HowDoWhy

The largest animal in the world is the Blue Whale. These mammals measure in at around 110 feet in length and estimates of weight have been made at around a staggering 200 tons. Compare this to the largest dinosaur which is estimated to have weighed about 100 tons and we have the distinct pleasure of sharing our planet with what is suspected to be the largest animal ever to have lived.

What is really surprising is that the largest creature on Earth feeds almost exclusively on krill. These tiny animals average 1 to 2 cm in length. What they lack in size they make up for in quantity. Blue Whales consume around 40 million krill a day!

Blue Whales can dive for 30 minutes or more, though they typically spend 10-20 minutes submerged when feeding. They can reach speeds up to 30mph but typically cruise at around 12mph. For more Blue Whale facts, visit the American Cetacean Society.

SCUBA was originally an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. The term was coined in World War II to refer to the rebreathers used by US frogmen of the time. The subsequent development of the closed-circuit regulators in use by recreational divers today led to the adoption of the word by mainstream users.

While originally an acronym for a specific piece of diving equipment, scuba is now a common word which can be applied to the act of diving with closed circuit equipment or any of the other diving gear a scuba diver may use. Today, one is a scuba diver or certified in scuba diving rather than a diver using SCUBA equipment.

If you are interested in becoming a certified scuba diver and experiencing the amazing underwater world around us, please visit Break Away Adventure to read their introductory article on the scuba diving.

 The largest hummingbird in the world is the South American Giant Hummingbird (Patagona gigas). As mentioned in What is the smallest bird in the world, the Bee Hummingbird, at .06 ounces, is dwarfed by the Giant Hummingbird which weighs in at an astounding 20 ounces.

Giant Hummingbirds have relatively dull plumage compared to many other varieties but still sports the characteristically long beak to access nectar in the trumpet-like blossoms of its favorite energy sources.

Giant Hummingbirds are native to the western South America and in the Andes, specifically, ranging from Ecuador to as far south as northwestern Argentina. For video of this amazing bird, visit the Internet Bird Collection (IBC).

Our previous post - What is the smallest bird in the world - prompted this question. Most people think that hummingbirds eat nectar from sweet flowers. They’re right. But they do not gain nutrition from the nectar. If all a hummingbird ate was nectar, it would starve and die!

Nectar - or the sugary water solutions we add to feeders for hummingbirds - is a rich source of energy but it completely lacks protein and other nutrients hummingbirds need to grow, breed and survive. But a hummingbird’s metabolism and energy requirements are so high that it requires the energy from nectar to survive as well. So where does it get protein, vitamins and nutrients? Insects and spiders, same as other small birds.

So when you think of what hummingbirds eat, think of it this way - hummingbirds eat nectar to power their ability to hunt and eat bugs!

To read more about hummingbirds, what they eat and how to attract and feed them visit the Hummingbird Feeding Guide.

 I’ve always been a bit of a science nerd so when, many years ago, a girlfriend insisted that cold water would boil faster than hot water, I refused to simply take her at her word. First I applied some critical thinking - a step I highly recommend whenever somebody tells you something that sounds a little off.

Boiling water is simply approaching a transition state between one form and another. It is in a liquid state and approaching a gas state. In order for any material to change states you either have to increase or decrease energy. Basically, you’re trying to excite or calm the molecules in the material.

In the case of water, its normal “room temperature” state is as a liquid. Remove heat (energy) sufficiently and it will become a solid (ice). Increase heat (energy) sufficiently and it will become a gas (water vapor or steam).

Now, and here’s where my science breaks down a bit, if I want to boil water, I have to excite those molecules. I have to get them moving. A passing familiarity with the laws of motion had me thinking that it’s easier to move a boulder already in motion than it is to move a boulder that’s standing completely still. It takes less energy to move or maintain motion in something that is already in motion. Seems that would apply at the molecular level too, wouldn’t it?

If you accept that you need energy to “move” water molecules sufficiently to boil water and you also accept that the molecules in cold water are moving slower than the molecules in hot water, common sense would dictate this myth is false. The same amount of energy applied to the same amount of cold water vs. hot water should result in reaching the boiling point more slowly. It also stands to reason that a pot of water just short of boiling is going to get there a lot sooner than a pot of water pulled from the freezer just before it freezes.

So there’s the common sense approach of applying logic. The actual experiment was pretty simple. Let the faucet run on cold, fill a pot with two cups of cold water and time how long it takes to boil. Then repeat but use water from a hot tap. In an effort to inspire your own scientific interest, I’ll leave it to you to try out but I’ll give you one big hint on the results. The myth was wrong.

 The smallest bird in the world is a hummingbird. In particular, the Bee Hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae), which weighs in at about .06 ounces (1.8 grams). That’s less than a US penny! The Bee Hummingbird is only found in Cuba and the Isle of Pines off New Caledonia in the Coral Sea.

The Bee Hummingbird consumes nectar from flowers to fill its energy needs but, like all hummingbirds, also eats insects for nutrition, protein and vitamins not present in nectar.

Other interesting facts about the Bee Hummingbird - its wings beat at around 60-80 beats/ minute and as fast as 200 beats a minute when mating! Like other hummingbirds, Bee Hummingbirds are hearty eaters, consuming almost 8 times their mass in liquid every day (that’s not counting the insects they eat as well).

For additional information on attracting and feeding hummingbirds, visit the Hummingbird Feeding Guide. Remember, though, that hummingbirds are only found in the Americas.

I spent a couple years employed as a Veterinary technician and the most common lament I recall from the doctors when examining a pet was, “I wish he could tell me what was wrong.” Give your vet a hug the next time you bring Fluffy in for a checkup because the poor Doc faces the double whammy of not only having to cure what ails your pet but he or she also has to figure out what’s wrong without benefit of a patient who can point to where it hurts. You can help significantly by paying attention and bringing a good list of symptoms to the party. While I couldn’t possibly list all symptoms without writing a medical journal, here are some signs to look for.

Limping - Before calling the vet, check your pet’s feet and between the pads. I’ve removed my fair share of thorns from my own pets. If your pet has a good amount of fur between the pads and you’ve just returned from a winter walk, make sure balls of packed snow or ice haven’t formed in the fur between the pads. Also consider what your pet has walked through. One of my dogs once limped uncomfortably and I discovered she’d walked through a puddle of battery acid. A good rinsing with soap and water fixed her right up. If you can’t determine cause, contact your vet.

Frequent or repeated vomiting - I’ve never known a pooch who didn’t throw up now and again, but the key to look for is, does it happen several times over the course of more than one day or does it happen a lot in a single day? If your pet vomits multiple times in a day or a couple times a day for 2 or more days, a call to the vet might be in order. If your cat vomits up what looks like a mouse without bones or tail, it’s probably a hairball and nothing to be concerned about.

Listlessness or lethargy - Any animal easily enticed into playtime who suddenly shows a significant decline in energy and enthusiasm is a good candidate for a vet visit. This is particularly true if there are other symptoms.

Sudden hair loss - Loss of hair can be indicative of several conditions from relatively easy to cure parasitic causes to serious illness that requires more rigorous treatment. Take your pet to the vet if you begin to notice sudden hair loss that exceeds the normal shedding common with seasonal changes.

Foul odor from the ears - Dogs and cats can suffer from ear infections. Floppy-eared dogs are particularly prone. If you notice a foul odor from their ears, a visit to the vet for a good cleaning and treatment is suggested. Continue reading »

If you ever find yourself far removed from the light pollution that saturates the city and suburban skies, take a look at the night sky and prepare to be impressed. Those of us who spend most of our lives in and around cities are often awestruck by how many stars there are out there once we get away from the glaring lights. Of particular note is a white band of dense stars and dust that splits the sky. This is the Milky Way.

But, the Milky Way is actually two things - the beautiful celestial view we enjoy from here on Earth and the galaxy in which we live. What you see when you look up at the sky at that dense trail of dust and stars is actually our galaxy as seen from our position within one of its spiral arms. It will appear brightest if you look towards the constellation Sagittarius because that way lies the center of our galaxy and, hence, the densest collection of material.

The Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain approximately 100-400 billion stars. It is part of a group of galaxies called the Local Group - which in turn is part of a massive cluster of additional galaxies and material known as the Virgo Supercluster. The Milky Way galaxy is also part of a binary pair of galaxies (with the other one being Andromeda) and is orbited by a number of smaller galaxies.

A galaxy is a massive collection of stars gravitationally bound around a common central core. It is believed that most, if not all galaxies have at their core a super massive black hole - a black hole coming in at hundreds of thousands or billions times more massive than our own Sun.

Speaking of our own Sun, you can imagine a galaxy to be a super-sized solar system. Rather than a few planets orbiting a single star, a galaxy contains billions or hundreds of billions of stars orbiting a single or multiple black holes.

Galaxies come in different shapes. Most folks think of the classic spiral galaxy shape as shown in the spectacular image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to the left, but galaxies can also be found in elliptical shapes ranging from nearly spherical to highly elongated and even ring shaped morphologies. Some lack much definable shape at all. This is usually due to “collisions” or interaction with neighboring galaxies.

Galaxies tend to cluster together in groups forming beautiful strands and webs throughout the universe. Our own local group contains 30 or more galaxies. Galaxies can also be incredibly big. The most recent observations of the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest Spiral neighbor and largest member of our local group, put the count at some 1 trillion stars.

You might also be interested to know that the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy (the galaxy we call home) will someday merge into a giant elliptical galaxy. We are drawing towards each other at a pace around 60-90 miles per second. But with Andromeda almost 4.5 light years away, the merger isn’t expected to go through until sometime in 2.5 Billion AD. You might not want to bother waiting in line for good seats.

From some of my previous posts you know that objects don’t just have size, they have mass. A three-foot diameter ball of loosely packed feathers, for example, has far less mass than a three-foot diameter ball of lead. But if you keep compressing feathers into that three-foot sphere, keep squeezing and squeezing them in, you’ll eventually have as much mass as the lead sphere. Once the two spheres are of equal mass you only need to squeeze in one more feather and, suddenly you have a three-foot sphere of feathers that is more massive than the three-foot sphere of lead.Now imagine you have an unimaginably powerful feather-squeezing gizmo and could keep squeezing in feathers. If you kept squeezing them in, your feather ball would become more and more massive. Eventually it would be so massive that it would have measurable gravity. Sooner or later it would become so massive that you could walk around on it just like the Earth but not as large.

Because your feather squeezing gizmo is so powerful you’d keep squeezing feathers in until the sphere had as much gravity as the Sun, then more than the Sun. Eventually it would have so much mass and its gravity would be so powerful that even light would bend a little when it passed too close to it. And after that? Well, it would become so massive that anything, including light, would fall right into it and be unable to escape if it passed too close.

And just like that, you’d have created a black hole. A black hole is simply an object of so much mass that its gravity prevents the escape of anything, even light. Black holes of varying mass exist at the center of many galaxies (including our own, it is believed) and in the space beyond. They are formed by the death of very large stars or by the joining of enough mass (in the form of stars, gas and other matter until the inward gravitational pull of the object exceeds any outward forces imparted by spin or (in the case of stars) by the energy of fusion. At this point, the object collapses in size until an unbelievable amount of mass is compressed into an unimaginably small area of space.

When you think about black holes you’re actually thinking about two things - the object or mass in the middle and the area of influence that object exerts. (though both are depicted in the image to the left, remember they’d both actually be completely invisible until you get out to the event horizon). The area of influence can be further broken down into two components - the event horizon and everything outward beyond the event horizon out to a point where the gravitational effect is no longer notable (represented by the green fog). We’ve already described the mass in the middle. It is simply all the matter (gas, rocks, ice, feathers, squirrels or anything of sufficient quantity) that has been packed together until it is massive enough to have an area of influence that prevents the escape of everything, including light.

If you could measure out from the edge of the massive object, there is a sphere of space-time. If an object passes far enough away from that sphere of influence at a constant speed as in the image to the left then it has every chance of continuing on its path without even noticing the effects of the black hole. Super sensitive instruments might read a subtle fluctuation in gravity in the direction of the hole. Perhaps a subtle course correction might be required. But the point is, despite its awesome power, even a black hole has limits. The primary weapon in its arsenal, gravity, dissipates over distance.

If the object flies closer to the black hole then its direction of travel might be influenced. It would, in effect, be pulled towards the black hole rather than traveling forward in a straight line. It might even be slowed a bit until it escaped the gravitational influence assuming it is applying constant force.

An object (a rocket, for example) has two choices to minimize the influence of the black hole it passes near. It can increase its speed to limit its time in the black hole’s gravity well or it can increase its distance from the gravity well as in the first example.

Fly too close, though, and the object might be captured by the black hole’s gravitational influence. It might then be held in a permanent orbit around the black hole, not falling in but not escaping. If it could increase thrust, it might escape. If it ran out of fuel, it is doomed to eventually fall past the event horizon. Once it falls past the event horizon, all bets are off. Remember, that current theory holds that nothing can move faster than light. Since even light is incapable of finding its way back out from the inner side of the event horizon, no rocket or spaceship could either. The event horizon is where the black hole begins to appear black. That’s because light can’t escape to reach our eye so, effectively, nothing from that point inward appears to exist.

Black holes are some of the strangest things you can find in space. Physics gets really weird when you throw black holes in the mix. A black hole literally warps both space and time. If you’re interested in reading more about black holes, super massive black holes, or micro black holes, eat a good breakfast, get plenty sleep the night before and make sure you bring your thinking cap with you. Then go to Ted Bunn’s absolutely wonderful FAQ about black holes and read until your brain hurts.

If you have flash enabled, I also strongly recommend visiting ThinkTechnologies.com and enjoying a very well put together flash presentation on the bizzare nature of black holes.