| 1561/ 250
million years ago, all the continents were joined into one huge
land mass called Pangaea. The part that is now Antarctica was
much closer to the equator, and it had tropical jungles. The
Hawaiian and Reunion Islands, as well as Yellowstone and Iceland,
are examples of hot spots that have remained in the same place
for much of the Earth's history. The reason being that they
are rooted solid in the Earth's deep mantle and cannot move.
1562/ It was Alfred Wegener,
an astronomer and explorer who argued that the continents
wandered about the globe. The new Earth conceived by Wegener
was half a century ahead of its time. He published his major
work describing continental drift in 1915; it was the mid-'60s
before geologists generally realized that he was, in essence,
right.
1563/ A hurricane has
a calm 'eye' in the centre, because no matter how strong the
rotating winds are around the centre, there must always be
a point where there is no wind at all. That point, and a circular
region around it, is the eye. A hurricane's rotating winds
are the result of the Coriolis force. Because the planet is
spinning, moving air masses drift to the right, north of the
equator and to the left, south of the equator. Within about
five degrees of the equator, the Coriolis force falls to almost
zero and hence no hurricane has ever been known to cross the
equator. Air pressure in a hurricane's eye is very low, often
lower than any (sea-level) pressures outside of such storms.
1564/ If a helium atom could be magnified to be as far across
as 30 football fields, its nucleus would only be the size
of a ping-pong ball.
1565/ When matter and
antimatter collide they release tremendous amounts of energy.
Some scientists dream of harnessing this energy to send spacecraft
to other solar systems orbiting distant stars. The first antihydrogen
antimatter has recently been created at the European Laboratory
for Particle Physics(CERN). The antihydrogen existed for a
mere 40 billionths of a second.
1566/ A robot-camera
named Jason was involved in the discovery and exploration
of the Titanic shipwreck in 1986.
1567/ The Comets that
pass close to the Sun originally came from one of two places;
either the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt. Approximately a
dozen 'new' Comets are discovered every year. Because they
are so far from the Sun, the Comets in the Oort Cloud take
over 1 million years to make a single revolution around the
Sun.
1568/ The man who is
believed to have invented the telescope was a Dutch spectacle
maker called Hans Lipperhey who died in 1619.
1569/ It was Galileo
who first used a telescope to show that Venus goes through
a complete set of phases, just like the moon.
1570/ The Keck telescope
in Hawaii can gather forty thousand times as much light as
the telescope that Galileo used.
1571/ Other than the
hydrogen and oxygen that make up the water molecules, the
most plentiful element in seawater is chlorine.
1572/ Even the ocean
has freshwater springs, and at these springs, freshwater can
be taken right off the surface of the sea. Absolutely pure
water is not actually clear and transparent in colour. It
is actually blue!
1573/ A 'singularity'
is a mathematical concept that can be visualised as a warped
region of spacetime where quantities may become infinite so
that ordinary physical laws cease to apply. The Big Bang is
thought to have originated from such a singularity.
1574/ The first practical
helicopter was the German Focke-Wulf FW61 in 1936.
1575/ Saturn has such
a low density that it would float if put in water!
1576/ The energy in the
sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000
years ago - it spent most of this time passing through the
dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach
us once it had left the Sun.
1577/ Jupiter's magnetic
field is so massive that it pours billions of Watts into Earths
magnetic field every day.
1578/ When a dolphin
is sick or injured, its cries of distress summon immediate
aid from other dolphins, who try to support it to the surface
so that it can breathe.
1579/ The International
Space Station (ISS) measures 361 feet from end to end. That's
the equivalent of the length of an American Football field.
The station will provide 46,000 cubic feet of pressurised
living and working space for engineers and scientists. Greater
than the volume of the passenger cabin and cargo hold of a
Boeing 747. The flight support software used to control the
onboard computers has 1.7 million lines of code.
1580/ There are about
40 volcanoes in the continental USA that have had activity
within the last 10 years. Most volcanoes are between 10,000
and 100,000 years old.
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facts...
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