Thứ Ba, 4 tháng 10, 2016

Top 56 funniest science facts ever

Let's have a closer look at top 56 funniest science facts ever
  • In a full grown rye plant, the total length of roots may reach 380 miles (613 km).
  • In a full grown rye plant, the total length of fine root hairs may reach 6600 miles (10,645 km).
  • A large sunspot can last for about a week.
  • If you could throw a snowball fast enough, it would totally vaporize when it hit a brick wall.
  • Boron nitride (BN) is the second hardest substance known to man.
  • The female Tarantula Hawk wasp paralyzes a large spider with her sting. She then lays her eggs on the motionless body so that her developing young have a fresh supply of spider meat to feed on.
  • The seeds of an Indian Lotus tree remain viable for 300 to 400 years.
  • The only letter not appearing on the Periodic Table is the letter “J”.
  • Velcro was invented by a Swiss guy who was inspired by the way burrs attached to clothing.
  • Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
  • October 10 is National Metric Day.
  • If you stretch a standard Slinky out flat it measures 87 feet long.

  • The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
  • Super Glue was invented by accident. The researcher was trying to make optical coating materials, and would test their properties by putting them between two prisms and shining light through them. When he tried the cyano-acrylate, he couldn't get the prisms apart.
  • No matter its size or thickness, no piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
  • A car traveling at 80 km/h uses half its fuel to overcome wind resistance.
  • Knowledge is growing so fast that ninety per cent of what we will know in fifty years time, will be discovered in those fifty years.
  • According to an old English system of time units, a moment is one and a half minutes.
  • The typewriter was invented in 1829, and the automatic dishwasher in 1889.
  • The wristwatch was invented in 1904 by Louis Cartier.
  • When glass breaks, the cracks move at speeds of up to 3,000 miles per hour.
  • By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand.
  • Ten minutes of one hurricane contains enough energy to match the nuclear stockpiles of the world.
  • Most gemstones contain several elements. The exception? The diamond. It's all carbon.
  • Diamonds are the hardest substance known to man.
  • Which of the 50 states has never had an earthquake? North Dakota.
  • When hydrogen burns in the air, water is formed.
  • Sterling silver contains 7.5% copper.
  • Cars were first made with ignition keys in 1949.
  • J.B Dunlop was first to put air into tires.
  • Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, also set a world water-speed record of over seventy miles an hour at the age of seventy two.
  • It is energy-efficient to turn off a fluorescent light only if it will not be used again within an hour or more. This is because of the high voltage needed to turn it on, and the shortened life this high voltage causes.
  • The Earth's equatorial circumference (40,075 km) is greater than its polar circumference (40,008 km).
  • Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world.
  • Due to gravitational effects, you weigh slightly less when the moon is directly overhead.
  • The Earth's average velocity orbiting the sun is 107,220 km per hour.
  • There is a high and low tide because of our moon and the Sun.
  • The United States consumes 25% of all the world’s energy.
  • Flying from London to New York by Concord, due to the time zones crossed, you can arrive 2 hours before you leave.
  • There is enough fuel in a full tank of a Jumbo Jet to drive an average car four times around the world.
  • The surface speed record on the moon is 10.56 miles per hour. It was set with the lunar rover.
  • If you could drive to the sun -- at 55 miles per hour -- it would take about 193 years
  • The moon is one million times drier than the Gobi Desert.
  • Just twenty seconds worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon.
  • A Boeing 707 uses four thousand gallons of fuel in its take-off climb.
  • The planet Saturn has a density lower than water. So, if placed in water it would float.
  • Since 1959, more than 6,000 pieces of 'space junk' (abandoned rocket and satellite parts) have fallen out of orbit - many of these have hit the earth's surface.
  • It takes 70% less energy to produce a ton of paper from recycled paper than from trees.
  • Every year in the US, 625 people are struck by lightning.
  • Hawaii is moving toward Japan 4 inches every year.
  • The rocket engine has to supply its own oxygen so it can burn its fuel in outer space.
  • The North Atlantic gets 1 inch wider every year.
  • Oxygen is the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, waters, and atmosphere (about 49.5%)
  • A stroke of lightning discharges from 10 to 100 million volts & 30,000 amperes of electricity.
  • A bolt of lightning is about 54,000°F (30,000°C); six times hotter than the Sun.
  • The average distance between the Earth & the Moon is 238,857 miles (384,392 km). 
It's hard to say whether or not the above awesome facts are full, but mostly there. So now, are you interested in funny jokes?

Thứ Sáu, 9 tháng 9, 2016

Fascinating and fun facts about tortoises

Do you like to see some animal facts in your sparetime? Here is fascinating and fun facts about tortoises

1. A TORTOISE IS A TURTLE, BUT A TURTLE ISN'T A TORTOISE.


A turtle is any shelled reptile belonging to the order Chelonii. The term "tortoise" is more specific, referring to terrestrial turtles. (Of course, there's always an exception. In this case, the land-dwelling box turtle.) Tortoises are usually herbivorous and can't swim.

One easy way to tell 'em apart: look at their feet and shells. Water turtles have flippers or webbed feet with long claws, and their shells are flatter and more streamlined. Tortoises have stubby, elephant-like feet and heavier, domed shells.

2. A GROUP OF TORTOISES IS CALLED A CREEP.


But you won't see a creep very often. (Not that kind, anyway.) Tortoises are solitary roamers. Some mother tortoises are protective of their nests, but they don't care for their young after they hatch.
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3. TORTOISES INSPIRED THE ANCIENT ROMAN MILITARY.


During seiges, soldiers would get in testudo formation, named after the Latin word for tortoise. The men formed rows and held shields in front or above them to completely shelter the unit.

4. "TESTUDINAL" MEANS "PERTAINING TO OR RESEMBLING A TORTOISE OR TORTOISE SHELL."



5. TORTOISES HAVE AN EXOSKELETON AND AN ENDOSKELETON.


The shell has three main parts: the top carapace, the bottom plastron, and the bridge that fuses these pieces together. You can't see them, but every tortoise has ribs, a collar bone, and a spine inside its shell.

6. THE SCALES ON THE CARAPACE ARE CALLED SCUTES.


Made of the same keratin found in fingernails and hooves, scutes protect the bony plates of the shell from injury and infection. The growth rings around scutes can be counted to determine the approximate age of wild tortoises.

7. THE LIGHTER THE SHELL, THE WARMER THE ORIGIN.


Tortoises from hot places tend to have lighter-colored shells than tortoises from cooler areas. The light tan sulcata originates from the southern part of the Sahara Desert.

8. THEY CAN'T SWIM, BUT TORTOISES CAN HOLD THEIR BREATH FOR A LONG TIME.


They're extremely tolerant of carbon dioxide. It's a good thing—tortoises have to empty their lungs before they can go into their shells. You'll often hear them exhale when they're startled and decide to hide.

9. AND YES, THEIR SHELLS ARE SENSITIVE TO TOUCH.

Shells have nerve endings, so tortoises can feel every rub, pet, or scratch ... and sometimes they love it. Note: This delightful creature is a turtle, not a tortoise.

10. SULCATAS ARE ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR PET TORTOISES—AND ONE OF THE BIGGEST.


Get ready to move to the suburbs and amend your will. Sulcatas are the third largest tortoise species in the world, behind the Galapagos and Aldabra giant tortoise. They can live more than 100 years and weigh up to 200 pounds.

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Chủ Nhật, 4 tháng 9, 2016

Giraffes only make sound at night

Do giraffes make sound? The answer lies in this writing. Let's see to discover the best answer for this amazing question


Image result for What noise does a giraffe make?

It’s long been assumed that unlike other animals, giraffe, even giraffe baby are largely silent beasts. They don’t oink, moo or roar. But new research suggests perhaps giraffes do have a distinct sound: They hum.

It was previously believed that giraffes may make sounds that are impossible for humans to hear, similar to elephants, but the new research suggests otherwise. In a new study published in the journal BioMed Central, researchers recorded over 940 hours of sounds from giraffes at three zoos over an eight-year period. Beyond the occasional snort or grunt, the researchers recorded humming sounds that the giraffes made only at night. The humming was 92Hz in frequency, Wired reports, which is still audible to humans but pretty low.

Though more research is needed (even though the researchers called making the recordings “consuming, tedious and very challenging”) it’s possible that the giraffes are using these noises to communicate with one another.

“These results show that giraffes do produce vocalizations, which, based on their acoustic structure, might have the potential to function as communicative signals to convey information about the physical and motivational attributes of the caller,” the researchers conclude.

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Thứ Hai, 29 tháng 8, 2016

Do elephants run?

So without further ado, here is elephants for kids answer may interest you for the question: Can elephants run?

Image result for elephant can run

A charging elephant might not look like it's merely walking, but that's exactly what it may be doing. Surprisingly, scientists don't agree on whether elephants run in the traditional sense. Now a new study splits the difference, suggesting that a rushing elephant may be walking and running at the same time.

Elephants break all the rules of animal movement. Most four-legged vertebrates change their stride when they move at high speeds so that all four feet leave the ground at once. Elephants take faster and longer steps, but they never take all four feet off the ground. That helps them spread out their massive weight as much as possible, says Norman Heglund, a biomechanics expert at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. But then, are they really running?

That's been a tough question to answer. It turns out there's a lot more involved in running than just taking one's feet off the ground. The legs also flex in particular ways that change an animal's center of gravity and the force it exerts on the ground. Scientists can measure these changes in humans and other animals by making them walk across force sensing plates. But just try doing that with a 4000-kilogram elephant.

The closest researchers have come is high-speed video of rushing elephants analyzed by a team of researchers in 2003. John Hutchinson, a biologist of the University of London's Royal Veterinary College, and colleagues concluded from the footage that, when elephants move at high speeds, their back legs bend slightly, like a runner springing from step to step. But scientists wanted to see more quantitative data.

So in the new study, Heglund and colleagues engineered a heavy-duty force-sensing plate that could withstand being trampled by a charging elephant. They shipped sixteen of the plates, along with computers and video cameras to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang Province. There, they constructed a 2 meter by 8 meter track from the plates and filmed 34 elephants, each guided by a mounted trainer, as they traversed the track at a range of speeds.

Despite their size, elephants step lightly, the team reports today in The Journal of Experimental Biology. A human runner exerts peak forces of 3 times his or her body weight when running, while elephants exert at most 1.4 times their body weight. They also don't move their center of gravity much: Even at an 18 kilometer-per-hour charge, an elephant's center of mass moves up and down by about a centimeter, a smaller vertical movement than human runners make.
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Image result for elephant can run

As to whether elephants actually run, the answer seems to be, well, sort of. While Hutchinson's team saw that an elephants' front legs walked while the back legs trotted, Heglund's team's measurements indicated the opposite: When stepping with a forelimb, the elephants' center of mass lowered slightly as the force on the ground increased, indicating a spring-like mechanism typical of a dog or a human's run. Meanwhile, even at high speeds, the elephants' back legs seemed to stay rigid, which is typical of a walk. "They don't really run in the classical sense," Heglund says. "They can't quite kick it into second gear, so they're stuck halfway in between" a walk and a run.

But that may not be the final answer, warns Hutchinson, who studied the same group of elephants alongside Heglund's team. He says that the elephants' feet likely touched more than one plate at once, making it hard to separate what individual limbs were doing. Still, he says, the research is important because it quantifies the forces with which elephants hit the ground. "It's nice to have the numbers."

If nothing else, the study illustrates that, when it comes to running in animals, "it's not one size fits all," says Daniel Schmitt, an expert in primate locomotion at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "That speaks to how evolution works."

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Thứ Năm, 25 tháng 8, 2016

What are similarities between humans and animals in genetic?

Enjoy our wide range of science facts and it’s the time for similarities between humans and animals in genetic:

Image result for genome

It is very difficult to find reliable data comparing the human genome to animal genome. The principal reason is that few animals have had their full genome sequenced. Even those that have cannot be easily compared in terms of percentages because the genomic length and chromosomal division can vary greatly from one species to another.

Scouring the Web, here is what I have found so far.

- Genome-wide variation from one human being to another can be up to 0.5% (99.5% similarity)

- Chimpanzees are 96% to 98% similar to humans, depending on how it is calculated.

- Cats have 90% of homologous genes with humans, 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 79% with chimpanzees, 69% with rats and 67% with mice. 

- Cows (Bos taurus) are 80% genetically similar to humans.
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- 75% of mouse genes have equivalents in humans (source), 90% of the mouse genome could be lined up with a region on the human genome (source) 99% of mouse genes turn out to have analogues in humans 

- The fruit fly (Drosophila) shares about 60% of its DNA with humans.

- About 60% of chicken genes correspond to a similar human gene.

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Thứ Tư, 24 tháng 8, 2016

Two amazing tiger facts

South China tigers


Panthera tigris amoyensis, also known as the South China tiger, is actually the most endangered tiger subspecies. They are even more endangered than the Sumatran tigers, which are already heavily watched by conservationists. The South China tiger has even made the list of the world's ten most endangered species. The South China tiger belongs to a group of smaller tiger subspecies, with lengths spanning from 2.2 to 2.6 meters (87 to 100 inches). The range of the length of South China tigers is true for both male and female tigers. Males have a weight range of 127 to 177 kg (280 to 390 pounds); females, on the other hand, have a weight range of 100 to 118 kilograms (220 to 260 pounds).

South China tigers were so endangered that between the years 1983 and 2007, they have not even been seen in the wild. A farmer actually had to show some photographs of a South China tiger but those photos were actually debunked as fakes. This sighting ended up becoming part of a huge scandal back in 2007.

The Chinese government made it a law to ban the killing of tigers in 1977. This could be a move that was just a little too late because of the possibility of the wild tigers being already extinct. If they are extinct then there may be less than a hundred South China tigers left, 59 of which are known to be captives. These tigers are believed to be the offspring of only six animals. This is bad news because in order for the subspecies to continue to exist, genetic diversity is needed. There are no efforts to breed the tigers to speak of right now, anyway, and no efforts to bring the tigers back to their natural habitats.

Bali tigers


Some tiger subspecies may still be mentioned in books but they have already been extinct as habitats continue to be destroyed. The Panthera tigris balica, which is popularly known as the Bali tiger, used to be limited to Bali, which is an Indonesian island. When it still existed, the Bali tiger was the smallest tiger subspecies, with the males weighing 90 to 100 kilograms (200 to 220 pounds) and the females weighing 65 to 80 kilograms (140 to 180 pounds). It is unfortunate that people can no longer appreciate the beauty of a Bali tiger in its compact size. The tigers have become extinct because of hunting. The last of its kind, which is an adult female, was believed to have been hunted and killed in Sumbar Kima.

Back in September 37, 1937, there was no Bali tiger left captive in West Bali. However, today, it should be noted that the tiger is still regarded with importance in Balinese Hinduism.