Human fingers can detect nano-size
objects. This means you not only
have the ability to feel a tiny bump
the size of a large molecule, but if
your finger was the size of Earth,
you could determine the difference
between a house and a car. Source
And yet its still almost impossible to find the end of the tape
cowards. i can already tell the difference between a house and a car
this pic from my biology textbook is way funnier than it needs to be
I hate being a bio major bc I know exactly what this stupid picture is referring to
do tell
there are these things called survivorship curves and there are three types Type I (shown in red) Type II (blue) and Type III (green) They’re created by looking at birth and death rates of a given species and the curve shows at what point in time an organism of a specific species will die. For example, humans have a fairly low infant mortality and if you make it to around age 16 you’ll probably survive until you’re around 75 unless there’s an accident or you have some undetected disease that would cause you to die early. Type III are plants, fish, and other marine animals that have a very low chance of survival at birth but if they make it past infancy they will likely live to their life expectancy. Type II are birds, small lizards and mammals and they really just die randomly.
It’s 2018 and I still have no clue how CDs work. It’s a shiny disc, how do they get data on that, let alone that much?? Magic
Like a vinyl disc, where a physical groove is marked into the vinyl, a laser marks the ink of a CD in a similar manner.
A laser (your disc drive) can then look at the pattern in the ink and understand it.
There’s no grooves on a CD tho???
They’re just really tiny, hence the laser. The smaller grooves means that more info can fit on a disc of the same size.
Man how the fuck did they figure out how to make that
“What if we replaced the Diamond needle of a record player with a laser?”
it’s only comparable to the grooves on a vinyl record in the sense that a spiral is the best way to store a track of data on a rotating disc. the truth is far more impressive than any of you have let on
Audio is translated into an electrical signal by a device that produces alternating current at the same frequency and intensity (voltage) as the sound waves hitting it, a microphone.
The voltage of that analogue audio signal is measured 44,100 times per second on a scale from -32,768 to 32,767 and stored as binary.
That binary does not go onto the disc directly as burnt area = 0, as many sources will tell you. The change from a pit to a land or vice-versa is what signifies a 1. It is also modulated to allow the player to read it more easily and encoded in a way so that the disc can still be read even if there are many bits that cannot be read due to a reasonable degree of scratches or dirt.
That finalized set of binary instructions is fed into a laser that etches the pits into a glass disc coated with a polymer that falls off glass discs easily when hit directly by a laser. It is then put in a vacuum chamber, coated with nickel, and a negative copy of that is grown by the complicated process of electrodeposition.
That negative copy is used to mold a disc of clear plastic with all the pits and lands. After it is molded it is coated with aluminum and another layer of plastic on top of the aluminum.
You put it in the CD player and the sensor that measures how much light is reflected by the laser sends that data to a little computer that reverses those modulations and error-correction encoding and sends that data to a circuit that takes the now-raw binary data and turns it back into an analogue signal that is amplified and sent to a speaker.
• Cacti are some of the only plants to photosynthesize from their stems. Their needles are really just modified leaves.
• Avocados are only around because people pollinate and disperse them by hand. The large seed is indigestible to small mammals now. It was originally eaten by giant sloths who would poop them out far away from the parent tree so they can grow. This is called an evolutionary anachronism.
• Banana candy does not taste like bananas because it was designed to taste like the Gros Michel banana which was eaten in the pre-1950s. It was wiped out by a fungus called panama disease. Since bananas are asexual all of them are genetically identical making it easy to wipe them all out at once. However fungus is sexual so it evolves more quickly. This means eventually we may lose the modern banana, the Cavendish, to it as well.
• There are actually three different types of photosynthesis: C3, C4, and CAM. Which type is used depends on the aridness of the environment, and are increasingly more efficient as listed.
• Moss is amazing. The fuzzy part of the moss is called the gametophyte stage and it is haploid meaning it has one set of chromosomes like a sperm or an egg cell in humans. If you look closely, sometimes you will what look like little tiny seeds on stems coming out of the main body. This is the sporophyte stage and it’s diploid, or has two sets of chromosomes, like our body cells. Moss is the oldest type of plant.
• You can usually tell what animal pollinates a plant by the color and shape of its flowers. Red flowers are hardly ever pollinated by bees because bees cannot see red well. Butterfly flowers have long deep centers. Bird pollinated plants can bear weight and are wide and open. Bat pollinated plants usually smell strongly and are darkly colored.
• Almost all American native elms and chestnut trees are extinct because of fungi. Asian chestnut and elm have replaced them, because they are resistant to the strains.
• There is a type of fern that has over 1200 chromosomes. For reference, humans have 46.
• If you shine consistent low level red light on a plant it will grow extremely tall, because red light tells the plant it is being shaded by and competing with other plants. If you shine consistent green light on a plant it will not sprout or die (if already sprouted) because plants absorb red and blue light to use. This is also why plants are green, because the unused green light is reflected back out.
TLDR; Plants are frickin cool and should get as much love as our animal friends.
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