Science facts that amaze you?

kowloon

Barely There wrote: »

If you take any number and subtract it from itself, the answer will always be '0'.

No matter how large the number you initially chose - try it.

-1-1=

Rucking_Fetard

kowloon wrote: »

-1-1=

0

Sir Arthur Daley

sauce makes you cycle faster and longer.

Joe Doe

Jakey Rolling wrote: »

The gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth is about 175 times that of the Moon, yet the Moon is the main cause of the ocean tides.

Sure that's just retaliative, more variable and frequent positioning... check this recurring math though:

The Moon's polar circumference is 27.3% the size of the Earth's polar circumference.

The Moon orbits the earth every 27.3 Earth (sidereal) days and turns 10920.8 km at the equator every 27.3 days. This equates to a speed of 400 km/h. The Earth turns at 100 times the rate and travels 40,000 km per rotation. Conversely the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon and 400 times further away from Earth, which is why we get to see such great eclipses.

If you were to draw a circle inside a square, with the circle's diameter the same as the square's length, the area left over that the circle does not cover is 27.32% of the total area of the square.


Earth turns 366 times each orbit of the sun, and is 366% the measurement of the moon at the polar circumference. The moon orbits earth 366 times every 10,000 days.

There are 109.2 Earth diameters across the Sun's diameter.
There are 109.2 Sun diameters between the Earth and the Sun when it is at the furthest reach of it's orbit around the sun.
There are 109.2 x 100 km across the circumference of the Moon...

davemc180

I always thought the sky was blue because of the reflection of the sea...

only seen on discovery its because of the ozone and basically could be any colour of the rainbow except for the angle the light rays hit us...

like a washing up liquid bubble has hints of green purple etc

Bipolar Joe

davemc180 wrote: »

I always thought the sky was blue because of the reflection of the sea...

only seen on discovery its because of the ozone and basically could be any colour of the rainbow except for the angle the light rays hit us...

like a washing up liquid bubble has hints of green purple etc

So, you think water is blue?

Jonty

I can't believe it's not butter

davemc180

Bipolar Joe wrote: »

So, you think water is blue?

I know water is clear but the sea is blue..

AND IT IS REALLY BUTTER

Wibbs

Bipolar Joe wrote: »

So, you think water is blue?

Water is slightly blue. Unless you're an ancient greek in which case it's wine coloured.

RustDaz

RustDaz

i must be dense i can't figure out the video paste thing at all

Rucking_Fetard

RustDaz wrote: »

i must be dense i can't figure out the video paste thing at all

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056265452

RustDaz

Maximus Alexander

davemc180 wrote: »

I know water is clear but the sea is blue..

AND IT IS REALLY BUTTER

Both water and the sky are blue independently of one another. The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering. Water is blue in large quantities because it absorbs other wavelengths of light leaving blue behind, but also the surface of the ocean takes on a lot of its colour from the sky, which is why it can look grey when it's overcast.

dellas1979

I always wonder, you know thousands of years ago, who or how did they get the idea on how to start a fire (2 rocks).

Looking at 2 rocks, it just wouldnt be obvious, ya know?

Do ye think one day, thousands of years ago, 2 rocks fell on each other in front of some neanderthols, and a fire started, to which it was discovered its warmth. And from that you could cook/melt etc.

And without this discovery, we probably wouldnt be tapping away here.

Just fascinates me that at one stage this discovery happened.

Fate Amenable To Change

dellas1979 wrote: »

I always wonder, you know thousands of years ago, who or how did they get the idea on how to start a fire (2 rocks).

Without this discovery, we probably wouldnt be tapping away here.

Do ye think one day, thousands of years ago, 2 rocks fell on each other, and a fire started, to which it was discovered its warmth. And from that you could cook/melt etc.

Just fascinates me that at one stage this discovery happened.

They would have used flint to make their tools and weapons, likely someone saw the sparks when they were trying to shape something

dellas1979

Fate Amenable To Change wrote: »

They would have used flint to make their tools and weapons, likely someone saw the sparks when they were trying to shape something

Was that more stone Age tho? (I thought fire was discovered even before this?).

bnt

kowloon wrote: »

-1-1=

(-1)-(-1)=0

Wibbs

dellas1979 wrote: »

I always wonder, you know thousands of years ago, who or how did they get the idea on how to start a fire (2 rocks).

Looking at 2 rocks, it just wouldnt be obvious, ya know?

Well it happened over a million years ago long before Neandertals. Homo Erectus look like the first guys to cop it.

And yea without it we would not be who we are today. Cooking in particular was one of the biggest innovations humans ever made. It released more nutrients, softened food and removed toxins and parasites so we could exploit food resources we couldn't have otherwise without evolving different teeth and digestive system. Plus fire made the night safe. Animals run away from it. Which adds another level to this humans and fire thing, someone had to brave the fire in the first place. It also allowed us to go into areas that would have been too cold for us otherwise. Fire changed everything.

Fate Amenable To Change wrote: »

They would have used flint to make their tools and weapons, likely someone saw the sparks when they were trying to shape something

Highly unlikely. 1) knapping flint produces remarkably few sparks if any(I never saw any when I did it) and 2) contrary to a very popular belief out there it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to start a fire with flints alone. Flint as a fire starter only came into use when we invented steel which we struck off the flint. That creates a cascade of sparks large and hot enough to start a fire. Plus many areas we lived in had no flint/chert dense enough to be of much use even with steel which we didn't have until historical times.

How our ancestors and hunter gatherers today start fires is by friction. Rubbing wood against other wood, usually by the use of a wood drill. It's actually quite a complex behaviour. How did they do it back then? Maybe they didn't at first. Natural wildfires from lightning strikes and the like may have been their original source. First they grabbed the fire when they could and later they collected and "stored" it, rather than make it themselves, that could come later. Even in historical times some fully modern human groups didn't have the knowledge to create fire. IE the Andaman Islanders. They got it from natural sources and stored it as near continuous fires or in the form of embers which can burn for days.

The method to independently make fire probably came about as part of our first use of wood as a tool and the working of that wood. Someone noticed that friction in wood caused heat and they went from there. Maybe they explained it away that the fire spirit "lived" in dead and dry wood and by rubbing it for long enough they could liberate it.

Wibbs

dellas1979 wrote: »

Was that more stone Age tho? (I thought fire was discovered even before this?).

The (various)stone ages made up the vast majority of our history. The earliest stone tools deliberately shaped are simple pebble choppers going back nearly 3 million years ago. Made by people who would not look human if you met one. Fire comes along about 1 million years ago, made by people who looked a little more like us, but still more ape like in appearance.

ScumLord

Another cool moon fact is that the moon is slowly moving away from earth. In the past it was much closer and in the future it will be further away. The cool thing about this is that humans just so happen to be around for the time when the moon fits perfectly over the sun for the most spectacular type of solar eclipse.

Wibbs

Just remembered you can strike flint off iron pyrites to get sparks.

Yea the moon is a cool one alright. If you stood on the earth in the Devonian period 400 million years ago the moon would have been much bigger in the sky and tides would have been much stronger. The days were shorter too and there were more in a year. You'd have also needed oxygen tanks as the air wouldn't have enough in it to breathe. Fast forward to the era of the dinosaurs and there would have been more oxygen in the air than today and it would have been a lot hotter too.

The King of Moo

Everything in the universe is basically made of hydrogen, the simplest atom with one electron and one proton. It's fused into more complex molecules by nuclear fusion in stars, and if you kept breaking down any element into a simpler one by nuclear fission and kept repeating the process you'd eventually get down to hydrogen.

It's simple, but I find it beautiful that all the amazing complexity of the universe can be broken down to such a basic substance.

Joe Doe

ScumLord wrote: »

Another cool moon fact is that the moon is slowly moving away from earth. In the past it was much closer and in the future it will be further away. The cool thing about this is that humans just so happen to be around for the time when the moon fits perfectly over the sun for the most spectacular type of solar eclipse.

Yep that's part of the recurring math pattern mentioned earlier (between the sun-earth-moon). The Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon and 400 times further away from Earth, which is why we get to see such great eclipses

Also the Golden Section, Divine Proportion, Fibonacci series aka phi (i.e. 1.618), can be seen repeating everywhere from the design of galaxies to tiny seashells, to synthetic designs such as the pyramids of Egypt, logo and product design and it even appears in forex trading patterns! Both conscious intelligence and unconscious instinct has a strong preference for this ratio.

kowloon

bnt wrote: »

(-1)-(-1)=0

Feck it!

thelad95

There's been a lot of trolls and stupid threads on After Hours in recent times but this thread is fantastic.

The Th!ng

As of 2014 the highest transistor count on a commercially available CPU is over 4 billion. In comparison to this the first transistor, which was developed in Bell Labs in 1947, was roughly 1 inch high and was comprised of, among other things, a paper clip.

Link to replica of the first transistor

Capt'n Midnight

There are roughly two moles of stars in the observable universe.

Panthro wrote: »

More Mantis Shrimp

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

snowstorm445 wrote: »

Speaking of science facts, Cork is scientifically proven to be the centre of the Universe.

Just like everywhere else

Karl Stein

thelad95 wrote: »

There's been a lot of trolls and stupid threads on After Hours in recent times but this thread is fantastic.

Well.. seeing as God made all this stuff the whole 'OMG science' thing is a bit of trolling by people who should know better.

sbsquarepants

Jakey Rolling wrote: »

The gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth is about 175 times that of the Moon, yet the Moon is the main cause of the ocean tides.

The gravitational pull of the sun on the oceans is roughly 50% that of the moon afaik. I'm open to correction on the exact number but it's definitely less, not more and certainly not 175 times more. Every time you double the distance between 2 objects, you quarter the gravitational attraction (the inverse square rule - g is proportional to 1/distance squared)