I bet you didnt know that

The stone dolerite is a mafic intrusive rock. That is a rock formed by lava bursting towards the earth's surface but not quite making it to the surface before cooling. In the U.S it is called diabase.

When people in the Neolithic Stone Age started to mine copper and tin in what would later become the Bronze Age. They used dolerite to make the heads of hammers as it is an extremely hard rock.
(Used today for chippings in road construction).
When cutting rocks, copper saws were used and crushed granite dust (a felsic intrusive igneous rock formed again by lava) or dolerite dust was used as grit or like the teeth in the saw.

The climate changed in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Europe and became wetter and colder. It was during this time that people began constructing stone circles. Dolerite or granite was used for the standing stones but dolerite seems to have been preferred over granite if it was available. Stone circles always had an entrance and facing the entrance as the person walked in would usually be a quartz stone.
Quartz is composed of silicon and oxygen. Silicon is used nowadays for chips in computers.
Some people say the granite and dolerite gives off energy and this may not be so far fetched as they can contain small amounts of uranium. The theory behind the quartz stone was that it amplified this energy towards whoever walked into the entrance.

Ineedaname wrote: »

Yeah and? The point is it’s roughly the same length

A 20km diameter sphere will not fit "inside" a 22km x 4km 2 dimensional area...

Ineedaname wrote: »

You're overthinking it....

You underthought it...

Up and atom.

Riddle101 wrote: »

Pirates doubled as mixologists. They created a drink that prevented certain diseases. Pirates borrowed the recipe for grog and made it legendary by adding lemon juice (it helped prevent scurvy) and sugar (it tasted good). Their's was a drink that packed a punch.

Talking of scurvy and pirates. Did you ever wonder why if the Royal Navy and the Pirates knew what cured scurvy earlier than the 17th C why did Scott and Shackleton suffered from it the early 20C?

The royal navy took scurvy seriously and knew the cure. In 1799 the scheduled allowance for the sailors in the Navy was fixed at I oz.lemon juice with I + oz. sugar, served daily after 2 weeks at sea,

Its an interesting story, and it didnt just happen because they forgot. It happened because how a cure becomes undiscovered or ignored because it seems unscientific. How advances in some science can create a new, not fully correct, dogma.

Scurvy was cured by lemon in the 17C, however by the mid to late 19C the British started using lime instead, so as to procure it from their colonies rather than Spain. Vitamin C wasnt understood at the time and it was assumed that any antiscorbutic properties were related to acidity.

Lime is acidic for sure, but it has less than 25% the vitamin C ratio of lemon and it was stored in copper cans which leeched the vitimin C, rendering it useless. However this didnt have much of an immediate effect as by the mid 19C as sailors were out at sea for much shorter periods, as steam shops became common. By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

Scurvy returned with a vengeance when George Nares led the British Arctic Expedition in an attempt to reach the North Pole via Greenland in 1875. Within weeks the crew was striken. Twenty years later the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition was stranded for 3 years, frozen into the pack ice. The crew were served lime every day and yet most got scurvy, except for the people who ate polar bear ( which was unpalatable to most who ate older preserved or salted meat). This scenario repeated in other expeditions.

In the absences of a theory of vitimin C then, it looked to the doctors and the scientists of this time that scurvy was caused by the meat going off. After all if fresh meat helps, and lime doesn't, it doesnt look citrus or fruit in general is antiscorbutic but that freshness is. And around this time most diseases were found to be caused by bacteria. In fact curing a disease with greens sounded like an old wives tale.

The doctor on the expedition (Koettlitz) said

That the cause of the outbreak of scurvy in so many Polar expeditions has always been that something was radically wrong with the preserved meats, whether tinned or salted, is practically certain; that foods are scurvy-producing by being, if only slightly, tainted is practically certain; that the benefit of the so-called "antiscorbutics" is a delusion, and that some antiscorbutic property has been removed from foods in the process of preservation is also a delusion. An animal food is either scorbutic—in other words, scurvy-producing—or it is not. It is either tainted or it is sound. Putrefactive change, if only slight and tasteless, has taken place or it has not. Bacteria have been able to produce ptomaines in it or they have not; and if they have not, then the food is healthy and not scurvy-producing.

ptomaines is basically bad meat that is assumed to cause food posoining. Given the sceintific advances of the day that found most diseases to be caused by bacteria this seemed to be most rational solution. And it was the solution that informed the doctors and physicians who consulted with Scott and Shackleton. (With regards to the past, the extent that citrus juices were effective in preventing scurvy, it was assumed their acidity denatured ptomaines, or killed the bacteria that caused them but that this wasnt reliable.).

So on to the Scott expedition. His main advisor was the aforementioned Koettlitz, and so Scott was impressed with the idea that his meat should be freshly canned. They canned the fresh meat under medical supervision, and opened it under medical supervision. In fact all tins were opened in the presence of his medical staff, including Dr. Koettlitz, and carefully examined for signs of spoilage. Any doubtful cans were consigned to the trash heap.

They were surprised then, when 3 weeks in, the first signs of scurvy started to appear....