The Night of the Undead Trees

Hello, scientists!

Today, we're going to face the greatest fear of the decade: zombies. You may be thinking that a zombie outbreak is completely fictional and impossible. Although it hasn't happened before, it's technically possible. Here's how.

Throughout all the fictional books and movies we've seen, the majority of zombie outbreaks are caused by bacteria or viruses. However, if zombies do become a reality, it will not happen like this. When either of these two kinds of life invade another organism, it doesn't build large, interior, physical structures, like zombies always appear to have. Although these kinds of infections aren't likely, there is one that is: fungal infection.

First of all, it is possible for fungus to infect humans, and they build structures. It may seem odd that they make things, like humans, so let's look at an example.

Mycorrhizae is a type of fungi that supplies a satisfactory answer to whether they build objects. Recent scientific studies have shown that plants actually communicate with each other by connecting their roots with mycorrhizae. This allows the plants to tell each other when pests are present, giving them an early warning system to build up defenses. Because it transfer information, like a nerve, fungus could infect our body and send information to our brain to do its binding, such as eating brains.

These fungal spores can actually enter our body, in ways such as inhaling them. When we die, the spores would detect that our body would be inactive, and would take action. Fungal systems would grow. It would then tell us what to do and transfer nutrients to organs needed to do work.

Although it seems like science-fiction (because it is), it has happened before. Parasitic wasps have infected hosts, such as caterpillars, and make them perform behaviors decided upon by the wasps. They aren't zombies, because they were never dead, but it shows proof that an organism can take control of another. Creepy, huh?

Again, I haven't really been able to post blogs because of my schedule. Make sure to comment, and I'll see you in the next post!

Until next time,
Ben's jamin'
Benjamin

P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

Above the Boiling Point

Hello, scientists!

Again, I'm sorry for not posting something yesterday or the day before. Homework (among other things) have kept me busy recently, so while I try to make this a daily blog, don't hold me to any promises I didn't make.

Anyway, chances are you, at one point, have wondered how it feels to fly. If you have, you're not alone. However, it actually turns out that it's impossible not to fly. You are always hovering above the ground at an atomic level. This also means that you don't really touch anything. The sensation of touch never is triggered by an object, but instead by the magnetic force between your atoms and the object's atoms. Dream come true!

Except, not really. You probably want to fly with a visible amount of space between you and the floor without a device. To that science says, "Good luck." Humans just aren't meant to fly or hover. Too bad. On the other hand, not only you can also make something fly on its own, you can do it in your very own kitchen.

That "something" is water. That's right, you can levitate droplets of water with only a saucepan and a stove. To understand this, let's review how water reacts to heat. It starts off frozen, an ice cube. As the tempurature increases to 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it melts into its pure liquid form, water. At 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it boils into steam, and that's (basically) the last step. However, at 379* degrees, something incredibly cool will happen.

This tempurature is named the Leidenfrost point. At this temperature, the droplet of water will actually be protected from direct contact from the pan by a thin** layer of water vapor under the droplet. The heat also causes the water droplets to coalesce. These two factors prevent the droplets from evaporating for a longer time. These balls of water also skitter around the pan due to them being riding on a cushion of steam.

Lead was used in a dangerous experiment. This experiment consists of (don't try this at home) dipping a wet finger into molten lead. Because there is a layer of steam from the water on your finger between you and the lead, you won't get burned. At least not right away.

Because of this layer of steam, it makes water of droplets possible to actually climb uphill. All that it needs is a surface that has grooves in the right direction. Which means in theory, you could make a maze with correctly positioned grooves. If you dropped water droplets into this maze, they would skitter, like in the saucepan, but in a specific direction, and turn when needed. Eventually, the droplets would solve the maze. Which is exactly what happened at the University of Bath.

Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, that's it for now! Comment on stuff I got wrong or missed and suggestions for next time. Just a warning: you shouldn't receive any blog updates until Sunday. Sorry. Then, we'll probably do something related to biology. Tune in then!

Until next time,
Ben's jamin'
Benjamin

P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

*This is a rough estimate; it's not exact.

**Thin means .1mm of vapor at the edge of the droplet and .2mm under the center.

Star-crossed galaxies

Hello, scientists!

First of all, I must apologize for not posting an entry recently. I went to a place without Internet and haven't had the time to make one.

From the title, you may think that the galaxies we will talk about has an ill fate, and that may be true. However, read on, and you may find that I may be speaking literally.

First of all, I should introduce these two galaxies. One is the Milky Way, our galaxy, and the other is Andromeda, a close neighbor of ours. The Milky Way contains about 300 billion stars, and Andromeda contains about 1 trillion. Remember that, it will later fascinate you about how large galaxies are (if that didn't convince you already).

It's now time to look at an optical illusion of sorts. Have you noticed that if a siren approaches you, its pitch increases, and when it moves away, it gets lower? This is called the Doppler Effect, when sound waves either compress or stretch relative to an observer. Basically, waves get shorter as they get closer, and get longer as they get farther away.

I did say that this was an optical illusion, not an auditory one. This is because this doesn't affect just sound waves; it affects light waves as well. If you look at a poster, you'll see that red wavelengths are longer than blue ones. This means that if an object moves away from you or towards you very quickly, it will turn slightly red or blue, respectively. You'll probably never use this unless you're an astronomer or physicist, but it still happens.

You can notice this when looking through a very powerful telescope. Because the universe is expanding, all galaxies are moving away from us. Because this is on a galactic scale, though, they are moving incredibly quickly. This causes them to appear red. This is called red shift. Scientists often have to alter a picture of a galaxy because of this effect.

In that last paragraph, I lied to you. Not all galaxies are moving away from us. One notable exception is, as you may have guessed, Andromeda. When viewed, it does not produce red shift, but instead blue shift, meaning that is moving towards us. Scientists now predict that these galaxies will collide. Uh-oh.

We shouldn't worry, though. For one reason, the collision will happen about 4 billion years in the future. Also, the likelihood of a stellar collision is unbelievably small. This is because the closest distance between stars in our galaxy is like two ping-pong balls two miles away from each other. This means that all stars will most likely pass by each other without a problem.

Where's the proof? Well, there isn't any, there's no way to predict every star's exact birth, death, and path (or if there is, we probably couldn't figure it out in 4 billion years). However, another analogy may help. If the Sun was a pin-pong ball, our nearest neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri, would be a pea 680 miles away, and the Milky Way would span a fifth of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In short, nothing is actually going to collide. Probably.

Thanks for reading! Let me know suggestions for next time, mistakes, or stuff I missed in the comments below! Tomorrow we'll discuss a physics question, so make sure to check in tomorrow.

Until next time,
Ben's jamin'
Benjamin

P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

Back to the Present

Hello, scientists!

Today we are going to try to tackle another physics question. Let me warn you, however, that I'm wearing a band-aid, so there may be some typos. Let's begin!

Today's topic sounds philisophical, and it kind of is. The fact is that there is no definite past, present, or future. At first, you may argue that the year 1980 was in the past, 2014 is in the present, and 2030 is in the future. I would agree with you, but only because our time frames are almost identical. This means that one second to me is (pretty much) one second to you, and we move through time at the same rate.

If you went to work on the International Space Station, things may start to get strange for two reasons. One, satellites move at incredible speeds, often faster than we give them credit for. In fact, the fastest satellite speed is about 17,650 miles per hour. As the theory of relativity tells us, the faster an object is moving, the slower it moves through time. However, this doesn't affect the time dilation as much as another factor: gravity. It has been proven that a thing that is being affected by a gravitational pull moves through time more slowly than an object that is not being affected by gravity at all.

Because of the effect gravity has on satellites, they move through time more quickly than us because they experience less gravity, due to their height. To fix this, scientists have programmed clocks on satellites to run a little slower than they should, so they wouldn't fall out of sync with the ones on the surface. Otherwise, the loss wouldn't be tremendous (only 1.7 seconds per century), but it still would cause problems with any GPS system.

This also, amazingly, means that past, present, and future are just relative. If I took a light-speed trip around the universe, my future would be your past. On the other hand, I could just spend thousands of years in a satellite, but where's the fun in that?

This is a short entry, but this thing isn't a difficult concept to explain. Anyway, comment about stuff I got wrong or missed or suggestions for next time. I'll probably cover something about astronomy tomorrow, so make sure to check it out!

Until next time,
Ben's jamin'
Benjamin

P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

The Real Apocalypse(?)

Hello, scientists!

Whether or not you usually belive world-ending conspiracies, you can't deny that an earth changing event is just over the horizon! 

This action is geomagnetic reversal, where the north and south magnetic poles of Earth switch, making the old south the new north and vice versa. Don't panic, though, because not only has this happened before, this has happened many time before. The length of time between these reversals is called a chron. The average chron is about 450,000 years.

The next geomagnetic reversal will be the most significant one so far to humans. One reason is not only is it going to be the first one in recorded history, it will happen in a time where a lot of society is based off of electronics and magnets. Another reason is that the last one happened a full 780,000 years ago. Compare that to the average 450,000 years, and you come up with an urgent problem. 

Before I mentioned that this has never happened in recorded history, so there really isn't any proof, right? Here comes the proof, you've asked for it.

Let's look at what may be the least likely location to find evidence of this: the ocean floor. Here, there is an underwater formation called a mid-ocean ridge. It occurs where two tectonic plates pull away from each other magma come up from the space between them. This cools, forming a ridge. This happens again and again, forming many ridges along the ocean floor. It's hard to explain, so here's a sped up visual depicting it.

When studying these ridges, scientists noticed something odd. As the rock cooled, it contained a iron-titanic oxide. The amount of the oxide corresponded with the direction of Earth's magnetic field. With this, scientists have been able to record our planet's magnetic field's history, and have thus predicted another magnetic reversal. It will come anytime from this instant to thousands of years into the future.

What effect will it have on us? Although it sounds silly, this event is actually dangerous. The magnetic field would become weaker, leaving the atmosphere vulnerable to high energy particles from the Van Allen radiation belts, layers of plasma above Earth held in place by the magnetic field. When these particles and the atmosphere collide, it produces radiation. Not good. A study in Greenland has shown that this has happened in the past.

Although this blog entry may have scared you, science is still on our side. Geologists have not been able to make a relationship between these magnetic reversals and extinctions of species.

The end of the chron is upon us! But don't worry. Earth will be fine. Hopefully.

That's all for today! Let me know stuff I missed and got wrong in the comments, or to suggest a future topic as well. Also, this is the first blog where you can actually follow my blog know and receive updates via email when I upload something new.

Until next time,

Ben's jamin'

Benjamin

P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

The Misfit Organ

Hello, scientists!

Today is going to be a short entry, but it will explain a question that many of you have probably asked or heard: why does the appendix exist? Why has it hung onto us? All it does it gives us diseases, right? All these questions will be answered today.

The first step to discovering what the appendix does is knowing where it is. It is where the small and large intestine intersect, and is also connected to the colon. These three organs are part of the digestive system, so the appendix probably helps us with digesting food. However, studies have shown that the appendix doesn't really do anything during this time. So yes, the appendix is truly useless.

Over time, humans got the idea that while it doesn't help humans now, it did in the past. Long ago, humans ate more vegetables than today and in the recent* past. As humans' diets changed, the appendix shrunk so the stomach would have more room inside the body. 

Here comes the proof.

Koalas and similar mammals have been found to have a longer appendix than humans. This makes sense so far because their main diet is leaves, not meat. Because the appendix is longer, it is able to host bacteria. This bacteria helps in digesting cellulose, material from plant walls, which surround plant cells.

In short, the appendix's main purpose is to host bacteria that help to break down veggies. No longer useful to us, but very important to other species.

I know this is kind of short, but I really wanted to address this issue. It doesn't really seem like a lot of people know about this, and it is kind of worth knowing about. Anyway, make sure to comment about missed and wrong stuff, suggestions for topics, or just regular comments! Next time we'll be covering a geology topic, so tune in tomorrow.

Until next time,

Ben's jamin'

Benjamin

P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

*recent refers to about the past few thousand years

Wormholes: The Coolest Tunnels Ever

Hello scientists!

Today we are going to look at an object of science that may not even exist. As you can probably guess from the title, this hypothetical thing is a wormhole.

First of all, it is debatable whether wormholes are real. The theory of general relativity allows them to exist, but they don't necessarily do. So, don't get your hopes up.

There are two types of wormholes we're going to talk about. The Schwarzschild wormhole is the first kind that humans have hypothesized. In short, this wormhole connects two points in spacetime that can be entered through a black hole that doesn't spin and not electrically charged. Somewhere else in spacetime, the particles are expelled from a white hole, the exit of the wormhole. Think of black holes and white holes as polar opposites. You can only enter through a black hole and come out a white hole, not the other way around.

This sounds a little complicated (because it is) and I may have lost you. This may not even be correct, and this is just a summarization. However, the good news is that you don't have to understand this because it is impossible (kind of). If the two points in spacetime are in the same universe (and yes, there is more than one universe, we may revisit this in another blog entry) the wormhole will collapse too quickly for light or anything slower than light to travel through it.

The other kind of wormhole is called a traversable wormhole. As the name suggests, this wormhole is a lot more useful for faster-than-light travel. Firstly, you can travel through this wormhole in both directions. Also, you can travel to either the same universe or a different universe. The problem is, you either need exotic matter or negative mass cosmic strings.

If you're confused about the last two terms I mentioned, you're not alone. Scientists, as of now, don't know how to create either. However, quantum effects may support a traversable wormhole, something that we know more about.

If you are absolutely lost, it's basically because I'm using terms that no one except scientists use. It doesn't help that we are talking about something that doesn't exist. If I got you confused, my main point is that there are two types of wormholes, and one actually may be able to be created by humans.

Let's talk about if you were to travel through one of these wormholes. First of all, a wormhole from a park to a beach would look something like this:

Pretty strange, huh?

You wouldn't be traveling faster than light. Say you traveling from Point A to Point B. If you took a wormhole, you would beat a beam of light that didn't go through the wormhole. However, if that beam of light came through the wormhole with you, the beam of light would get to Point B first.

Time travel is also possible. All you have to do is force one wormhole to move at high speeds. If you then entered through the moving wormhole and came out the still one, you would have just traveled into the past. There is a problem, though. There are many time paradoxes out there. What if you killed your grandparent before your parent was born? Would you exist? If you didn't, then you couldn't have killed your grandparent.

One way to avoid these paradoxes is that if you travel through time, you also travel to a parallel universe. After being studied by scientists, this is, in fact possible. In conclusion, this means that wormholes are possible, and it comes with cool stuff like teleportation and time travel!

This is really kind of confusing, and definitely not the best blog I'm going to post. In fact, yesterday's was probably better. So post comments if you have corrections, questions, suggestions for topics, or just want to say something. Anyway, next time we're going to visit life science, so tune in tomorrow!

Until next time,

Ben's jamin'

Benjamin

P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

Defying Physics to Bring You Clean Energy

Hello, scientists!

I would like to note that this is my first post ever, so this may not be perfect, but I decided to see how I do! Speaking of this blog, you may be asking why I started it. Well, I like science and math, and the two seem to go hand in hand. I also decided that many people don't enjoy science as much as possible because it can be boring if presented in the wrong way. With this blog, I'll (try) to make science more interesting than you may have thought before.

Anyway, I should probably move on today's topic: the speed of light.

In many science fiction stories and movies, we always see a spaceship zooming off into the cosmos at hyper speed. However, we are told again and again that things can't travel faster than the speed of light due to Einstein's theory of relativity.

Today, let's try to prove Mr. Einstein wrong, a very difficult thing to do. We all know, either by heart or by Google, that the speed of light is about 300,000 km/s. That's incredibly fast, and it's difficult to make something travel that speed. Luckily for us, that speed is not always correct. To explain this, I created this little metaphor. I could say that cars travel at 763 mph, the top speed of the fastest car. You could easily prove me wrong by going on the highway. You won't see any cars breaking the sound barrier. The main point is, objects, like light or cars, may not always travel at their top speed. For example, light only travels 300,000 km/s in a vacuum like space, but about only about two-thirds that speed in something like water.

At this point, let's turn to a clean source of power. Nuclear reactors, although appearing just as a white, curved, dull tower at first, may be the construction containing a crucial clue to this confusing case. While creating energy, the reactor accelerates particles are close to "c", the speed of light in a vacuum. When the particles travel through water, water slows down the light around it, but not the particles themselves, and the particles will travel faster than light.

Hurrah! We have moved things faster than the speed of light! But there is just one problem. "You haven't proven anything yet," you may think, and you're absolutely correct. Here's the proof; you've asked for it.

When something, such as the particles we were discussing before, go faster than the light around it, it emits light. Scientists have named this Chernobyl's glow, presumably named after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. You can see this in action if you happen to witness a nuclear reaction. If you haven't, this is what it looks like:

This image is the fuel rods for the nuclear reaction emerged in water. The bright blue glow you see is Chernobyl's glow, signaling that particles are traveling faster than the speed of light around them.

This may have disappointed you because you still can't travel at hyper speed, but you can! The slowest recorded speed of light is a mere 36 mph. This occurred when light went through the element rubidium at extremely low temperatures. Incredibly, light has also been stopped altogether before, but it doesn't count as the slowest speed because it's not speed at all. So if you run slower than your friends, cheer yourself up by reminding yourself that you are going at speeds that people once thought were impossible.

That's all for now! This is my first rodeo, so let me know how I did by commenting! Also, feel free to comment about things I missed or got wrong. Lastly, if you have any questions, just ask in the comments and I'll try to answer them next time.

Until next time,
Ben's jamin'

Benjamin

P.S. make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.

Source for this info: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6546462/The-10-weirdest-physics-facts-from-relativity-to-quantum-physics.html (among other things)