The Sci Tech World

Whenever we've tried to test the effects that living in isolation without sunlight have on the body, a common thread has emerged: much longer sleep cycles. Back in 2015, Julie Beck over at The Atlantic pulled together the findings from a number of different experiments that all saw the participants involved drifting off for days at a time... and suffering some fairly acute mental stresses along the way too. Take cave explorers Josie Laures and Antoine Senni, for example, who lived underground for months in the 1960s. When they emerged from their self-imposed solitude (having stayed in separate caves), both thought much less time had passed than was actually the case, to the tune of several weeks. What's more, Senni would sometimes sleep for stretches of 30 hours at a time, then wake up believing he'd just had a short nap. Researchers on the surface kept in touch with the pair and monitored their vital statistics for any signs of deteriorating health, but they didn't off...

The deepest dive recorded by the free-diving Bajau Laut people of Southeast Asia was to an impressive 79 metres (259 feet), and the longest time spent underwater by them was just over three minutes. Although the Bajau do not dive to these depths or for this length of time during their day-to-day fishing, they spend up to 60 percent of their working life underwater. New research published in the journal Cell shows that they have some physical and genetic adaptations to help them make these amazing dives. It seems that, although we tend to see ourselves as at the pinnacle of the natural world, evolution still has a grip on some groups of people. It is changing them to better suit their environment and their unusual lifestyle. The Bajau Laut have traditionally lived a nomadic life on houseboats, exploiting the rich resources of the coral reefs and mangrove forests of the region. During the 20th century, some populations of Bajau settled on the shore but continued living a subsistence life...

The Earth’s magnetic field is like an invisible force field around the planet, it protects living things on planet from dangerous solar rays by repelling charged particles. Earth’s magnetic field is not constant and it is continuously changing. Undeniably, our planet’s past comprises hundreds of global magnetic reverses, where south and north magnetic poles switch places. And scientists are sure that another one of these swaps is about to happen. But the bigger question is when exactly will it happen?According to researchers, during this occurrence the magnetic field won’t fall back to a complete zero, but will undergo a weaker and more composite form. During this reversal there is a possibility of simultaneous existence of multiple “north” and “south” magnetic poles and it may fall to 10% of the current-day strong point. Research shows that geomagnetic reverses happen a few times every million years on average. Nonetheless, the interval among reversals is very uneven and can range up ...

“The Ganymede Ocean is believed to contain more water than Europa's,” says Olivier Witasse, a project scientist working on ESA’s future Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE). “Six times more water in Ganymede’s ocean than in Earth's ocean, and three times more than Europa.” In March of 2016, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revealed the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon --larger than Mercury and not much smaller than Mars. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search for life, as we know it. “This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,” said John Grunsfeld, now retired assistant administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting...

Theoretical physics often lifts the sanctions we set on our own imaginations. Whether it's exploring the possibility of warp drives or understanding the rate of the Universe's expansion, we are quick to explore the unknown on our chalkboards until our tech is ready for our ideas. In a similar deep-dive into the theoretical, a Norwegian professor argues in the journal Acta Astronautica for the of possibility of photon rockets that can reach 99.999 percent of the speed of light (300,000 km/s [186,000 mph]).The paper asserts that, while humanity can't do it anytime soon, we could potentially build a spacecraft that falls just short of the ultimate speed limit sometime in the future when the necessary technology is feasible. Espen Gaarder Haug is a professor of quantitative finance at the Norwegian University School of Life Sciences who believes that the math in contemporary physics isn't too distant from the math in quantitative finance. This background gave Haug an unconv...

Earth may have a new neighbor, in the form of an Earth-like planet in a solar system only 16 light years away. The planet orbits a star named Gliese 832, and that solar system already hosts two other known exoplanets: Gliese 832B and Gliese 832C. The findings were reported in a new paper by Suman Satyal at the University of Texas, and colleagues J. Gri?th, and Z. E. Musielak. Gliese 832B is a gas giant similar to Jupiter, at 0.64 the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits its star at 3.5 AU. G832B probably plays a role similar to Jupiter in our Solar System, by setting gravitational equilibrium. Gliese 832C is a Super-Earth about 5 times as massive as Earth, and it orbits the star at a very close 0.16 AU. G832C is a rocky planet on the inner edge of the habitable zone, but is likely too close to its star for habitability. Gliese 832, the star at the center of it all, is a red dwarf about half the size of our Sun, in both mass and radius.The newly discovered planet is still hypothetical at this...

A group of researchers has discovered proof for a strange particle that, strangely, is also its own antiparticle. It was first proposed 80 years ago but now existence of it might be a reality. The results, published in the journal Science, were led by researchers from Stanford University in California and the University of California. The notion of a particle having its own antiparticle was first introduced in 1937 when Italian physicist Ettore Majorana (who strangely disappearedin 1938) first suggested the theory. He said that inside the class of fermions, which comprise protons, electrons, and neutrons, some particles must have their own antiparticles, which became known as Majorana particles. An antiparticle is a particle that has the same mass as the normal particle, but a reverse electric or magnetic property. For instance, the electron’s antiparticle is the positron. If the two come across each other, they annihilate each other. In this study, the group of physicists stacked thin...

The Earth is thought to have been formed about 4.6 billion years ago by collisions in the giant disc-shaped cloud of material that also formed the Sun. Gravity slowly gathered this gas and dust together into clumps that became asteroids and small early planets called planetesimals. These objects collided repeatedly and gradually got bigger, building up the planets in the Solar System, including the Earth. The details of how the Earth formed are still being worked out. Scientists study meteorites and the oldest rocks on Earth to understand what happened in these earliest times in the Solar System. They also observe other solar systems in our galaxy, the Milky Way.Okay then, lets watch the video: A Journey Through Time: Planet Earth 4,499,999,000 Years Ago:

A chunk of rock which fell to Earth and was discovered in the deserts of Egypt may hold the key to our understanding of how the solar system was formed. The Hypatia stone, named for the first Western woman mathematician and astronomer, contains minerals unlike anything seen before in our solar system. Extraterrestrial Diamond-Studded 'Hypatia’ Stone Found In Egypt Is Unlike Anything Seen In Our Solar System Ever Before, Say ScientistsExperts say the extraterrestrial object may have formed at a time when the universe was still taking shape and may predate the sun and its surrounding planets. It contains micro-mineral compounds not found elsewhere in our region of space, or in known meteorites and comets, and has the potential to rewrite the history books. The discovery was made by researchers from the University of Johannesburg (UJ), who used advanced scanning techniques to analyse Hypatia's structure. The original rock that fell to Earth must have been at least several metres i...

Life is a steady wellspring of amazement and secret. As Douglas Adams once stated, space is huge. Huge. Unfathomably huge. Truth be told, space is big to the point that it's anything but difficult to overlook that we're very little in it. Furthermore, the numerous powers at play in the universe make startling sights — more than we can maybe find and comprehend in our lifetime. At whatever point we found something new, we figured this could be make us conceivable to reach and to get what we need, yet Every corner we find , whether it's past our air or just observed through a magnifying lens, uncovers some new ponders that can all the while persuade us and take us to our center. Here are a portion of the revelations, which you may have not contemplated and are answers to our inquiries like that, why investigation and disclosure in the enormous space and planet Earth make our lives wealthier. 1. The Milky Way may contains up to 100 billion planets in the "Goldilocks Zone....

In all the planets of our home galaxy, humankind happens to discover itself on a planet which is perfectly suitable for life. Earth isn't without its dangers however. Earth has seen five massive extinctions throughout its history, due to catastrophic disasters like huge asteroids and massive volcanic outbursts. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is very much concerned about the next mass destruction. He's so worried that he thinks we have to get off Earth and grow into a multi-planet species as soon as possible, according to an article posted by blogger Tim Urban called How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars. Musk's thought is quite straightforward. Perhaps by the time the next huge asteroid heads our way, we'll have the equipment to protect the planet or redirect the space rock. But if it's something a bit more disastrous, like a neighboring star exploding, we may all get vaporized. Musk says we certainly can't afford to just wait around and find out. In his a...

Here’s something to think about: the  average adult human  is made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms, and most of them are hydrogen - the  most common element in the Universe , produced by the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The rest of those atoms were forged by ancient stars merging and exploding billions of years after the formation of the Universe, and a tiny amount can be attributed to cosmic rays - high-energy radiation that mostly originates from somewhere outside the Solar System. As astronomer Carl Sagan once said in an episode of  Cosmos : “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” To give you a better idea of where the ingredients for every living human came from, Jennifer A. Johnson, an astronomer at the Ohio State University, put together this new periodic table that breaks down all the elements according to ...