That's Interesting Science

Question 1

When anything dies, whether plant or herbivore, carnivore or parasite, what happens to it?

Answer 1

It is eaten by scavengers like beetles, or it may decay eaten by bacteria and fungi. Yet again, the scavengers are powered by the sun.

Question 2

What is Solar energy transference?

How does it give plants and animals power?

Answer 2

All energy comes from the sun and is reused in different forms. The green leaf is a solar panel, absorbing the electromagnetic radiation (ER). The plants are eaten by herbivores (plant eaters). The energy is passed to the herbivore. The herbivore uses the energy to fuel their muscles as they walk, graze and fight. Then comes the carnivore to eat the herbivore. The energy is passed on yet again. Other animals, parasites, feed on the living bodies of both herbivores and carnivores. So now the insects are powered by the Sun.

Ref: Magic of Reality–Dawkins P. 138

Question 3

How does Solar Energy from millions of years ago, power our civilization today?

Ref: Magic of Reality. P. 140

Answer 3

Many plants and animals are not eaten but biodegrade. Over great amounts of time they become coal, oil and natural gas. These modern fuels power our cars, ships, trains etc. All that heat and energy came originally from the Sun, via the green leaves of plants that lived over 300 million years ago. [Think about this next time you gas up your car!]

Question 4

How does the Carbon Dioxide that the tree leaves drink in get released back into the atmosphere?

Answer 4

When cold weather comes, the leaf dies and falls to the ground. As the leaf degrades, it releases the CO2 it drank in when the leaf was young and new. The CO2 merges back into the atmosphere.

Question 5

If we claim that all our energy comes from the Sun, what about the Water Wheel’s energy we have used for power for hundreds of years?

Answer 5

Even all the water wheels energy came from the Sun indirectly from snow, ice and rain in the mountains and the formation of rain clouds all caused by the sun. [It is mind boggling how much energy we blindly use that is only possible because of the Sun.]

Question 6

How tiny is an Atom?

Answer 6

A dust mite can only be seen through a microscope, but as small as it is, even a dust mite contains more than a hundred trillion atoms.

Ref. Magic of Reality P95.

Question 7

How tiny is an Atom, example 2.

Answer 7

The period at this sentence end has over a trillion atoms.

Ref: Magic of Reality P91.

Question 8

What would be a clever response if someone says I don’t believe we are from monkeys?

Answer 8

If someone says you are from a monkey, you can take it billions of time further back to when we were stars.

Magic of Reality P. 30.

Question 9

Why was there never was a first person?

Caution. This is an Esoteric question.

Answer 9

Never was a first person because evolution takes millions of years. Our ancestors were Gibbons. It took a lot of evolving from Damaged DNA and replicating to evolve into the Hominid. Then the process repeated again to go from the Hominid to the Homo Sapien.

Always remember we started out as star dust, just like the Periodic table of elements. So we have come a long way.

Question 10

What determined the names of our months of the year and our days of the week?

Answer 10

We got our days of the week and most months of the year from ancient God names.

Question 11

Can we see the elements around us?

Answer 11

An atom of gold is the smallest we can reduce this atom and keep its identity as an atom of gold. Most of the substances we see around us are not elements, but compounds. A group of atoms joined together to make a compound is called a molecule.

Magic of Reality P80.

Question 12

Which is the smallest. Protons, neutrons or Electrons?

Answer 12

Each nucleus of an atom contains particles called protons and neutrons. They are about the same size. But they are 1,000 times bigger than the electrons.

Ref: Magic of Reality P91

Question 13

Colon Cancer in African Americans.

Answer 13

African Americans are twice as likely to get it than a white person. Plus those African Americans who do get it are twice as likely to die from it.

MN: This is because of the Neanderthal DNA. Whites have about 1.5% and African Americans have the lowest on record at about one half of a percent. Asians have roughly 2.0%.

Ref: NBC Nightly News 2.8.17

Question 14

The Great Lakes.

If we spread the water from the Great Lakes over the Continental United States, would it cover all our land, half our land, or only a quarter of our land?

Answer 14

The Great Lakes have enough water to cover the entire continental United States to a depth of 9 feet!

Question 15

Niagra Falls has existed over 20,000 years, true or false?

Answer 15

False. Niagra Falls has existed just over 12,000 years.

Question 16

The Pork Tape worm affects 50 million people worldwide, true or false?

Answer 16

True. The tape worm makes a cyst in the brain.

Question 17

Which is faster, a 9 mm bullet or the Earth moving through space?

Answer 17

The Earth is faster at 70,000 MPH. The 9mm bullet is about 900 MPH.

Question 18

One light year is about how many miles?

Answer 18

One light year is about 6 Trillion miles.

Question 19

Does a nuclear submarine ever need to refuel?

Answer 19

A nuclear submarine refuels every 20 years.

Question 20

How sensitive is the sonar on a modern day submarine?

Answer 20

A modern day submarine can isolate and detect a ship’s propeller 3,000 miles away, the width of the Atlantic ocean.

Question 21

Do we humans give off invisible light?

Answer 21

Yes we do. It is Infared and it just is invisible to us humans. Reptiles like a snake can see it plain as day.

Question 22

How many dimensions does Space time have?

Note: You need all the dimensions to meet someone for coffee.

Answer 22

Space time has four dimensions.

H = Height above/below ground

L = Longitude

Lat = Latitude

Time = Time you meet.

Question 23

Since energy cannot be destroyed or created, what happens to our energy?

Answer 23

All energy is borrowed, then you must give it back. Our energy disapates as heat.

For a leaf on a tree. When the leaf falls off the tree and it turns brown and dries up, it finished giving its energy back to the universe.

Question 24

Is diet soda or any sugar substitute bad for us?

Answer 24

Yes. Sweetened drink = 3 times the chances of dementia and stroke.

Source: NBC Nightly news. 4.20.17

Question 25

Deep Sleep. Ref: NBC News 5/29/17

As an infant we spend 40% of sleep time in deep sleep.

How much time is spent in deep sleep when you are age 80?

Answer 25

At age 80 your deep sleep is reduced to only 5%.

Question 26

Gravity does not pull us to the ground. We simply fall through curved space along the path of least resistance.

The presence mass of the Earth causes space to curve and distort. The reason we have gravity on Earth is because the Earth is bending the space around it.

Question 27

Researchers have long been seeking a way to diagnose Alzheimer;s disease in its earliest stages, before any symptoms appear.

By the time memory loss becomes apparent, damage to the brain associated with Alzheimer’s may already have been occurring for as long as 20 years!

The Brain’s offactory bulb which is involved with the sense of smell are among the first brain structures to be affected by Alzheimer;s.

Answer 27

Older people who cannot quite place odors, for example lemon or spearmint, paint, gasoline, etc. are in their early stages fo Alzheimer’s.

“If we can delay the onset of symptoms by just five years, we should be able to reduce the prevalence and severity of these symptoms by more than 50%.

Ref: West Magazine.

Question 28

Elvis is still earning after his death.

His estate made an estimated $27 million in the year leading up to October 2016.

Question 29

Why is time travel impossible?

Answer 29

[MN: The reason time travel is impossible is because time is a logical construct and not real. Time only exist in our human brains.]

Question 30

The United States for many decades lead the world in manufacturing.

Why did we lose so many manufacturing jobs?

Answer 30

87.8% of Manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. between 2000-2010 were the result of automation and improved technology.

REF: Time mag. 11/13/17.

Question 31

Coal mining. This year, 2018, almost all electricity is generated by burning coal.

1) Isn’t this going to increase air pollution?
2) If we are burning such massive amounts of coal, why are all the Virginia, tennesse and other nearby mines shut down and the people out of work?
3) Why aren’t we using nuclear power plants to make the electricity instead?

Answer 31

1) The coal we use is from the Western mountains and it burns very clean with almost no pollution. We have enough coal in the West to mine for another 80 years!
2) Because the Western coal burns very clean and the Eastern coal mines burn extremely dirty and cause super pollution.
3) Because of earthquakes, tsunami, terrorist and just accidents in general, it is not worth the risk of having a meltdown.

Question 32

How strong is the Sun’s gravity?

Answer 32

The Sun’s gravity is 28 times the gravity on Earth.

Question 33

Do we lose most of our immune system as we pass our 60’s and onward?

Answer 33

Diminishing immunity with age

Beginning with the sixth decade of life, the human immune system undergoes dramatic aging-related changes, which continuously progress to a state of immunosenescence. The aging immune system loses the ability to protect against infections and cancer and fails to support appropriate wound healing. Vaccine responses are typically impaired in older individuals. Conversely, inflammatory responses mediated by the innate immune system gain in intensity and duration, rendering older individuals susceptible to tissue-damaging immunity and inflammatory disease. Immune system aging functions as an accelerator for other age-related pathologies. It occurs prematurely in some clinical conditions, most prominently in patients with the autoimmune syndrome rheumatoid arthritis (RA); and such patients serve as an informative model system to study molecular mechanisms of immune aging. T cells from patients with RA are prone to differentiate into proinflammatory effector cells, sustaining chronic-persistent inflammatory lesions in the joints and many other organ systems. RA T cells have several hallmarks of cellular aging; most importantly, they accumulate damaged DNA. Altered metabolic patterns provide opportunities to therapeutically target the immune aging process through metabolic interference.
At birth the immune system is equipped with an enormously diverse repertoire of antigen-reactive T and B cells, all of which are so infrequent that they cannot protect the host. Thus, as humans age and are exposed to infectious organisms and cancerous cells, antigen-specific lymphocytes need to expand massively in frequency and switch from a highly proliferative naive cell into a less proliferative effector and memory cell. Massive clonal expansion and persistence of antigen-selected cells for decades impose enormous proliferative pressure on immune cells, rendering the immune system highly susceptible to the aging process.
Aging is associated with several morbidities that finally lead to organ failure and death. With progressive deterioration of protective immunity, older individuals become susceptible to cancers and infections (Table 1). Interestingly, aging is also associated with increased incidence of inflammatory disease, most notably cardiovascular disease (1). Many of the degenerative diseases of the elderly, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and osteoarthritis, have a strong component of tissue-damaging inflammation. Similarly, production of autoantibodies is much more likely to occur in older individuals (2). In essence, immune aging is associated with declining protective immunity combined with increasing incidence of inflammatory disease.