Something for young scientists to aspire to …

Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs, and that kids can change the world. And he knows something about both of those: When he was 14, he built a working fusion reactor in his parents’ garage.

Lab-grown organ transplanted into rats

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have fitted rats with kidneys that were grown in a lab from stripped-down kidney scaffolds. When transplanted, these ‘bioengineered’ organs starting filtering the rodents’ blood and making urine just as a normal kidney would.

AMAZING !!!

Learn more here, here or here.

Amazing facts about the human body

ATOM COUNT
It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

OTHER LIFE
On sheer count of cells, there is more bacterial life inside you than human. There are around 10 trillion of your own cells, but 10 times more bacteria. Many of the bacteria that call you home are friendly in the sense that they don’t do any harm. Some are beneficial.

ATOMIC COLLAPSE
The atoms that make up your body are mostly empty space, so despite there being so many of them, without that space you would compress into a tiny volume. The nucleus that makes up the vast bulk of the matter in an atom is so much smaller than the whole structure that it is comparable to the size of a fly in a cathedral. If you lost all your empty atomic space, your body would fit into a cube less than 1/500th of a centimetre on each side. Neutron stars are made up of matter that has undergone exactly this kind of compression. In a single cubic centimetre of neutron star material there are around 100 million tons of matter.

FUR LOSS
It might seem hard to believe, but we have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee, it’s just that our hairs are useless, so fine they are almost invisible. We aren’t sure quite why we lost our protective fur. It has been suggested that it may have been to help early humans sweat more easily, or to make life harder for parasites such as lice and ticks, or even because our ancestors were partly aquatic.

Lots more here.

If you removed all ships from the sea …

How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth’s waters?

Archimedes’ principle tells us that the water displaced by a ship weighs as much as the ship itself. If we can figure out the total weight of all the world’s ships, we can figure out how much water they’re displacing, then divide that volume by the surface area of the ocean to figure out how much the water level would drop.

Weighing ships is confusing. There are a bunch of different measurements of the size of a ship, and many of them, like gross tonnage, are actually measures of the volume of the ship’s rooms and other internal spaces, not its weight.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development publishes estimates of the size of the world shipping fleet.

What the UNCTD publishes is “deadweight tonnage”, which is the maximum weight of the ship’s fuel, cargo, and crew. What we want is “displacement”. Unfortunately, comprehensive numbers for displacement are harder to find.

Fortunately, we can estimate it. Brian Barrass’s book Ship Design and Performance for Masters and Mates gives a table of ratios of deadweight tonnage to displacement for different types of ships.

Extrapolating from the last few years of UNCTD data, and using the coefficients from the book, suggests that the world fleet weighs about 2.15 billion tons when fully loaded.

A ton of water is about a cubic meter. 2.15 billion cubic meters divided by the surface area of the oceans equals about 6 microns (0.006 mm).

So there you go, if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth’s waters the sea level would fall by about six microns—slightly more than the diameter of a strand of spider silk. Learn more here.

Another 10 Bets You’ll Never Lose

Amazing Time-Lapse Video

Heaven meets the Earth in this moving time-lapse video showing gorgeous landscapes underneath an ever-changing night sky.

“Within Two Worlds” was created by photographer Brad Goldpaint. The film features shooting comets, a giant tilting Milky Way, and glowing purple and pink auroras peeking over the horizon. Stunning sequences watch day turn to night and night to day, as overhead stars shine their beautiful light above mountains, forests, and waterfalls.

Six famous thought experiments explained quickly

A paradox is something that cannot be true but also cannot be false. For example:

The Scientific Power of Thought

The power of the mind and it’s ability to affect physical change may shock you! Find out how simply imagining can make it so.

An enormous rain drop

What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?

We’ll imagine our storm measures 100 kilometers on each side and has a high total precipitable water (TPW) content of 6 centimeters. This means the water in our rainstorm would have a volume of:

100km²×6cm=0.6km³

That water would weigh 600 million tons (which happens to be about the current weight of our species). Normally, a portion of this water would fall, scattered, as rain—at most, 6 centimeters of it.

In this storm, all that water instead condenses into one giant drop, a sphere of water over a kilometer in diameter.

The water would hit the ground moving at over 200 m/s (450 mph). Right under the point of impact, the air is unable to rush out of the way fast enough, and the compression heats it so quickly that the grass would catch fire if it had time.

Fortunately for the grass, this heat lasts only a few milliseconds because it’s doused by the arrival of a lot of cold water. Unfortunately for the grass, the cold water is moving at over half the speed of sound.

The wall of water expands outward kilometer by kilometer, ripping up trees, houses, and topsoil as it goes. The house, porch, and old-timers are obliterated in an instant. Everything within a few kilometers is completely destroyed, leaving a pool of mud down to bedrock. The splash continues outward, demolishing all structures out to distances of 20 or 30 kilometers. At this distance, areas shielded by mountains or ridges are protected, and the flood begins to flow along natural valleys and waterways.

Learn more here.

How to build the Perfect Sandcastle

Everyone knows the secret to building sandcastles is a little water. But while too little leaves the sand useless, too much makes it heavy enough to cause disastrous landslides. Fortunately, scientists have unravelled the secrets behind sandcastle building for you.

While it might sound flippant, building the best structures out of sand is a tricky civil engineering problem. That’s why a team of scientists set to a complex series of experiments involving theoretical and practical modelling of sand castles.

By testing different levels of sand wetness, they studied how columns of sand buckled as they were built higher and higher. Eventually, they found that there’s an optimum sand wetness: you should be aiming to have a liquid volume fraction of 1 per cent. That means that, by volume, you need to combine 99 parts of perfectly dry sand with 1 part water to build the ultimate castle. Learn more here or here.