• Asafum@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    154
    ·
    6 days ago

    There are more hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system.

    :P

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    41
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    There’s 10⁹ living cells in a gram of surface soil, and in 20 km depth that reduces to 10⁶ cells per gram, but they’re still alive and actively metabolizing down there! eating rock, mmhm tasty rock oh yeah! :p

    they have cell turnover rates of hundreds of years though, so they age very slowly and multiply very slowly due to energy shortage.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      138
      ·
      6 days ago

      Sharks are older than fire.

      Sharks existed before there was enough O2 in the atmosphere to sustain a fire.

    • blueduck@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      6 days ago

      Also trees existed before bacteria did. So when a tree died it just fell over and sat there for a while. Never decomposing

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          34
          ·
          6 days ago

          The earliest trees evolved around 400 million years ago.

          Source

          The ancestors of bacteria were unicellular microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear on Earth, about 4 billion years ago.[23] For about 3 billion years, most organisms were microscopic, and bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms of life.

          Source

        • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          16
          ·
          edit-2
          6 days ago

          It’d be remarkably fortuitous if bacteria evolved to break down wood before wood existed.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        6 days ago

        that isnt true, there was no decomposing fungi, bacteria that evolved yet at the time of the carbiniferous peroid, and those “tree” were actually gigantic gametophytes(posessing half the chromosomes) of early bryophytes. the actual first tree dint evolve til after that peroid.

    • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      63
      ·
      6 days ago

      Australia is wider than the moon. If earth had the size of a football (soccer), the moon would be about 7m away. If the sun had a diameter of 1m, Neptune would be 5.6km away. In that scale model, the next star would be placed in the outer planets. Space is insanely big.

      • shrodes@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        edit-2
        6 days ago

        I’m confused what you mean by wider. As far as I can tell Australia is about 4000km wide and the moon’s circumference is about 11000km

        EDIT: it’s late and I am dumb, I take it you mean the moon’s diameter! 3474km

        • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          6 days ago

          I looked up the circumference of a football and it said about 70cm. As the moon is about 10 times the circumference of the earth away, that’d put the moon at 7m away.

            • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              6 days ago

              A 70cm diameter soccer ball (>2 ft across) would be kinda fun. Except headers the CTE would be even worse!

              • podian@piefed.social
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                6 days ago

                All Very true facts. I admit I was and am still taken aback by the measurement and extrapolation of linear distances using… circumference.

                • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  2 days ago

                  You could calculate it more accurately, of course. But the relationship between earth’s circumference and the distance to the moon is roughly 1:10, purely by coincidence, making it easy to calculate an estimate when scaling earth up or down.

                • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  6 days ago

                  Yeah it’s a weird way to make the distances sound shorter than pi*(a measurement we all can visualize).

      • LurkingLuddite@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        30
        ·
        6 days ago

        If you count Voyager, we already have.

        Otherwise … Yea, I’ll be surprised if society in general even makes it to 2100 unscathed.

        • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          6 days ago

          Voyager is fantastic, but it’s still way, way closer to the solar system than anything else.

          An excerpt from Wikipedia:

          At this rate, it would need about 17,565 years to travel a single light-year.[78] To compare, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, is about 4.2 light-years (2.65×105 AU) distant. If the spacecraft was traveling in the direction of that star, it would take 73,775 years to reach it. Voyager 1 is heading in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

          • LurkingLuddite@piefed.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            13
            ·
            6 days ago

            Yes, and they are still on a galactic orbit, not a solar orbit. They are, unquestionably, the first things we’re sending off, regardless of whether they arrive anywhere substantial.

            • nymnympseudonym@piefed.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              10
              ·
              6 days ago

              30 years ago we didn’t even know for sure if planets around other stars was a common thing and had no expectation we’d actually know their chemical compositions

    • Lumisal@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 days ago

      Gonna need a fact check on this one.

      Are we counting the gas of Jupiter or just the solid core? Same for the others

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        6 days ago

        Actually, Jupiter doesn’t have a solid core the way you think! The gases just get so dense at the core that it starts to behave like a solid. You couldn’t, like, blow away all the clouds and have some rock to wander around on.

        • Lumisal@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          6 days ago

          I assumed the hydrogen had become condensed into a crystal solid? Or at least, that’s the current theory

  • Deconceptualist@leminal.space
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    100
    ·
    6 days ago

    Time derivatives!

    • Rate of change in position is called velocity
    • Rate of change in velocity is called acceleration
    • Rate of change in acceleration is called jerk
    • Rate of change in jerk is called snap
    • Rate of change in snap is called crackle
    • Rate of change in crackle is called pop
        • antrosapien@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          6 days ago

          I can’t even comprehend what something beyond jerk means in reality or how to even produce it by physical means

          • Deconceptualist@leminal.space
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            18
            ·
            6 days ago

            Well these are higher order derivatives, so they do have physical meaning but the latter ones are increasingly abstract and subtle from our normal earthly perspective.

            If you think of a stable and perfectly circular orbit, that’s a steady and constant acceleration. Then if you thrust to make it elliptical, you’re changing the acceleration which can be measured as jerk. But then if that thrust itself is variable, you can measure its changes as snap. And then of course the rate of how much you change that is crackle, and so on.

            • Danquebec@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              6 days ago

              If I was working with those concepts, I’d just start using numbers.

              Like, acceleration is v2, jerk is v3, and so on.

              • Deconceptualist@leminal.space
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                5
                ·
                edit-2
                5 days ago

                These are n th order mathematical derivatives so I’m pretty sure physicists do something very similar to that whenever n matters.

        • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          5 days ago

          Getting them just right is important for driverless cars learning to brake in a way that feels comfortable to humans

        • tallricefarmer@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          6 days ago

          They aren’t useful. It is just scientists memeing. Any research that involves anything past jerk would be esoteric.

        • fallaciousBasis@lemmy.worldBanned
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          5 days ago

          Jitter is a technical term for latency variations between Internet packets over time.

          High jitter is bad for VoIP and online gaming and potentially streaming if the jitter is caused by packet loss and retransmits.

          • Deconceptualist@leminal.space
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            edit-2
            6 days ago

            I only know jitter as irregularity in data flow (e.g. network packets).

            Jerk is sometimes called jolt though. Both terms seem fitting to me. Supposedly in roller coaster design, having too much jerk/jolt can be quite unpleasant for riders. Which kind of makes sense, if the acceleration varies too wildly I could see that making me sick.

            • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              5 days ago

              I only know jitter from electronics as well, but it could be applied in mechanics as well. Iirc, jitter is the irregularities in the intervals in a periodic signal, like data transfer. But jitter will be present in anything with a period, it doesn’t have to be digital signal. A jerk is a single action, so there is no period and there can be no jitter. A series of jerks could have a seemingly regular period, but when measured more accurately, the intervals between jerks will have small variances: jitter. Hence why imo a series of irregular jerks could be considered jittery.

              Noone ever uses it that way though and I’m not even sure that I phrased it correctly, but because of the word “jerk” I find it a mildly fun play on words.

  • JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    108
    ·
    6 days ago

    Toads swallow food with their eyes. When they snag some food into their mouth they close their eyelids, and their eyes go inside and help push food down the throat before coming back up to the front of the head.

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    6 days ago

    There a more hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water, than there are stars in the entire solar system.

    • Foofighter@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      5 days ago

      Told that joke to my daughter. Didn’t understand it. Fine, hydrogen, atoms molecules… thought one for a 10 y/o with no particular interest in science.

      But then I asked how many stars our solar system had.

      Answer: “I don’t know”

      Asked with emphasis on “our solar system”.

      Answer: “Infiite number of stars”

      Asked how many stars are in out living room

      Answer: “Zero”

      Asked how many stars are on our planet

      Answer: “Zero”

      Me thinking we are on track and that she understood the scoping error in her first assessment asking the original question again with emphasis on sun (in german its sonnensystem, I.e. sun system, so it makes sense)

      Answer: “Zero”

      Lovely seeing extrapolation in real live.

  • m0darn@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    84
    ·
    6 days ago

    If you took all the DNA from every cell of one person and laid it in a straight line they would die

  • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    73
    ·
    6 days ago

    Red grapefruits were originally created by planting yellow grapefruit near a radioactive source with the express purpose of creating mutations in the plant.

    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      6 days ago

      From what I read, red grapefruit like Ruby Red existed naturally, but the atomic mutations only made them more red / not fade over time.

    • lemming@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      5 days ago

      Radioactivity and chemical mutagens are normal methods of creating new traits in crops. That’s how new varieties of fruits, grains etc. are often created. Nobody knows what exactly it does on the genomic level, usually. And then people complain about modifying a specific gene by targetted tools…

      • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        5 days ago

        Absolutely, there are thousands of cultivars that were created via mutagenesis (and all of them qualify for organic food, because this isn’t GMO for some reason)

        But quite few followed the old “chuck some cobalt in a circle of crops and see what happens” method they used for grapefruit.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      4 days ago

      Well those would have gone on my bucket list, but then towards the end, as I was searching for them to name the chemical responsible;

      He and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations in L. asiatica. Current tests suggest it is not likely related to any other known psychedelic compound. For one, the trips it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the extraordinarily long duration of these trips and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself.

      A few days to a week? I’m very much reconsidering.

  • MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    6 days ago

    Fundamentally everything and everyone, even nothing, is made of the same fields of invisible…stuff. We can measure them in very accurate detail. We are all connected. We are all ripples and waves in those fields. Everything is. If only you could see the entire spectrum of light, you would see one of those fields.

  • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    50
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    The moon is currently drifting away from the Earth. Eventually, that will make total eclipses impossible, so enjoy them while they last.

    Fast forward a few billion years, and the Sun begins to swell up, engulfing the closest planets. At some point, the atmosphere of the Sun could begin to cause drag on the Moon, slowing it down. If so, the Moon begins to crash down on Earth. Once it reaches the Roche limit, it gets shredded into kwazillion bits, and the Earth will have rings, just like Saturn.

  • tal@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    Something like a fifteenth of all humans who have ever lived are alive today.

  • susi7802@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    45
    ·
    6 days ago

    If you do not vote, you support political parties that you do not agree with at all.

    • LurkingLuddite@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      6 days ago

      Support? No.

      Accidentally help gain traction/control? Yes.

      I do not support the weeds taking over my garden. Though failing to fight them will still result in weeds all over my garden.

      • bisby@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        6 days ago

        “support” has multiple definitions. My chair supports me.

        Someone standing on my shoulders is being supported by me whether or not I like the situation.

        • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          edit-2
          6 days ago

          If we take your chair away, you fall. If we take you away, the person standing on your shoulders falls.

          What happens if we take a non-voter out of the picture? Does that change the outcome in any way?

    • CanadaPlus@futurology.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      6 days ago

      Maybe? One-vote margins have happened, but they’re pretty rare. The basic idea of strategic voting is also obvious to most people, if not some Lemmy kinds of people.

      You could say that you’re not not supporting them, at least. Some parties hope for low turnout.

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      5 days ago

      You cant say that on Lemmy! You’ll be banned for EleCtOrALiSM!

      This will then injure the feelies of every lefty waiting on their couch for door dash to bring them a politician they really super like, but can’t contribute to finding. That, of course, cannot stand.

      Edit: We should also note that this type of behavior may summon at least one teenage European to sagely say “every American is complicit!” in a way that is most helpful.

    • saimen@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 days ago

      It’s more like you support the one party who the majority of voters support.

  • Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    6 days ago

    Male ducks have a corkscrew penis almost as long as their body. Female ducks have vaginas that corkscrew in the opposite direction, with false endings. Ducks do not have consent, so nature found a way.