"The center of the Milky Way," image credit: NASA/CXC/UMass Amherst/Q.D.Wang et al. Click on image to learn more.
There are many ways to look at 10-15. This power of ten is:
Saturn's rings during equinox. Click image to learn more. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Saturn’s rings are 500,000 miles (10+05) or 2,640,000,000 feet (10+09) in circumference but only about one foot thick.
Learn more about Saturn at SpaceFacts.net
Image from Alpha Building Consultants
According to The Times of India, in 2010 a group of German physicists claimed “to have measured the shortest-ever time interval by discovering the tiniest duration an electron takes to leave the atom.”
The scientists found that “when light is absorbed by atoms, the electrons become excited and get ejected from the atom if the photons carry sufficient energy.” However, when electrons are separated from atoms there is a time delay of 20 attoseconds, “which they claim is the shortest time interval measured to date.”
Reasonably, it is a bit difficult for us to wrap our heads around such a short interval of time, so consider this: one attosecond is one billionth of one billionth of a second. It can be written as 1 as, 0.000000000000000001 seconds, 10-18 seconds, or described as one quintillionth of a second. Still fuzzy?
To really help us envision this length of time, the BBC News painted this picture: “If 100 attoseconds is stretched so that it lasts one second, one second would last 300 million years on the same scale.”
from Scale of the Universe, an interactive website
As many of you know, Charles and Ray’s film Powers of Ten takes the viewer on an adventure of magnitudes. It is a journey that shouldn’t be missed.
This blog, which is based on the Eameses’ film, is another way to look at the relative size of things in the universe. It explores powers of ten through the lens of current events, scientific discoveries, and even the mundane–say, the amount of caffeine in your average cup of coffee (which happens to be 10-04 kg).
If you want to consider scale in another way still, check out a remarkably fun, visual and interactive website called Scale of the Universe, developed by Cary Huang at htwins. This site allows you to “zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime and learn about everything in between.”
Three Gorges Dam, Sandouping, Hubei Province, China. Photograph by w:User:Nowozin. File from Wikimedia Commons
China’s Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. Built from 30 million cubic meters of concrete (10+07), it stands 606 feet tall (10+02) and spans 1.5 miles across.
While the Dam’s construction employed 60,000 workers (10+04), it also displaced 1.3 million people (10+06), leveled 1,350 towns (10+03) and destroyed 1,200 existing archeological sites–along with another 8,000 that were yet to be explored.
It was estimated in 1992 that the Dam would cost $8.3 billion to build. However, at the time of its 2009 completion, China reported to have spent $23 billion (10+10), while others say the figure might have been as high as $88 billion.
The Three Gorges Dam holds back 10 trillion gallons of water (10+13) and produces roughly 84 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity a year. That’s enough energy for one tenth of China’s entire population; nonetheless, this controversial project continues to raise concerns about the social, environmental and public safety impacts of such a large-scale venture.
Hats off to: Facts and Details, The Design Observer Group, and the Smart Museum of Art, whose curator, Wu Hung, organized the exhibition Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art.
A detailed image of Messier 9, a globular star cluster. Image credit: NASA & ESA
“The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250,000 [10+05] individual stars shining in it.
Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25,000 light-years [or 1.47 x 10+17 miles] from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic center pull it slightly out of shape.
Globular clusters are thought to harbor some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, born when the Universe was just a small fraction of its current age. As well as being far older than the sun—around twice its age [and therefore 9 billion or 10+09 years old]—the stars of Messier 9 also have a markedly different composition, and are enriched with far fewer heavier elements than the sun.”
Learn more about Messier 9 at NASA.gov by clicking here.
Image courtesy of openclipart.org
On March 22, 2012, people across the globe celebrated World Water Day. Below are some interesting water facts from PBS.org and treehugger.com.
2.2 million (10+06) people die every year from diseases related to unsafe drinking water.
On average, humans consume 16,000 gallons (10+04) of water in a lifetime–that’s 256,000 8oz glasses (10+05).
The surface area of the Earth is 5.1006 x 10+08 km2. 70% of Earth is covered by water, but only 2.5% of that is fresh water while the other 97.5% is salt water.
1.2 billion people (10+09) don’t have access safe drinking water and half the world’s population is without adequate water purification systems.
500,000 tons (10+05) of pollutants enter U.S. lakes and rivers every single day. That’s 365 billion pounds (10+11) each year.
Out of 191 of our world’s nations, 10 of them share 65% of the world’s annual water resources. Americans take the cake, using 2,500 cubic liters of water each year, or double the world’s average. That is enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool for each and every one of us.
Image credit: Aggleton's Photostream
Recipe for Giada de Laurentiis’ Double Chocolate Chip Cookies:
For baking directions, click here. Be sure to let us know how they turn out!
Yaling Yang of the University of Southern California says, "For normal people, from age 2 to age 10 there is a big jump in their white matter, and actually that's the same age that they develop the skill to lie." Pinocchio must have more white matter in his brain than other children (or fictional characters for that matter).
Consider this scenario: as you leave work one day, an annoying co-worker corners you and asks you out on a date. As quickly as possible, you have to come up with an excuse for why you can’t go. What would you say? How quickly could you make up a story? How convincing would it be? According to NPR’s Radio Lab, the answers may lie in how much white matter you have in your brain.
While half of the brain is composed of gray matter that processes information, the other half is composed of white matter. White matter connects our ideas and thoughts by transporting electrical signals from one group of neurons to another. (“Each neuron forms about 1,000 [10+03] connections in the brain to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections” [10+12] according to Scientific American.)
A 2005 study led by Yaling Yang of the University of Southern California, and Adrian Raine, an expert on antisocial disorders, found “…evidence of structural differences in the brains of people with a history of persistent lying.” Specifically, people who tend to lie–or even those who can tell fanciful stories on the fly–have up to 20% more white matter than the average person.
To hear the complete story on Radio Lab (highly recommended), click here. To read the story, click here.
Using German marks as wallpaper, image courtesy of Bundesarchiv
Due to hyperinflation in the 1920s, one dollar was the equivalent of one trillion (10+12) German marks. Learn more at pbs.org.