Interesting Facts Sometimes people who write, experience burnout. That is a lack of ideas. I don’t understand why, but I have been writing articles for about 15 years or more and doing it six days a week, and yet I am still tickled to discover new facts and write about them. Sometimes I write about one subject and other times it might be several in the same article. Today I will be writing about several different things I find interesting, and I hope you will too. The first thing I want to talk about is the incredible advances which have been made lately in telescopes. I am not talking about the type you hold up to your eye, I am talking about astronomical telescopes. The larger telescopes use mirrors to gather light from distant objects and when I was a child the one with the biggest mirror was located at Mount Palomar in California. It was dedicated in 1948. The first thing you have to know is the bigger the surface of the mirrors in a telescope, the more light they can gather, and the further they can see. The scope at Mount Palomar was considered a monster when it was built because it has a 200-inch diameter mirror. It was just announced the construction of a telescope with a set of mirrors which equal 84 FEET is being built. This scope together with modern electronics will allow it to see through the earth’s atmosphere clearly, and electronic light gathering devices will make this a modern marvel, and it is hard to imagine how far into space we will be able to see, and we should be able to see some planets in other solar systems for the first time. I find this very exciting. This is only the first of the super telescopes, others are being planned. Most scientists agree on the fact global warming is taking place. They also think CO2 is the main cause of this warming, and have been scratching their collective heads trying to cool down the planet. Now they may have found a way. There is a mineral which stores CO2 and it is called magnesite. The idea of using magnesite for this, was not practical until now, because we couldn’t get enough of it to do anything with. This situation has changed. Scientists have found a way of rapidly producing the mineral. This could be the thing which saves the earth. When nature produces magnesite, it takes hundreds of thousands of years. Scientists have figured out how to create magnesite in 72 days. It is hard to believe, but one of the main ingredients in the process is polystyrene and the same polystyrene can be used over and over. Science can be very strange. What I mean by this is there are some scientific facts which seem incredible and yet they are true. Take for example the amount of DNA in a human body. We have so much DNA in us if you stretched it out in a single strand it would reach the dwarf planet Pluto and back to earth 17 times. If you are an average person, by the time you reach the end of your life you will have walked far enough to have gone around the world 5 times. Did you know killer whales are dolphins? I don’t know if you have been reading about octopuses lately, but some scientists think they are alien creatures and here is why. They have nine brains, one in their head which is the main brain and one in each arm. They also have three hearts. Hey maybe these creatures are alien after all. Well we just got something else to worry about. We are now being told if we use our cell phones too often it could contribute to us going blind. Scientists have found blue light is not good for our eyes and the phones emit blue light. They tell us blue light causes poisonous molecules to develop in your eye’s light sensitive cells. First it was the danger of radiation from radio signals and now blindness. Makes you want to dispose of your cell phone. I saw where the old saw of the Nazis building bases on the moon was referred to again, and I would just like to put this idea to rest one last time. During World War II the Nazis tried very hard to build a plane which could reach the United States so they could bomb us. Thank goodness they never succeeded. If the Nazis had been able to get to the moon they could have launched vehicles into space which would have orbited the earth where they could have bombed the heck out of us and we couldn’t have done anything about it. Therefore, the Nazis never made it to the moon. We are on the verge of an idea which will make our idea of optics to increase our vision equivalent to using rocks as weapons. It is said there are at least 285 million people worldwide with vision problems. Cataracts will become obsolete, a thing of the past, and our vision will be so improved it will become better than 20/20 by a factor of three. This will not require wearing glasses or contacts. This will be due to the Bionic Lens. It will replace our natural eye lens. It is claimed installation takes only eight minutes. The company which makes the bionic lens claims it will feel like your own natural lens and not cause problems. I guess we will have to wait and see about that. The bionic lens is said to be coming out at the end of this year (2018). Well, I mentioned people saying the Nazis got to the moon, now let me tell you about another rumor which states the Soviet Union got to the moon twelve years ahead of us. The story goes the Soviets landed on the moon, but the cosmonauts died there so they covered it up. There are recordings which purport to have the voices of the cosmonauts on them as they spoke their dying words. It is said they had a secret night rocket launch. The Soviets did keep cosmonaut’s deaths secret for years which adds more fuel to the fire. So far, no evidence of this landing has been found. Here are some more strange facts for you. A sloth can hold its breath longer than a dolphin. A sloth can do it for up to 40 minutes. You know how nice some of those apples look in the supermarket? It turns out they can be up to one year old. They get picked in August and November then covered in wax, hot-air dried and put in cold storage until they go up for sale. In the old days when you had your photo taken you didn’t say cheese, you said prunes.
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