What Happens When A Cannonball Is Dropped In Mercury. Breathingearth - CO2, birth & death rates by country, simulated real-time. "Hella" Gets Huge. How a Facebook campaign might formalize the biggest slang word yet. Words for measurements and numbers often move from science to slang, as you know if you’ve ever waited light years for anything, or used clichés such as “don’t give them an inch.” Real numbers like millions and billions are fodder for zillions and kajillions, and insults such as "nano-minded" and "nano-souled" show that a certain metric prefix gets used for all sorts of imprecise, small things besides iPods. The English language is a world champ at slangifying the specific (while disappointing math teachers everywhere). Now a slang term is trying to make the reverse journey, thanks to almost 60,000 Facebook fans who want to make “hella” the official word for 10 to the 27th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, in SI (the French Système International d'Unités).
Sendek’s idea is intriguing, logical, and partly inspired by the fact that “hella” is popular slang in science-and-surf-soaked Northern California. How to turn "water" into marbles Personal and Historical Perspectives of Hans Bethe. Photo: The Bounty of Species in a Single Scoop of Seafloor Mud | Wired Science. A mere handful of seafloor mud may contain as many species as are found in a square meter of tropical rainforest. The fantastic assemblage seen above was gathered from a single scoop of mud, about 2 inches deep and 5 inches across. “It’s easy, when you get away from the coast, to think of the oceans as a homogeneous blue. It’s a lot more complex than that,” said biologist Craig McClain of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.
McClain and colleagues collected the mud while surveying distributions of seafloor organisms, the lives of which are shaped by “marine snow” — a slow, steady, shower of organic particles that drift down from high in the water column. Like terrestrial snow, the deep-sea-life-sustaining version doesn’t collect uniformly but gathers in drifts and eddies. They found large-scale, trans-Atlantic patterns, somewhat reminiscent of the vast and elegant patterns seen in blooming plankton, but not measured before on seafloors. Image: Craig McClain/Deep Sea News. Senses Challenge.
Space is Huge. Teenager Wins Science Fair, Solves Massive Environmental Problem. This Awesome Urn Will Turn You into a Tree After You Die. You don't find many designers working in the funeral business thinking about more creative ways for you to leave this world (and maybe they should be). However, the product designer Gerard Moline has combined the romantic notion of life after death with an eco solution to the dirty business of the actual, you know, transition. His Bios Urn is a biodegradable urn made from coconut shell, compacted peat and cellulose and inside it contains the seed of a tree. Once your remains have been placed into the urn, it can be planted and then the seed germinates and begins to grow. You even have the choice to pick the type of plant you would like to become, depending on what kind of planting space you prefer.
I, personally, would much rather leave behind a tree than a tombstone.