MARIE CURIE AND RADIOACTIVITY

  

Radioactivity is the property that atoms of certain elements have to spontaneously emit ionizing radiation. Radiation can simply be defined as energy, examples of radiation are: light, heat and radio waves. The term ionizing also indicates that this type of radiation is able to destroy the bonds inside the molecules, in fact damaging them.

THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC

 

                                                        

Recently I’ve seen this picture in the Internet and it made me ponder about the role that music has in our lives. Does music really have a healing, therapeutic power?

WILL THE EARTH'S BLACK BOX RECORD OUR END?

 

 

"Unless we dramatically transform our way of life climate change and other man-made perils will cause our civilization to crash," these words are written in the Earth's Black Box (see website)   and they appear as a worrying and dramatic warning for us and for all mankind before it is too late.

It seems an exaggeration but there are those who really think so: in Australia, for example, where at the beginning of the New Year they will build the Earth BlackBox, the black box that will record the end of the Anthropocene.

MIND READING OR THOUGHT IDENTIFICATION?

 

We are used to consider mind reading something that belongs to the world of fantasy. Something that only sorcerers and superheroes can use. But this is only partially true: over the last decade we have developed technologies that allow us to peer into people’s minds. Since “mind reading” sounds too fancy, scientists call this process "thought identification”.

THE GOLD RUSH IN THE OCEAN

 

Lately at school we've talked a lot about the rare earth and other metals both from a human rights perspective (with the topic of child labour, for example) and from a more scientific point of view with our Chemistry teacher. What caught my attention is that their extraction cannot only happen in the mainland and, in this article,  I will explain how the extraction of metals could also be a serious worry  for the ‘’health ‘’ of the oceans.   

MARS 2020: SEARCHING FOR LIFE ON MARS

Mars 2020 is a space mission developed by NASA for the search of ancient life clues on Mars . The mission consists of a rover named Perseverance and a small helicopter named Ingenuity . Perseverance has a similar design to its predecessor rover Curiosity but comprises some technical improvements and a lot of devices to investigate on bacterial life .

INVENTORS KILLED BY THEIR OWN INVENTIONS

Marie Curie

Bad luck, extreme courage, underestimation of danger: inventors’ life is not always paid back with success. There have been a few who we’ll always be remembered for their inventions, but there are some other we’ll remember because of their tragic deaths related to their own work.  Let’s see some.

GENETIC EDITING

 

Life has existed on this planet for nearly 4 billion years. Human history begins only 300,000 years ago with the appearance of the Homo Sapiens and only in the last 65 years we have figured out how DNA works, built machines that could read it and then tools that could rewrite it. Technological development is faster and faster and with it more and more debates on ethics are opening up. One of these is about genetic editing: if humans had the technology to control the source code of life, what would happen when we turn it on ourselves?

THE LIMITS OF HUMANITY

The Large Magellanic Cloud  , a galaxy which belongs to the Local Group 

With our current technology sending a human to the closest star will take thousands of years. Even assuming that humanity will become a type 3 civilization ( an example of type 3 civilization is the galactic empire in the Star Wars series ) there will always exist a boundary beyond which  we could never go further: the Local Group. The Local Group is the group of galaxies to which our galaxy belongs; it includes about 70 galaxies , most of which are small in size, which is 0.00000000001% of the observable universe .

EXOPLANETS

OUT THERE

We live in a thin spherical shell a few kilometers thick around the surface of the Earth . Even if we explore the deepest abysses in the ocean or climb the most impervious peaks of Himalaya , our reign has ridiculous dimensions .Our little world is also populated by ghosts : we think that everything we perceive is real but as we stray a little from the quite place where we live , everything we know changes . If we want to explore the secrets of the universe we must renounce these certainties preparing for the unthinkable . The research of exoplanets represents one of the last frontiers of modern science ….follow me on this wonderful  journey .

HOW DO BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS WORK ?

FIRST ATTEMPTS

In 1881 a physician named William Halsted successfully carried out a blood transfusion injecting his blood in his sister Minnie who was dying for a hemorrhage after giving birth to her child. This was one of the few successful cases,      in which that was possible, because they had the same blood type (which is not guaranteed even among close relatives). One of the first experiments was made in 1667 by Jean Baptiste Denys,      who tested this practice on a man called Antoine Mauroy using the blood of a sheep to treat his psychosis.  At the first try everything seemed good,   but after the second one he started to run a fever, had a pain in his lower back and a sting in his arm, then he urinated a thick black liquid.

HOW DOES FEAR WORK?

                                                                                 

Fear is an apparently simple - and yet extremely complex - concept. The most general definition of fear we can use is the emotion that arises in response to a potential threat. But exactly, what are the biological causes of fear? Where does it originate? What are its origins? What is its goal? In today’s article, we will try to answer to these questions.

First of all, in humans fear originates from a part of the brain known as amygdalae, which also manages various different emotions. When it detects something it considers a potential threat, the amygdalae starts sending to the entire brain electrical signals, informing them of the threat and stimulating the production of fear-associated hormones, such as adrenaline and dopamine, in order to make the body ready to flee from the threat.

PANDEMICS

There’s one thing that is consistently ranked as one of the most likely things to end the world, that would kill millions of people: a pandemic.

A pandemic is a disease that escapes our control, sweeping across the world, killing millions and changing civilization.

ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

  One of the easiest intelligence tests is the “Mirror self-recognition test”, it’s on a very intuitive level and has something to do with self-awareness. The test is to put a red mark on your face, you pass if you recognize that it’s on your own face. Children begin to pass at around 18 months old. Chimps, dolphins, elephants and magpies: all of them passed the test. However, some monkeys don’t pass the test, even though they’re widely seen as intelligent animals.

WHY IS GLASS TRANSPARENT?

Hello everyone! With today’s post  I’m going to start  a series with the answers  to many common questions from everyday life which may seem predictable or obvious but are not .

 The first question I’d like to answer is “Why is glass transparent?” Have you ever wondered how something like glass can be so invisible?

INTERSTELLAR: MANKIND'S NEXT STEP WILL BE OUR GREATEST

“Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

The movie

Interstellar is a 2014 American science fiction film written and direct by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, Anne Hathaway as Amelia Brand, Jessica Chastain as Murphy Cooper, Bill Irwin as TARS (voice and puppetry) and CASE (puppetry), Ellen Burstyn as old Murphy and Michael Caine as Professor Brand.

Interstellar has some of the most beautiful images of  the space. The space is vast and the depiction of a wormhole accomplishes amazement especially to science fiction space. The black hole is even more amazing and it is a recurrent image throughout the movie. It’s in these lingering shots of a tiny spacecraft floating through the galaxy that we can recognize the influence of Kubrick’s space Odyssey. 

Interstellar include complex but fascinating theories referring to Physics,  thanks to a scientific consultant,  Kip Thorne, who also wrote a book where he explains all the Physics in the film (The Science of Interstellar).

IS IT POSSIBLE TO LIVE NEAR A BLACK HOLE?

If you have seen the renowned film "Interstellar", you probably remember the  protagonists leaving the earth in search for an inhabitable planet near a super massive black hole, but you must know there’s a major mistake in all that.  

 A  research directed by NASA astrophysicist, Jeremy Schnittman,  explains it. In his work Schinttman analyses the probability to find an inhabitable planet at  the right distance from the black hole, in the livable area , heated by the accretion disk . Would you like to know what the mistake in the movie is? You can’t live near a black hole because of the light. What does that mean? The light  I refer to is the light that comes from the surrounding stars . To understand it,  we have to imagine the  gravitational , and in general physical  effects caused by this massive object. First of all the different passing of time. According to Einstein's  relativity , when you are close to an object with a huge mass, the time flows faster . Few hours near the black hole are many years in interstellar space. The second one is the reason why you are reading this article ....  charged particles accelerated by the gravity.

NASA SPITZER SPACE TELESCOPE CAPTURED AN AMAZING IMAGE. WHAT IS IT?

Hello everyone,

look at this picture...space bubbles! Nasa Spitzer Space Telescope captured this image of burning, bubbling star formation in the Cat's Paw Nebula. As gas and dust compress to form stars, the gas around these areas heats up and pressurizes, giving them the appearance of bubbles. Radiation from the hot stars also causes these bubbles to glow brightly. Spitzer is an infrared telescope which can help scientists to see through thick clouds of gas and dust in ways our eyes cannot. What do you think about it? What's your favorite nebula? Tell us in the comments.

Giordano C.

BEAUTIFUL ROCKS & MINERALS

Since I was younger I've always been interested in rocks and minerals. 4 years ago I went to London and I visited the Natural History Museum where I bought an amazing book on minerals and rocks. Thanks to it I’ve learnt a lot about minerals and, today, I'm going to share with you  what my three favourite ones are.  

First of all, definition!

A mineral is a naturally occurring solid with specific chemical composition.

DAMN, THE EARTH IS... MELTING!

Hi guys, today we will deal with an important topic which is changing our world: global warming. This phenomenon is creating many problems and troubles to our health and lifestyle, so, to fight it, we must know what global warming means and what it could cause in the future. First of all we must know that the global warming is caused by the extreme CO2 emissions in the atmosphere which are provoking the decrease of the ozone layer, the glacier melting, the deforestation and the climate change.