Scientific Discoveries Science has really been taking off lately. Creations of the atmospheres of other planets are taking place in some laboratories. Along with this is the discovery of what earth was like millions of years ago. When ancient ice is brought back to the lab the atmosphere of the earth at the time the ice was frozen can be determined many times. We have been able to figure out the carbon cycle for the last two million years. Things have been learned such as the fact ice ages which took place every forty thousand years changed about one million years ago. After that date they took place every hundred thousand years. Ancient air bubbles in the ice revealed the fact there was hardly any CO2 in the atmosphere up to 1.5 million years ago. Scientists of all sorts are interested in Titan. Titan is a moon of Saturn and recently there has been a lot of interest in it by the scientific community. This is why many were excited to find they were able to recreate the moon’s atmosphere in a laboratory. The reason for this is Titan is a candidate to be searched for life. Scientists have discovered that organic chemistry is taking place on that moon. Titan has a dense nitrogen atmosphere. Could it be possible Titan has the same type of atmosphere as the earth had billions of years ago? Scientists think it is a possibility. One of the problems with examining the surface of Titan is the planet is covered in a thick haze. There has been a constant race to try and get to the almost perfect superconductor. There has been a win in one area but a loss in another. The win consists of creating the world’s first room temperature superconductor, but the loss is it has to be kept under tremendous pressure making it impractical. The new material scientists created seems to conduct electricity without resistance, something thought impossible for years. Usually very cold temperatures were required to better conductivity. To give you an idea of the pressure needed, it is equivalent to the pressure at the center of the earth. Other super conductors need bulky cooling devices. A couple of scientists think we will never see the edge of the universe no matter how powerful our telescopes get. For all we know the universe might go on forever. It depends on what you believe about the universe. For one thing there may have been more than one big bang and maybe that part of the universe is further out. For another if there was an end to space, what would that mean is beyond space? I believe we just do not know enough about the universe or perhaps universes to make a decision whether there is an end to the universe or not. Maybe if we travel long enough through the universe we would land up where we started. There is nothing much a human can do when it comes to their DNA. What is there, stays there and we can’t alter our DNA ourselves. One would think this is true for all living animals, but it turns out it is not. There is a type of squid which was found named the Longfin Inshore Squid which can edit the RNA inside its nerve cells on the fly. Scientists claim it is much safer to edit RNA than DNA because if a mistake is made, it just goes away. Scientists don’t know the exact reason the squid does this and they haven’t found any other animals so far that can do it. Learning how to use this on humans might give us a breakthrough on such things as cures for certain diseases. Scientists found something they never expected. There was a meteorite which crashed into Australia about 100 years ago. When they examined it, they found it contained a superconductor. They realized the material they were trying to make can be formed in space by nature. Then they found the same material existed on earth. It is too bad, but the material won’t superconduct at room temperature, so there is no advantage to it yet. One of the dreams of science is to have the ability to see through anything. The method used would be by using terahertz waves. They have been limited in this however because they have only been able to produce a machine that only produces one frequency in that range. Many different terahertz frequencies are needed depending on the type of material you want to see through. A new Terahertz laser has been invented which can operate over a range of frequencies. It operates on what is commonly known as laughing gas. It also has other uses and some of the fields it will be able to operate in are wireless communication, radar and spectroscopy. Scientists for the first time have created artificial embryos without the use of sperm or eggs. They implanted them in mice and a live fetus was created. There was a problem however, the fetuses had malformations. Have we created life? Will we be able to replace the animal and eventually put these into a machine to develop? I do not like the way this is developing and some might say I am old fashioned, but anything leading to the eventual artificial creation of humans is distasteful to me. Quantum physics seems like some sort of magical world because much of it violates what we believed was possible. Take for example an experiment which was conducted. A demonstration using 2000 atoms was conducted and the result was these 2000 atoms were able to exist in two places at the same time. I don’t pretend to understand this but I will tell you what scientists say about it. Everything in the universe is also a wave, even us. Waves occupy multiple places in space at once. This means any type of matter can be in two places at once. Did this clear things up? I didn’t think so, it didn’t for me either. There is a company which has taken Star Trek seriously and is claiming they are going to perfect antimatter propulsion. That would be quite a feat since the biggest colliders can’t even produce a spoon full of the stuff in years. It is also very dangerous stuff. If it comes into contact with matter, it causes an incredible explosion because matter and antimatter eliminate each other which would make it extremely hard to store. We just registered a hit with a detector on earth of an antimatter photon, so maybe there is an area in space where antimatter can be harvested in the future.
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