My Science School

Earth’s most valuable gemstone is also its hardest natural surface. Only a diamond can scratch another diamond. These rugged rocks are forged 100 miles below your feet, where the molten temperatures and intense pressure of Earth’s mantle put the big squeeze on carbon, one of the planet’s most common elements (your body is nearly 20 percent carbon). Clusters of carbon atoms mash together over billions of years into a dense and rigid pattern. The end result: diamonds. Eventually, lava pushes veins of these rocks toward the surface, where they look more like pieces of glass than glittering  jewels – until a jeweler cuts and polishes them. Scientists figured out how to replicate this process in the 1950s to create itty-bitty artificial diamonds for the tips of cutting tools and industrial drills.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Carving through 277 miles (446 km) of Arizona, U.S.A, and up to a mile (1.6 km) deep in places, the Grand Canyon exposes millions of years of geological history in layers and layers of colorful rocks. The canyon is proof of the power of water over stone. The raging waters of the Colorado River (along with other forces) carved the canyon over millions of years – a process known as erosion.

The Grand Canyon pink rattlesnake is the most common snake in the park, startling hikers as it suns itself on rocks and sandy trails, searching for lizards to eat. Strong geologic evidence suggests the Colorado River broke out of the west end of the Grand Canyon about five million years ago, and no sooner.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Tiny creatures are responsible for the color of the cliffs, which stretch for eight miles (13 km) along England’s coastline. The cliffs began to form 70 million years ago when a shallow sea covered the region. Microscopic algae called coccolithophores floated in this sea. When they died, their white calcium skeletons sunk to the bottom, forming a white mud that grew thicker over time. When the seas receded, the mud dried into the white, crumbly chalk we see on the cliffs today.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Tourists flock to see this geyser blow its top – launching superheated water vapor up to 185 feet (56 m) high – every 92 minutes in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, U.S.A. Geysers are rare geological features, and Old Faithful is doubly rare for its regularity. Researchers were baffled by the punctuality of its eruption until recently, when they managed to chart its subterranean plumbing. It turns out that a large chamber beneath Old Faithful fills with steam bubbles boiled by the molten magma below. Those bubbles become trapped in a tube that leads to the geyser’s mouth. The tube gradually fills with water, the pressure builds, and – whoosh – Old Faithful erupts right on schedule.

 

Picture Credit : Google

You’ll find it 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from shore in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and California. Bleach bottles and old garbage bins bob amid fishing nets tangled with rotting sea creatures. Scientists call this swirling mass of trash the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. Twice the size of Texas by some estimates, it’s the world’s largest dump.

The seafloor beneath the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may also be an underwater trash heap. Oceanographers and ecologists recently discovered that about 70% of marine debris actually sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Soda bottles tumble into the surf. Garbage cans fall off ships. Grocery bags blow out to sea. About 260 million tons (235.9 mt) of plastic are produced each year worldwide, and as much as 10 percent of it ends up in the ocean. Unlike food and other organic garbage, plastic doesn’t dissolve; it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces that can stick around for centuries. Twine, toothbrushes, discarded toys, to-go bags, and less identifiable pieces of plastic drift around and around in an enormous ocean vortex created by currents, sort of like a slowly flushing toilet that never drains.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Dolphins, seals, whales, sea lions, manatees – these aquatic creatures live in world of water, but their drinking habits are more in line with those of camels and other animals of the desert. Salty seawater is as toxic to marine mammals as it is to us. When they need a drink, marine mammals grab a bite to eat, sucking the moisture from fish, squid, and other aquatic entrees. Seabirds such as terns and albatrosses, meanwhile, have special glands near their eyes that absorb the salt from seawater and flush it out their beaks.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Marine (our ocean) fish are stantly drinking to keep their bodies hydrated, but not all that water goes to their bellies. Some of the seawater passes over special salt-extracting cells in their gills; the rest is swallowed down. A saltwater fish’s gills and kidneys work overtime to process all the salt and flush it back into the ocean. Freshwater fish and sharks, meanwhile, don’t need to drink water. Water passing over their gills combined with the chemical makeup of the fluids in their bodies keep them hydrated.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Ah, you must be thinking of the ‘’Roswell incident,’’ in which an unidentified craft crashed near the small town of Roswell, New Mexico, U.S.A., in 1947.  Conspiracy theorists claim the craft was a flying saucer and that the U.S. military whisked away the wreckage along with the bodies of its alien pilots. The U.S. government released a report on Roswell in the mid-1990s claiming the debris was actually a crashed balloon in its top-secret ‘’Project Mogul,’’ which used high-altitude sensors to monitor for enemy nuclear-missile tests. ‘’Likely story,’’ claim the conspiracy theorists.

 

Picture Credit : Google

The frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa hides a liquid ocean that might contain alien creatures. Enceladus, one of Saturn’s many moons, has a sea the size of Lake Superior under its icy surface. Enceladus has some very surprising features that make it very interesting to astrobiologists. It is white and reflects almost 100% of the light that strikes it. It also has geysers on its surface that shoot out jets of water with ammonia and organic compounds. The temperatures near these geysers are likely very high. And Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has vast lakes of liquid methane. If life existed here, it would be truly alien.

 

Picture Credit : Google

 

Astronomers peering at Mars in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries saw signs of life everywhere. Seas! Continents! Canals that carried water to Martian farms! But modern telescopes, probes, and NASA landers ruined the fun by revealing our planetary neighbor’s dry details: It’s just a lifeless ball of red rock. Early astronomers had confused Mars’s ancient seas and riverbeds for signs of civilization.

 

Picture Credit : Google

By digging: Robotic rovers are sampling Martian soils for signs of ancient life.

By visiting: Probes are being dispatched to spots across the solar system that might harbor life today.

By looking: NASA’s Earth-and space-based telescopes have been scanning the galaxy for Earthlike exoplanets outside our solar system capable of supporting life.

By listening: In 1960, scientists began scanning the universe with special telescopes for radio signals from alien civilizations. The project is called SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It hasn’t picked up any alien broadcasts yet, but we haven’t stopped listening.

 

Picture Credit : Google

When the Viking I orbiter snapped pictures of Mars in 1976, one photo became a hit for its apparent portrayal of a mountainous Martian face resembling an Egyptian pharaoh. Eager to set the record straight on this crowd-pleasing Mars anomaly, NASA used a satellite to re-photograph the region in 1998 and 2001. The high-resolution images revealed a natural geological feature rather than a monument to Martian kind.

As the Viking 1 mission circled the red planet in search of a landing site for its sister ship, Viking 2, it snapped photos of Mars for engineers at NASA to study. On July 25, 1976, it captured the image of a pile of rocks that greatly resembled a human face. When NASA released the photograph almost a week later, they described it as a "huge rock formation in the center which resembled a human head."

 

Picture Credit : Google

 

 

Not so fast, Earthling! Outer space is a big place, and one thing scientists have learned from studying life on Earth is that organisms can thrive in all sorts of harsh environments. Meanwhile, astronomers have discovered nearly 4,000 Earthlike planets beyond our solar system and are spotting more every day. Some of these ‘’exo-planets’’ orbit their stars in the ‘’Goldilocks zone,’’ a distance that’s neither too hot nor too cold to support liquid water and possibly alien life. Who knows? Maybe an alien kid somewhere up there is wondering if you exist.

 

Picture Credit : Google

At first, free fall can feel like roaring down a hill in a roller coaster or one of those sudden-drop rides at amusement parks. But these rides are thrilling – and a little scary – because passengers can see the world whiz past them and the ground rush at their feet. Astronauts only see the inside of their spaceships or the distant Earth and stars outside the windows, so they don’t have any visual clues that they’re falling. To them, free fall feels as if gravity has switched off. The feeling can be disorienting – and a little sickening for some. Two-thirds of the passengers about NASA’s “Vomit Comet,’’ a plane that flies in slow dives to re-create weightlessness, toss their cookies during flight.

 

Picture Credit : Google