Dr Karl, a famous Australian science presenter, has summarised the cockroach’s lack of nuclear hardiness. We should all be worried about the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans taking over the world – not cockroaches.
And for Myth Buster fans, you’ll find similar conclusions in their experiments. They found it ‘plausible‘, but dependant on the level of radiation.
Under normal circumstances this would be my version of hell, but a couple of years ago when we holidayed in Rio I was on a mission to hear the song during my travels. Surprisingly I didn’t have to go far or do anything special. I heard that song 3 times in one day!
I can tell that you’re now humming away silently. Well click here and chillax to Astrud Gilberto. I also found this interesting write up on the story behind the song. Such a great hit at the time, it became the second most popular recorded song – just behind The Beetles ‘Yesterday’.
Not quite hanging 10, but pretty cool – check out this image I found on the wonderful world wide net.
I promised last time I posted the first of the ‘Evil Aliens’, I’d come back sometime later to answer the question I posed – Can you guess 2 scientific errors in the making of this cartoon? True to form, the smart readers out there not only came up with my answers, but also some of their own (see comments section on original post).
My two thoughts were:
Hugh was inspired by the following mathematical discovery, in the making of this winning caption above and this other entry ‘Bill and Ben didn’t really understand the Double Bubble Conjecture, but they did throw themselves wholeheartedly into a practical demonstration.’
“When two round soap bubbles come together, they form a double bubble as on the right in Figure 1. Unless the two bubbles are the same size, the surface between them bows a bit into the larger bubble. The separating surface meets each of the two bubbles at 120 degrees. This precise shape is now known to have less area than any other way to enclose and separate the same two volumes of air, even wild possibilities as on the left in Figure 1, in which the second bubble wraps around the first, and a tiny separate part of the first wraps around the second. Such wild possibilities are shown to be unstable by a new argument which involves rotating different portions of the bubble around a carefully chosen axis at different rates. The breakthrough came while Morgan was visiting Ritoré and Ros at the University of Granada last spring. Their work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Spanish scientific research foundation DGICYT.” (Link) Got nothing to do tonight? Why not read the paper?
Captain Cook is famous for discovering Australia for England. They thought it would make a great gaol for the over flooding prisons back in the motherland…and so modern Australia was born. A few facts about the Captain:
I wonder if Ben stopped to dine in the restaurant just next door to this useful sign, and patiently awaited further expansion of the universe? Ever read the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Universe? I loved it. The second book in the trilogy of 5 books is ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’.
And for a bit of trivia. Fans of the Hitch Hikers story celebrate the author Douglas Adams on 25 May each year, by carrying the ‘Do not panic’ towel. To find out more about the significance of the towel, check out Wiki.
