drives up its price unnecessarily at times, but one reason for its high cost is that it’s hard to extract and isn’t nearly as common as iron or aluminum.

 

Credit : Quora

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