nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Child Item

I bet you didnt know that

Cartouche

As people here work in various jobs / professions they might know things from work or study no one here knows yet. this is what this topic is about.

what do you know that we have never heard of?

Eg: you don't need to be great at maths to be an architect

this is obvious to me but everyone says to me "i wanted to be an architect but i was bad at math,i can barely add"

Find more posts tagged with

Quick Links

Comments

New Home

Quick question about the plague - hasn't it been recently discovered that it was in fact an air-borne disease? I seem to remember that some bodies were found recently during some underground work in London, and when they were examined and analysed and what have you they realised the plague wasn't transmitted by fleas after all. Is that correct, or did I imagine it?

[Deleted User]

New Home wrote: »

Quick question about the plague - hasn't it been recently discovered that it was in fact an air-borne disease? I seem to remember that some bodies were found recently during some underground work in London, and when they were examined and analysed and what have you they realised the plague wasn't transmitted by fleas after all. Is that correct, or did I imagine it?

Edit: You're entirely right, it's airborne and the fleas are vindicated.

I think I might have misread that link and it doesn't say what I thought! I think it refers to A bubonic plague, an infection of the lympathic system, rather than what we think of as THE bubonic plague, in which case both the Black Death and The Plague refer to the same thing!

New Home

So did I!!! Well, good to know, I guess...

Esel

If a flea from a rat will bite a human, surely it will bite a cat as well? Cats coming into contact with infested rats would carry the fleas to humans... KILL THE CATS!

Btw, I have seen rabbits and hedgehogs teeming with fleas. Are there any fleas which confine themselves to one type of host?

[Deleted User]

New Home wrote: »

So did I!!! Well, good to know, I guess...

Horrifying to think you could still contract bubonic plague, though of course until antibiotic resistance gets us - and it will, and soon - at least we have treatment for it.

[Deleted User]

Esel wrote: »

If a flea from a rat will bite a human, surely it will bite a cat as well? Cats coming into contact with infested rats would carry the fleas to humans... KILL THE CATS!

Btw, I have seen rabbits and hedgehogs teeming with fleas. Are there any fleas which confine themselves to one type of host?

I get that impression, since apparently you can still get bubonic plague from squirrel fleas and the fleas of prairie dogs but other animals don't get a mention.

ETA: nope, seems that it's airborne and nothing to do with any fleas at all. You're safe.

New Home

I know that hedgehog fleas are 'specialised' (not a technical term, but you get the gist) and wouldn't survive on other hosts, I'm not sure if other types of fleas are the same.

Back to the plague - I just checked, and according to Wikipedia (who's never ever wrong :rolleyes:), Yersinia pestis is the bacterium responsible for the plague, and depending on how a person is infected the plague manifests itself in different ways; the bubonic plague and the septicemic plague are likely to be transmitted by insect bites and sometimes by infected food, whereas the pneumonic plague is air-born; the Black Death seems to be a combination of all three. Charming.

I know gondolas in Venice are black supposedly as the fulfilment of a vow made to Our Lady to stop the plague, and that the mask of the plague doctor has such a long beak/nose because it would be stuffed with herbs and other things to act as a filter against air borne diseases, including the black death (I'm not sure as to how reliable the masks were, but I'm sure it was better than nothing), so the 'miasma' theory wasn't that far off, after all.

New Home

Candie wrote: »

Horrifying to think you could still contract bubonic plague, though of course until antibiotic resistance gets us - and it will, and soon - at least we have treatment for it.

Ditto for leprosy.

[Deleted User]

New Home wrote: »

I know that hedgehog fleas are 'specialised' (not a technical term, but you get the gist) and wouldn't survive on other hosts, I'm not sure if other types of fleas are the same.

Back to the plague - I just checked, and according to Wikipedia (who's never ever wrong :rolleyes:), Yersinia pestis is the bacterium responsible for the plague, and depending on how a person is infected the plague manifests itself in different ways; the bubonic plague and the septicemic plague are likely to be transmitted by insect bites and sometimes by infected food, whereas the pneumonic plague is air-born; the Black Death seems to be a combination of all three. Charming.

I know gondolas in Venice are black supposedly as the fulfilment of a vow made to Our Lady to stop the plague, and that the mask of the plague doctor has such a long beak/nose because it would be stuffed with herbs and other things to act as a filter against air borne diseases, including the black death (I'm not sure as to how reliable the masks were, but I'm sure it was better than nothing), so the 'miasma' theory wasn't that far off, after all.

Almost all the plague docs died, as they probably knew they would. One of the oldest infectious disease hospitals in the world was in Florence where the plague was first concentrated and I think it's partly a plague museum now.

Those plague doc outfits were frightening enough, though the logic behind them was solid enough for the times.

osarusan

When planning the construction of Egypt's Aswan Dam in the 1960s, surveyors drilled down into the river Nile looking for bedrock. To their surprise, they had to drill down much farther than expected, as they found nothing but sediment for hundreds of metres. Further drilling and study revealed that the sediment had filled up what was a massive canyon under the Nile, as much as 1000 miles long and with a deepest point of as much as 2000 metres.

This canyon was formed during the Messinian salinity crisis, which occurred approx 5.9 million years ago, when the Strait of Gibraltar was forced closed through tectonic movement, and the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic ocean.

Over time, the Mediterranean gradually evaporated down to virtually nothing (causing it to become hypersalinated also). As the level of the Mediterranean dropped, the level of the Nile began to drop also as it eroded the rock beneath it, carving out a canyon.

This erosion continued until the Zanclean flood (5.3 million years ago), which was the Atlantic ocean refilling the Mediterranean basin through the Strait of Gibraltar. As the sea level rose again, this caused the Nile to stop eroding its bedrock, and the entire canyon was eventually filled in with sediment.

Skylinehead

osarusan wrote: »

Eh...no.

Eh...yes.

Qantas have never had a fatal accident right?

osarusan

Skylinehead wrote: »

Qantas have never had a fatal accident right?

I am guessing that at the time of filming they did not, but maybe that has changed since...unless you are making some joke/reference I am not getting.

seagull

Skylinehead wrote: »

Qantas have never had a fatal accident right?

Not since 1951

valoren

That there is, in all probability, something in your home that is as toxic and even more radioactive than weapons grade Plutonium. :eek:

If there isn't then there should be.

It's Americium - particularly the isotope AM 241 - Atomic number 95.

Thankfully there is only 0.29 micrograms of it in people's homes.

It is used in smoke detectors. Within the Americium atoms sit decaying into alpha radiation - or specifically - neptunium-237. These alpha particles can strip electrons from atoms - or more precisely the atoms from the air in the room. As it does so a tiny electric charge flows.

While the electric charge flows from this decay no alarm sounds.
Not until smoke particles enter the detector and easily absorb this alpha radiation.

As the alpha particles which have been spitting out are now effectively stopped from removing electrons in the surrounding air, this leads to a drop in the electric current and thus;

*beep*beep*beep*beep*beep*beep*beep*beep*

GBX

So by not checking my battery is working or even having one in the first place im safe?

castletownman

BUMP

Turkmenistan is the only country in the world whose national anthem has a quote from Star Trek.

The last line in every paragraph reads "Live long and prosper, Turkmenistan!"

retalivity

Ah Turkmenistan...ruled by the batsh1t insane Sapurmurat Niyazov from 1985 til his death in 2006. Some of his highlights are:

Renaming the months of the year, including january after himself and april afyer his mother.
Banning all dogs from the capital as they smelled
Banning smoking in all piblic places, as he had to quit himself after heart surgery
Banning beards and long hair on men
Building a palace of ice so turkmen could learn to ice skate - turkmenistan is 70% desert.
Ordered a 12 metre tall gold sculpture of himself to be built and placed on top of a neutrality monument. It rotated slowly so that iy would always face the sun

Cookie_Monster

Turkmenistan has a hole in the ground that's been on fire for 4 decades!

Capt'n Midnight

retalivity wrote: »

Building a palace of ice so turkmen could learn to ice skate - turkmenistan is 70% desert.

Antarctica is mostly desert too.

cdeb

He banned make-up as his nation's women were beautiful enough already.

When Kazakhstan became independent, one of the first things they did was ring the US and say that they appeared to be the third biggest nuclear power in the world, and could the US advise how they could get of the stuff? The USSR used Kazakhstan for its nuclear testing. Kazakhstan went from having 1400 nukes to having none in the space of four years

Skylinehead

cdeb wrote: »

He banned make-up as his nation's women were beautiful enough already.

When Kazakhstan became independent, one of the first things they did was ring the US and say that they appeared to be the third biggest nuclear power in the world, and could the US advise how they could get of the stuff? The USSR used Kazakhstan for its nuclear testing. Kazakhstan went from having 1400 nukes to having none in the space of four years

4th biggest actually - Ukraine had 5,000 after the breakup of the USSR. That amount of nuclear warheads is mind boggling.

mzungu

Cookie_Monster wrote: »

Turkmenistan has a hole in the ground that's been on fire for 4 decades!

The background to it here, taken from Wikipedia:

According to Turkmen geologist Anatoly Bushmakin, the site was identified by Soviet engineers in 1971. It was originally thought to be a substantial oil field site. The engineers set up a drilling rig and operations to assess the quantity of oil available at the site. Soon after the preliminary survey found a natural gas pocket, the ground beneath the drilling rig and camp collapsed into a wide crater and was buried.

Expecting dangerous releases of poisonous gases from the cavern into nearby towns, the engineers thought it best to burn the gas off. It was estimated that the gas would burn out within a few weeks, but it has instead continued to burn for more than four decades.

The years of the crater's history are uncertain. Local geologists say the collapse into a crater happened in the 1960s, and the gases weren't set on fire until the 1980s. There are however no records available for any version of the events.

mzungu

The Aral Sea used to be one of the largest lakes in the world, but it has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had shrunk to 10% of its original size.

NASA article on the background:

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The region’s two major rivers, fed by snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops. Before the project, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers flowed down from the mountains, cut northwest through the Kyzylkum Desert, and finally pooled together in the lowest part of the basin. The lake they made, the Aral Sea, was once the fourth largest in the world.

Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the Aral Sea. This series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite documents the changes. At the start of the series in 2000, the lake was already a fraction of its 1960 extent (yellow line). The Northern Aral Sea (sometimes called the Small Aral Sea) had separated from the Southern (Large) Aral Sea. The Southern Aral Sea had split into eastern and western lobes that remained tenuously connected at both ends.

By 2001, the southern connection had been severed, and the shallower eastern part retreated rapidly over the next several years. Especially large retreats in the eastern lobe of the Southern Sea appear to have occurred between 2005 and 2009, when drought limited and then cut off the flow of the Amu Darya. Water levels then fluctuated annually between 2009 and 2016 in alternately dry and wet years. In 2014, the Southern Sea’s eastern lobe completely disappeared.

As the Aral Sea has dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard. The salty dust blew off the lakebed and settled onto fields, degrading the soil. Croplands had to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water. The loss of the moderating influence of such a large body of water made winters colder and summers hotter and drier.

In a last-ditch effort to save some of the lake, Kazakhstan built a dam between the northern and southern parts of the Aral Sea. Completed in 2005, the dam was basically a death sentence for the southern Aral Sea, which was judged to be beyond saving. All of the water flowing into the desert basin from the Syr Darya now stays in the Northern Aral Sea. Between 2005 and 2006, the water levels in that part of the lake rebounded significantly and very small increases are visible throughout the rest of the time period. The differences in water color are due to changes in sediment.

Link: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/aral_sea.php

New Home

That is horrific.

retalivity

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Antarctica is mostly desert too.

Ah yeah...i meant warm sandy desert!

iLikeWaffles

1x1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12,321
1,111 x 1,111 = 1,234,321
11,111 x 11,111 = 123,454,321
111,111 x 111,111 = 12,345,654,321
1,111,111 x 1,111,111 = 1,234,567,654,321
11,111,111 x 11,111,111 = 123,456,787,654,321
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
1,111,111,111 x 1,111,111,111 = 12,345,678,900,987,654,321
11,111,111,111 x 11,111,111,111 = 1,234,567,890,120,987,654,321
111,111,111,111 x 111,111,111,111 = 12,345,679,012,320,987,654,321

________________________________________________________________________________↑__________↑

111,111,111,111,1 x 111,111,111,111,1 = 1,234,567,901,234,320,987,654,321
111,111,111,111,11 x 111,111,111,111,11 = 123,456,790,123,454,320,987,654,321
111,111,111,111,111 x 111,111,111,111,111 = 12,345,679,012,345,654,320,987,654,321
111,111,111,111,111,1 x 111,111,111,111,111,1 = 1,234,567,901,234,567,654,320,987,654,321

and on, and on, and on

illuminati

Capt'n Midnight

Skylinehead wrote: »

4th biggest actually - Ukraine had 5,000 after the breakup of the USSR. That amount of nuclear warheads is mind boggling.

The UK defence nuclear deterrent was based on being able to destroy 75-80% of Moscow. So didn't need the US or USSR levels of overkill

South Africa is the only country to get rid of it's atomic bomb making capacity.

The UK is the only country to abandon the ability to launch satellites.

Capt'n Midnight

retalivity wrote: »

Ah yeah...i meant warm sandy desert!

Most of the Sahara is not covered in sand.

There is a very small desert in Poland.

368100

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

The UK defence nuclear deterrent was based on being able to destroy 75-80% of Moscow. So didn't need the US or USSR levels of overkill

South Africa is the only country to get rid of it's atomic bomb making capacity.

The UK is the only country to abandon the ability to launch satellites.

Didn't the Queen announce an agenda for launching satellites as part of opening parliament this week?

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

368100 wrote: »

Didn't the Queen announce an agenda for launching satellites as part of opening parliament this week?

Building, not launching, them.