Less known Science facts.

All Science Facts

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  1. Pure water (H2O) does not conduct electricity on its own.
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  2. Daizi Zheng, a Chinese designer, made a Coca-Cola powered cell phone. She designed a battery that uses enzymes to generate electricity from the carbs.
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  3. Diamonds can be shattered with a hammer.
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  4. Sound travels about 4 times faster in water than in air.
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  5. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen make up 90% of the human body.
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  6. 0.3% of solar energy from the Sahara is enough to power the whole of Europe.
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  7. Oak trees produce 2,200 acorns in a season, but each acorn only has a 1 in 10,000 chance of becoming an oak tree.
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  8. Scientists aren't sure what color dinosaurs were.
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  9. The only letter not appearing on the Periodic Table is the letter "J".
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  10. The earth is approx. 6,588,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
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  11. The brain case [of Neanderthals] on the average was more than 13 percent larger than that of the average of modern man
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  12. Your brain is 80% water.
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  13. When you walk down a steep hill, the pressure on your knees is equal to three times your body weight.
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  14. The weight of a carat (200 milligrams), standard unit of measurement for gemstones, is based on the weight of the carob seed.
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  15. The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth.
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  16. The storage capacity of human brain exceeds 4 Terrabytes.
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  17. The hair of an adult man or woman can stretch 25 percent of its length without breaking.
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  18. The Earth's atmosphere weighs about 5.5 quadrillion tons.
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  19. The banana tree cannot reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by the hand of man.
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  20. The average temperature at 40,000 feet above sea level is -60 F.
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  21. Stannous fluoride, which is the cavity fighter found in toothpaste is made from recycled tin.
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1998..Nobel Prize for medicine and Physiology.

Robert F. Furchgott

Louis J. Ignarro

Ferid Murad

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1998 was awarded jointly to Robert F. Furchgott, Louis J. Ignarro and Ferid Murad "for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system".

Importance in medicine today and tomorrow
Heart: In atherosclerosis, the endothelium has a reduced capacity to produce NO. However, NO can be furnished by treatment with nitroglycerin. Large efforts in drug discovery are currently aimed at generating more powerful and selective cardiac drugs based on the new knowledge of NO as a signal molecule.

Shock: Bacterial infections can lead to sepsis and circulatory shock. In this situation, NO plays a harmful role. White blood cells react to bacterial products by releasing enormous amounts of NO that dilate the blood vessels. The blood pressure drops and the patient may become unconscious. In this situation, inhibitors of NO synthesis may be useful in intensive care treatment.

Lungs: Intensive care patients can be treated by inhalation of NO gas. This has provided good results and even saved lives. For instance, NO gas has been used to reduce dangerously high blood pressure in the lungs of infants. But the dosage is critical since the gas can be toxic at high concentrations.

Cancer: White blood cells use NO not only to kill infectious agents such as bacteria, fungi and parasites, but also to defend the host against tumours. Scientists are currently testing whether NO can be used to stop the growth of tumours since this gas can induce programmed cell death, apoptosis.

Impotence: NO can initiate erection of the penis by dilating the blood vessels to the erectile bodies. This knowledge has already led to the development of new drugs against impotence.

Diagnostic analyses: Inflammatory diseases can be revealed by analysing the production of NO from e.g. lungs and intestines. This is used for diagnosing asthma, colitis, and other diseases.

NO is important for the olfactory sense and our capacity to recognise different scents. It may even be important for our memory.

Spectacles.

A modern pair of prescription reading glasses

Modern glasses are typically supported by pads on the bridge of the nose and by temple arms (sides) placed over the ears. CR-39 lenses are the most common plastic lenses due to their low weight, high scratch resistance, low dispersion, and low transparency to ultraviolet and infrared radiation.^{[citation needed]} Polycarbonate and Trivex lenses are the lightest and most shatter-resistant, making them the best for impact protection.^[1]

An unpopular aspect of glasses is their inconvenience. Though modern frames can be both lightweight and flexible, and new lens materials and optical coatings are resistant to breakage or scratching, glasses can still cause problems during rigorous sports. Visibility can be significantly reduced by becoming greasy, trapping vapour when eating hot food, swimming, walking in rain or rapid temperature changes (such as walking into a warm building from cold temperatures outside). Scraping, fracturing, or breakage of the lenses require time-consuming and costly professional repair.

Invention of eyeglasses

The 'Glasses Apostle' by Conrad von Soest (1403)

The first eyeglasses were made in Italy at about 1286, according to a sermon delivered on February 23, 1306 

The American scientist Benjamin Franklin, who suffered from both myopia and presbyopia, invented bifocals.

Woman wearing designer sunglasses.

Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology..1999

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1999

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1999 to Günter Blobel, for the discovery that "proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell."

Günter Blobel, born in 1936, works at the Laboratory of Cell Biology, The Rockefeller University, New York

All living organisms are made up of cells. The eukaryotic cell contains a number of different types of organelles each of which is surrounded by a tightly sealed membrane. Future applications In the near future the entire human genome will be mapped. As a result one can also deduce the structure and topogenic signals of the proteins. This knowledge will increase our understanding of processes leading to disease and can be used to develop new therapeutic strategies. Already today drugs are produced in the form of proteins, e.g. insulin, growth hormone, erythropoetin and interferon. Usually bacteria are used for the production of the drug, but in order to be functional certain human proteins need to be synthesized in more complex cells, such as yeast cells. With the help of gene technology the genes of the desired proteins are provided with sequences coding for transport signals. The cells with the modified genes can then be efficiently used as protein factories. Increased knowledge about the process by which proteins are being directed to different parts of the cell also makes it possible to construct new drugs that are targeted to a particular organelle to correct a specific defect. The ability to reprogram cells in a specific way will also be important for future cell and gene therapy. Fig. 1. "The signal hypothesis". Proteins which are to be exported out of the cell are synthesized by ribosomes, associated with the endoplasmic reticulum. The genetic information from DNA is transferred via messenger RNA (mRNA). This information determines how the amino acids build up the proteins. First, a signal peptide is formed as a part of the protein. With the help of binding proteins, the signal peptide directs the ribosome to a channel in the endoplasmic reticulum. The growing protein chain penetrates the channel, the signal peptide is cleaved, and the completed protein is released into the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum. The protein is subsequently transported out of the cell.

An Inventions that changed history,,The microwave

 

The Microwave Oven

The microwave oven, aka the "Popcorn and Hot Pockets Warmer," was a happy accident that came from, of all things, a weapons program.

Percy LeBaron Spencer was a self-educated engineer working on radar technology in the years following WWII. The technology in question was the sci-fi sounding magnetron, a piece of machinery capable of firing high intensity beams of radiation.

Above: a scientist, with robot.

Apparently, P.L.S., as some have called him, had a bit of a sweet tooth. Or a strange fetish. Either way, he had a candy bar in his pants while he was in the lab one day. The self-proclaimed engineer noticed that the chocolate bar had melted when he was working with the magnetron.

Spencer disregarded the simple idea that his body heat had melted the chocolate in favor of the less logical and therefore more scientific conclusion that invisible rays of radiation had "cooked it" somehow.

A sane man would stop at this point and realize these magical heat rays were landing just inches from his tender scrotum. Indeed, most of the military experts on hand probably dreamed of the battlefield applications of their new Dick-Melting Ray. But like all men of science, Spencer was fascinated and treated his discovery like a novelty. He used it to make eggs explode and pop kernels of corn ("Imagine, a future where a building full of workers in cubicles eat this all day!")

I proclaim myself to be awesome.

Spencer continued to experiment with the magnetron until he boxed it in and marketed it as a new way to cook food. The initial version of the microwave was roughly six feet tall, weighed in around 750 pounds and had to be cooled with water. But they got it down to size, and today we use it mostly to destroy random objects on YouTube.

Read more: 5 Accidental Inventions That Changed The World | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_17134_5-accidental-inventions-that-changed-world.html#ixzz1nuRNw5p1

2000..Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.

Arvid Carlsson

Paul Greengard

Eric R. Kandel

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2000 was awarded jointly to Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric R. Kandel "for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system".

A signal transduction in biology, is a cellular mechanism. It converts a stimulus into a specific cellular response.^[1] Signal transduction starts with a chemical or physical signal to a receptor, and ends with a change in cell function.

Receptors are in the cell membrane, with part of the receptor outside and part inside the cell.  The chemical signal binds to the outer portion of the receptor, changing its shape. This causes another signal inside the cell.  Some chemical messengers, such as testosterone, can pass through the cell membrane, and bind directly to receptors in the cytoplasm or nucleus.

Sometimes there is a cascade of signals within the cell. With each step of the cascade, the signal can be amplified, so a small signal can result in a large response.^[1] Eventually, the signal creates a change in the cell, either in the expression of the DNA in the nucleus or in the activity of enzymes in the cytoplasm.

Most often, ordered sequences of biochemical reactions inside the cell are involved. These are carried out by enzymes and linked through second messengers. So a "second messenger pathway" is produced. These things usually happen quickly, sometimes very quickly. They may last from milliseconds (in the case ofion flux) to days for gene expression.

The number of proteins and other molecules that take part increases during the process. So a 'signal cascade' develops and a relatively small stimulus may cause a large response.

In bacteria and other single-cell organisms, the transduction processes a cell has limits the number of ways it can respond to its environment. In multicellular organisms, lots of different signal transduction processes are used to coordinate the behavior of individual cells. By this means the function of the organism as a whole is organized. The more complex the organism, the more complex the repertoire of signal transduction processes the organism must possess.

Thus, sensing of both the external and internal environment at the cellular level, relies on signal transduction. Many disease processes such as diabetes, heart disease, autoimmunity and cancer arise from defects in signal transduction pathways. This highlights the critical importance of signal transduction to biology and medicine.^[2]