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Inspired by Tighty's post related to the pushing of the Milky Way across the galaxy I thought we could have a thread to post any and all Science related news. As I'm sure some of you know I am a Science teacher by trade and run a Science debate club at my school for the future medical students and engineers in our 6th form.

To give you a taste, we discussed whether Science has a responsibility to explore the unexplored corners of our Earth, such as the Moville Cave in Romania, which despite having a poisonous atmosphere and having been isolated from the rest of the world for 5.5 million years, appears to be teeming with life.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150904-the-bizarre-beasts-living-in-romanias-poison-cave

I'm always looking for topics we can discuss and if anyone comes across anything interesting on the travels across the interweb please post it in this thread.

Here's a little something my students have had fun with - I defy anyone to spend 5 minutes with this and not have their minds blown.

http://htwins.net/scale2/

A recent topic for discussion was a thought experiment I set the class :

If we poured a glass of water into the North Sea and returned one year later and scooped up a glass of water from the sea, what is the likelihood of there being at least one molecule of water from the original glass in there?

I definitely lost hard. That's incredible!

i could hear a dawkins suffix to the title of the thread in my head when i first read it:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fh_liyhIH8

re the molecules in the ocean question, i am sure i read that there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the worlds oceans. And that when you drink a glass of water you are almost certainly ingesting water molecules that passed through hitler's urinary tract. I may have remember some of the details, but that was the thrust of the article

Great thread.

Subscribed.

excellent

This'll be terrific, thanks Hutch.

woooooooooooooooooow, link sent to Grandkids  TY

My fiancee is a final year Biology student at Imperial College London she is hoping to get the option to write a science blog on bad science on TV and in film. If she gets this option and people would be interested I'll post the link here.

'Fun' biology fact of the day: the clinical symptoms of Cholera aren't caused by the bacteria Vibrio cholerae, they are instead caused by a virus that infects the bacteria causing it to release the cholera toxin.

Also here's an interesting video - more interesting when someone explains what is going on as you're going through but I think you can still appreciate the imagery without :)
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwnw4vg9I5Q

^^^

Have read more books than enough o cells, DNA & so forth, but I still find it impossible to grasp the smallness of these things.

For perspective, the human body contains ten trillion cells. And there is stuff inside cells. Think how small THAT must be.

Same applies to DNA. I don't know how accurate this is, but.....

Genes are composed of DNA, and it is predicted that there are over 3 billion basepairs in the human genome. Humans have approximately 10 trillion cells, so if you were to line all of the DNA found in every cell of a human body it would stretch from the earth to the sun 100 times

Imagine the scene............ you are a single celled organism that inconveniently has half its life cycle in the human circulatory system and half in its insect vector. How do you make sure that passing mosquitoes feed on the human you're currently residing in?

Why make a molecule that makes the infected human blood extra tasty of course!

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/malaria-molecule-makes-blood-extra-alluring-mosquitoes?tgt=nr

You are indeed correct sir. We used some mathematical wizardry involving Avagadro's constant and calculated that the number of molecules of water in my Periodic Table mug was vastly bigger than the number of mugfuls of water in the North Sea.

Of course, we cannot take diffusion into account and we can only ever calculate a probability based answer as the molecules will always be in random motion. Awkward buggers.

Fantastic video! Would definitely be interested in reading your fiance's blog. I used to get so mad at shows like early CSI with their incorrect DNA stuff!

Can't contribute much, but I'm in awe reading this tuff.

This was excellent - explained in a way even I could grasp, but not dumbed down too much.

The Presenter was very likeable, & it was a great piece of TV.

Uranium - twisting the dragons tail


http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x323med

This might not br correct, but from my observation, a red blood cell is about midway between the biggest and smallest things we can measure.

Jon, I'm struggling to understand how they would accept this. On the face of it, it looks like very easy pop-science. "They presented this thing, which is stupidly wrong. The real scientific position is this." Seems more like a popular magazine article than a valid science degree proposal. Happy for you to explain what I am missing.

On a logarithmic scale?

Before they start their final literature dissertation they have a coursework only "Science Communication" course - it's part of that. The idea is how to communicate complex science to the general public e.g. this on the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38955871 which features one of her professors (and something that might come up in the exams she has before the science communication course).

So in a way pop science is kind of the point - but that's why she also has to wait and see if it's allowed; she has to do it to a certain level of complexity.

Rather than "They presented this thing, which is stupidly wrong. The real scientific position is this..." the idea would be more - "here's a science lesson in blog form - and the introduction is how they do it wrong on TV".

Alright. Good luck to her.

Contact lenses.

I'm very very short sighted, could qualify as partially sighted. Can just about make out the big single letter on the chart if I squint - and move closer. But put a small rigid piece of plastic in my eye and I have better than 20/20 vision.

Properly awesome.

No, just roughly from where I'm standing.

I double checked for you and I make you right

bump

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBv42FWgV54

Ha, love it.

NASA are going to have a big press conference tomorrow where they are going to announce Wenger is leaving Arsenal some big discovery about planets outside of our solar system

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-host-news-conference-on-discovery-beyond-our-solar-system

NASA's 'discovery beyond our solar system' will reveal location of Chris Waddle's Italia 90 penalty

Borrowed from Newsthump :)

Hahahaha

Popcorn ready for this one!

My school is one of the few in our area to offer the International Bacclaureate as an alternative option to A levels. Pupils study a broader curriculum ( 6 subjects) in different categories. All of the group 4 are Sciences and DT.

Part and parcel of this is the 'Group 4 Project' that we are running on March 4th. Pupils are divided into mixed teams ( Bio/Chem/Phys/DT) and issued a challenge. This year's was set by one of our Physicists.

Teams will be given 10 sheets of paper, cotton thread, straws and access to a glue gun and paper. The challenge........... build a turbine capable of lifting the largest mass to a height of 50cm. I suspect I know the best way to do this but am happy to leave the question open to the combined intelligence of the Blonde community. If I have time on the day perhaps I will submit an anonymous entry into the competition and see if I ( we ) win.

Chronic pain is worsened by the few options available to the unfortunate people who suffer from this and doctors have long lamented the few options available to them.

Step (or slither?) forward Conus regius, a small humble species of marine snail. It produces a chemical that provides a long lasting pain relief that offers much safer alternatives to opiates.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39028557?ocid=socialflow_twitter

Thrilling discovery of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby star

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/22/thrilling-discovery-of-seven-earth-sized-planets-discovered-orbiting-trappist-1-star?CMP=twt_gu

Not sure I'd call it "thrilling", Rich.

They are an impressive distance away though - 40 light years, or 235 trillion miles. 

Still a huge potential story though, despite the fact that none of us will live to see the results of any subsequent investigations.

I caught the piece on BBC news this morning which used a scale model of the solar system to give an idea of scale.  Sun to Pluto were a few feet apart on the model (in a building in Cheshire).  One that scale these systems would be somewhere beyond Cardiff.

Tikay will change his tune if they've got a couple train stations ;)

Ok, so i stumbled across a video about Graham's Number which is an upper bound to the number of dimensions a hyper cube can exist whereby if you coloured all its lines using two colours youcannpot avoid having a face all the same colour.

so it is a number that is part of a solution to a mathematical problem.

but the number is huge.

how huge? full write up https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html

some cliffs:

consider a googol. 1 followed by 100 zeros.

that is pretty big. imagine filling the universe with grains of sand. you could fill the universe with sand 10 billion times over with a googol grains of sand.

a googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros.

imagine trying to write down the digits of a googolpex :  you have the universe filled with grains of sand. you would have to write 10 billion zeros on each grain of sand to be able to fit a numerical representation of a googolplex into the observable universe. it would take two lifetimes to complete one grain of sand.

grahams number dwarfs a googolplex.

-------------------------------------------------------

you can begin to represent it with arrow notation. let ^ = an arrowe

3^3 = 3 to the power of 3 = 27

3^^3 = 3^(3^3) = 3 to the power of 27 = about 7.6 TRILLION

so adding one arrowe moves the number from 27 to 7 trillion.

what about three arrowes

3^^^3 = 3^^(3^^)

this is 3 with a stack of threes above it 7.6 trilllion threes long.

for compassion a tower of three 3;s is 7.6 trillion. a tower with 7.6 trillion 3's yields a number that is 3.6 trillion diigits long. a googol [the niumber of grains to be able to fill the universe 10 billion times over) is 100 digits long

3^^^^3 leads to a tower of 3's that would stretch to the sun if written down. again to compare about 10 centimeters of that tower would drawf a googolplex. this tower is 150 trillion meters long.

4 arrows is not comprehensible. each arrowe makes the number more unintelligable to our brains and at four arrowes we have gone from 27 to the universe not being big enough to contain the number, literally or poetically.

but 3^^^^3 is only the start of grahams number:

----------------------------

let 3^^^^3 = G1 : a terrifying number that we cannot describe

G1 = the number of ARROWS between the 3's :  3^^^^G1^^^3

and that = G2 which is the number of arrows between the 3's in G3 etc etc

grahams number = G64

we don't know how many digits are in this number. the universe could not contain the number of digits of the number which describes the number of digits in the number which describes the number of digits Grahams number. you can iterate that by the number of atoms in the universe before you get to a number that would fit into the universe.

crazy crazy number.

BUT

we know it is an odd number. and we know it ends in a 7

and the lower bound of the n dimenisions in the problem = 12

so somewhere between 12 and Graham's Number = the answer to the problem he was trying to solve

maths eh, bloody hell