My Science School

Tropical rainforests support the greatest diversity of living organisms on Earth. Although they cover less than 2 percent of Earth’s surface, rainforests house more than 50 percent of all plants and animals found on land.

The rainforest is home to many plants and animals. According to The Nature Conservancy, a 4-square-mile (2,560 acres) area of rainforest contains as many as 1,500 flowering plants, 750 species of trees, 400 species of birds and 150 species of butterflies. The Amazon rainforest alone contains around 10 percent of the world's known species. 

Just about every type of animal lives in rainforests. In fact, though rainforests cover less than 2 percent of Earth's total surface area, they are home to 50 percent of Earth's plants and animals, according to The Nature Conservancy. For example, rhinoceroses, deer, leopards, gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, armadillos and even bears can be found living in rainforests across the world.

Some of the animals are also unusual. For example, the tapir is a mammal that looks like a mix between an anteater and a pig and can be found in the rainforests of South America and Asia. The stunning silverback gorilla lives in the rainforest of the Central African Republic. Forest giraffes, or okapi, a strange-looking cross between a horse and a zebra, also inhabit the African rainforest.

Credit : Live Science 

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The speed of light is approximately 1,079,000,000 kilometers/hour (670,600,000 miles/hour). On average, the Sun is 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away from Earth. This means that it takes a photon of light about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the Sun to Earth.

Objects in our universe are extremely far away. They’re so far away that kilometers or miles aren’t a useful measure of their distance. So we speak of space objects in terms of light-years, the distance light travels in a year. Light is the fastest-moving stuff in our universe. It travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/sec). And thus a light-year is 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers).

But stars and nebulae – not to mention distant galaxies – are vastly farther than one light-year away. And, if we try to express a star’s distance in miles or kilometers, we soon end up with impossibly huge numbers. Yet miles and kilometers are what most of us use to comprehend the distance from one place on Earth to another. In the late 20th century astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr. – author of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook – devised an ingenious way to portray the distance of light-years in terms of miles and kilometers.

Credit : Earth Sky

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According to the World Meteorological Organization, Yuma (Arizona) is the sunniest place on earth. It has a total of 11 hours of sunlight in winter and up to 13 in summer. This means Yuma experiences an average of 4,015 hours of sunshine per year.

At first this sounds fantastic. But it really isn’t that pleasant, since its 90,000+ inhabitants have to combat an arid climate, typical of the Sonora desert, which it forms part of.

Rainfall does not exceed 200mm per year and temperatures exceed 40°C practically 100 days per year. It is a furnace that would leave you wishing for a winter’s rainy afternoon.

The wide-open spaces in and around Yuma lend themselves perfectly to outdoor adventures in the desert or on the Colorado River. Social distancing? No problem! Fresh air and nature? Lots of it! Sunny and warm weather? Undoubtedly, since Yuma is the Sunniest City on Earth, according to Guinness World Records.

If you want rugged outdoor adventure, Yuma's the perfect jumping-off spot to hundreds of square miles of wilderness in the Imperial, Kofa and Cibola National Wildlife Refuges.  Hiking, mountain biking, camping, bird watching, and learning more about desert plants and animals are all out there for exploring.

If in-town adventures are more to your liking, just steps from downtown, parklands next to the Colorado River are a gleaming necklace, studded with pearls of spacious and beautifully-tended attractions, monuments, beaches, and two must-see historic state parks. You can hike or jog on paved or woodchipped or dirt paths along the riverfront, and there are many family-friendly features such as a playground, beaches, and picnic ramadas. The East and West Wetlands are the pride of Yuma, having been restored to natural habitat from what had been a homeless camp and the city dump in the past century. Now a point of civic pride for local Yumans, the riverfront parks make it easy to experience Yuma naturally!

Credit : Visit Yuma

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An annular eclipse, though a rare and amazing sight, is far different from a total one. The sky will darken ... somewhat; a sort of weird "counterfeit twilight" since so much of the sun still shows. The annular eclipse is a subspecies of a partial eclipse, not total. The maximum duration for an annular eclipse is 12 minutes 30 seconds.

However, an annular solar eclipse is similar to a total eclipse in that the moon appears to pass centrally across the sun. The difference is, the moon is too small to cover the disk of the sun completely. Because the moon circles Earth in an elliptical orbit, its distance from Earth can vary from 221,457 miles to 252,712 miles. But the dark shadow cone of the moon's umbra can extend out for no longer than 235,700 miles; that's less than the moon's average distance from Earth.

So if the moon is at some greater distance, the tip of the umbra does not reach Earth. During such an eclipse, the antumbra, a theoretical continuation of the umbra, reaches the ground, and anyone situated within it can look up past either side of the umbra and see an annulus, or "ring of fire" around the moon. A good analogy is putting a penny atop a nickel, the penny being the moon, the nickel being the sun.

Credit : Space.com 

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Angel Falls, Spanish Salto Angel, also called Salto Churun Meru, waterfall in the Guiana Highlands in Bolívar state, southeastern Venezuela, on the Churun River, a tributary of the i, 160 miles (260 km) southeast of Ciudad Bolívar. The highest waterfall in the world, the cataract drops 3,212 feet (979 metres) and is 500 feet (150 metres) wide at the base. It leaps from a flat-topped plateau, Auyan-Tepui(“Devils Mountain”), barely making contact with the sheer face. The falls are located in Canaima National Park, and, because of the dense jungle surrounding the falls, they are best seen from the air.

The falls, first sighted by outsiders in the 1930s, were named for James Angel, an American adventurer who crash-landed his plane on a nearby mesa in 1937. In late 2009 Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chavez declared that the falls should be referred to as Kerepakupai Meru, an indigenous name.

Angel falls has been in its current location for thousands of years. It will remain there until gravity pulls another block of the highly fractured sandstone away from the mountain. The block will fall to the ground and explode into a catastrophic rain of rock. The river will flow without interruption, but the position of the waterfall will change.

Credit : Britannica

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The Dead Sea is an inland lake 50km long by 15km wide in the Middle East between the West Bank* and Jordan. The Jordan River is the main source of the Dead Sea water.

It is about 430m below sea level, the lowest point on the surface of the Earth. The water level has been dropping even lower for the past 60 or so years, mostly because river water is being used elsewhere rather than flowing into the Dead Sea. It drops about 1m each year.

It’s a popular place for people to have a holiday, partly because it’s in the desert, which means lots of hot, sunny days.

Hotels and resorts line the shores, except that as the water level drops, the shoreline moves further away from the buildings. Some hotels that were on the shore are now more than a kilometre from the water.

It’s called the Dead Sea because it is full of mineral* compounds* (called salts). Dead Sea water is perhaps 10 times as salty as open ocean seawater and nothing much can survive in it.

Exactly how salty it is varies through the depth of the lake and with how much water is flowing in from the Jordan River and how much water is evaporating* (leaving salt behind).

It is so salty that bacteria is the only living thing that can survive. Fish that come in with river water quickly die.

Plants called halophytes that are adapted to extreme salt grow here and there along the shoreline.

Fish, birds and even ibex and leopards gather around several oases* fed by fresh spring water. About 500 million birds visit on their biannual* migration between Africa and Europe, but as the water level drops, the oases are drying up.

Credit : KidsNews 

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The Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara is said to have broken his own world record for the largest wave surfed when he caught a wave reported to be around 100ft off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal.

If the claims are verified, it will mean that McNamara, who was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts but whose family moved to Hawaii's North Shore when he was aged 11, has beaten his previous record, which was also set at Nazaré.

When McNamara set that record in 2011, he was accompanied by fellow big-wave surfers Andrew Cotton and Alastair Mennie and at the time Mennie said that the conditions were "perfect" for McNamara whom he described as "inspiring".

"Everything was perfect, the weather, the waves," Mennie said. "Cotty and I surfed two big waves of about 60ft and then, when Garrett was ready came a canyon wave of over 90ft. The jet ski was the best place to see him riding the biggest wave I've ever seen. It was amazing. Most people would be scared but Garrett was controlling everything in the critical part of the wave. It was an inspiring ride by an inspiring surfer."

Credit : The Guardian 

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Australia is 0.82 times as big as Sahara Desert. Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world’s sixth-largest country by total area. The population of 26 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard.

The Sahara is a desert on the African continent. With an area of 9,200,000 square kilometres (3,600,000 sq mi), it is the largest hot desert in the world and the third largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic.

The desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south, it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan Region of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Credit : Map Fight

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On 13 September 1922, a high temperature of 58.0 °C (136.4 °F) was recorded in Al-Aziziyah This was long considered the highest temperature ever measured on Earth, however this record was deemed illegitimate in 2012 after an investigation by the WMO.

The Libyan temperature had been recorded on Sept. 13, 1922, at an Italian army base. It had long stood out as an oddity, even though Libya certainly sees hot temperatures: El Azizia is located about 35 miles southwest of Tripoli, which lies on the Mediterranean coast. The waters would have a tempering influence on temperatures in the area, all of which weren't nearly as high as the record temperature.

"When we compared his [the thermometer reader's] observations to surrounding areas and to other measurements made before and after the 1922 reading, they simply didn't match up," said team member Randy Cerveny, of Arizona State University, in a statement.

Cerveny and the other members of the international team dug through historical records to evaluate the plausibility of the temperature.

The team was able to find and locate the original log book in which the temperature was recorded. From it and other sources they were able to identify five major problems with the record temperature: it was made a new and untrained observer; it was measured with an instrument that was antiquated even at that time; the observation site wasn't representative of its surroundings; it didn't match other temperatures measured in the area; and it didn't match later temperatures taken at the site.

Credit : Live Science 

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The Mariana Trench is a crescent-shaped trench in the Western Pacific, just east of the Mariana Islands near Guam. The region surrounding the trench is noteworthy for many unique environments. The Mariana Trench contains the deepest known points on Earth, vents bubbling up liquid sulfur and carbon dioxide, active mud volcanoes and marine life adapted to pressures 1,000 times that at sea level.

The Challenger Deep, in the southern end of the Mariana Trench (sometimes called the Marianas Trench), is the deepest spot in the ocean. Its depth is difficult to measure from the surface, but modern estimates vary by less than 1,000 feet (305 meters).

In 2010, the Challenger Deep was pegged at 36,070 feet (10,994 m), as measured with sounds pulses sent through the ocean during a 2010 survey by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In 2012, film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron descended to the bottom of Challenger Deep, briefly reaching 35,756 feet (10,898 m) during the 2012 expedition. But he could have gone a little deeper. A high-resolution seafloor mapping survey published in 2014 by researchers from the University of New Hampshire said the Challenger Deep bottoms out at 36,037 feet (10,984 m).

The ocean's second-deepest place is also in the Mariana Trench. The Sirena Deep, which lies 124 miles (200 kilometers) to the east of Challenger Deep, is a bruising 35,462 feet deep (10,809 m).

By comparison, Mount Everest stands at 29,026 feet (8,848 m) above sea level, meaning the deepest part of the Mariana Trench is 7,044 feet (2,147 m) deeper than Everest is tall.

Credit : Live Science

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As our planet makes its annual circuit around the sun, parts of the globe experience dramatic seasonal swings thanks to the tilt of Earth’s axis. Between April and September, the northern hemisphere is tipped toward the sun, resulting in longer days and warmer weather. Destinations near and north of the Arctic Circle experience an astronomical phenomenon: the midnight sun.

The best place in Norway to revel in the sunshine is as far north as possible: Longyearbyen on the Svalbard archipelago, where the sun doesn’t set for four months. Head to Svalbard Bryggeri, a craft brewery on the Longyearbyen waterfront, to sip on a cold beer while enjoying ocean views. Book a wildlife watching cruise online before you go, and keep an eye out for whales and walrus, which are more common during the summer months.

When to go: The sun doesn’t set between mid-April and mid-July.
Where to stay: Stay at Funken Lodge for glacier views, or book the rustic Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg, which is within walking distance from everything in town.

Credit : National Geographic

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The Nile is credited as the longest river in the world. Its main source is Lake Victoria in east central Africa. From its farthest stream in Burundi, it extends 6,695 km (4,160 miles) in length.

The two longest rivers in the world are the Nile, flowing into the Mediterranean, and the Amazon, flowing into the South Atlantic. Which is the longer is more a matter of definition than simple measurement.

Not until 1971 was the true source of the Amazon discovered, by Loren McIntyre (USA) in the snow-covered Andes of southern Peru.

The Amazon begins with snowbound lakes and brooks-the actual source has been named Laguna McIntyre-which converge to form the Apurimac.

This joins other streams to become the Ene, the Tambo and then the Ucayali. From the confluence of the Ucayali and the Marañón the river is called the Amazon for the final 3,700 km (2,300 miles) as it flows through Brazil into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Amazon has several mouths, which widen towards the sea, so that the exact point where the river ends is uncertain. If the Par estuary (the most distant mouth) is counted, its length is approximately 6,750 km (4,195 miles).

Credit : Guinness World Records

Picture Credit : Google