DOES SMOKING CONTRIBUTE TO WLOBAL WARMING?

Yes,smoking is not only bad for your health, but also helps to kill the climate. According the World Health Organisation, about 1.1 billion people worldwide smoke, and this number is expected to triple over the next 25 years.

All that smoke and tobacco farming will surely have an impact on the climate. Smoking alone spews 2.6 million tons of CO2 and 5.2 million tons of methane into the atmosphere every year.

But that’s not the worst part, tobbacco farming and disposing of waste has impacts on the environment too. The widespread monoculture inherent in growing tobacco extracts six times more potassium from the soil than growing other plants does.

But now comes the big hammer: 150 kg of wood are needed for drying one kilogram of tobacco, which converts to 1.2 million hectares of forest. About 600 million trees are chopped down annually to make room for tobacco plants. These trees could remove 22 million tons of the climate-killing gas yearly.

Not only that, all those cigarette filters end up on the ground and contaminate the groundwater with nicotine, dioxin, formaldehyde and cadmium.

Do dogs sweat from their tongues?

Dog's Armpits Dog's "sweat" through their exhale/breathing and through the pads on the bottom of their paws. It is not considered "sweating" anyway. Sweating in humans is to dampen the skin so that when the fluid evaporates it causes a cooling effect. 

Their main way to cool down is through panting or breathing very rapidly which cool them internally. They do not have armpits, because they do not have arms. Those aren't pits; they're called flanks. They have 4 legs. 

Dogs do have "sweat glands" on their paws. They do sweat heavily through their feet. That's why it is recommended that if you have a long-haired dog or a dog that requires frequent grooming to make sure you take it to a groomer on schedule to have its feet cleaned up.

IS THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION NOISY?

LET'S FIND OUT

You'dthinkthatsoaringaroundEarthonthe International SpaceStationwould be prettyquiet, butitturnsoutlifeaboardhumanity's orbital outpostissurprisinglynoisy — albeit in thatcomforting, white-noisesort of way. This, straightfromcommander Chris Hadfield'stwitter, is a recordingtakenfrominsidethe U.S. lab of the ISS:

https://soundcloud.com/colchrishadfield/space-station-noise

Hadfield describes theambientnoise as being "somewhatnoisy," butthat "thesounds are of theenvironmentthatkeepsusalive. Perhapslike in thewomb.

The ISS is a noisy place. Tobettercharacterizetheacousticenvironment as itchangeswithassembly, the International SpaceStationAcousticMeasurementProgram (ISS Acoustics) has collected data frombefore a permanentcrewoccupiedthe ISS. Theexperiment uses one B&K Type 2260 SoundLevel Meter (SLM) and threeAmetek Mark I audio (acoustic) dosimetersto monitor the ISS acousticnoiseenvironment. 

Forpeacefulsilence, saysHadfield, astronautsneedonlytakethemselvesoutside the ISS:"Spacewalks are whisper-quiet, just radio comm and yourownbreath."

 Snowstorms are mute

snowstorms are not frecuent,                  To produce lightning

they dont produce lightning                    and thunthers you

and thunthers.                                          need that the difference

                                                                 between the positive

                                                                 top charge and the low

This is just because of the                       denial is sufficiently

wind in winter is not                               significant a lightning

the same as wind in summer.                  takes place.

During the summer, the

troposfera is full of humid

and warm air. Above, the air                   So in winter the wind

is cold and is full of crystals                    is dry and the cauds

of ice. When the warm air                       doesn´t produce

ascends, going I obtain steam                  friction between them

of water, the molecules rub                      so thunthers and

the crystals of ice and the                        lightning aren´t

friction believe an electrical                    produced.

field in the cloud, as when

you brush the doormat with

the feet. The crystals of ice

acquire a light positive charge,

and the ascending current

takes them to the top part of

the cloud, so that in the low

part there stays a network of

negative charge.

                                                        

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IF EVOLUTION HAD TAKEN A DIFFERENT  TURN COULD DRAGONS EXISTED? 

It would have taken quite a few turns for natural selection to have produced dragons, but if you're willing to stretch a bit, most classic dragon characteristics do exist in other species. They just don't come packaged in one animal.

First up on the dragon checklist: flying. Dragon wings are usually depicted in one of two ways—a third pair of limbs connected to the backbone, or webbed forearms. Jack Conrad, a paleontologist and reptile expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, thinks the latter is more plausible.

"It seems that six appendages are very unlikely in vertebrates," he says. "The only thing close to having six limbs are these frogs in the western part of the U.S. that get this bad parasite and end up generating extra limbs. Even then, the new limbs are identical to the hind limbs, and the frogs don't do well. It seems that anytime nature tries to generate a vertebrate hexapod, it dies. That seems to be the main limitation."

In Conrad's opinion, the leathery wings of a pterosaur are the best possible flight mechanism for a giant lizard. "Quetzalcoatlus had a 30-foot wingspan," he says. "That would do the trick." Big, strong wings are necessary to compensate for the weight of a dragon's skin, which, of course, would need to withstand bow-and-arrow attacks. "Let's throw a little alligator in there for armor," Conrad says. An alligator's skin, he explains, is made partly of bony plates. When European settlers first encountered the reptiles, the skin proved to be tough enough to turn away a musket ball, plenty strong for a dragon.

OK, so we've got a very large alligator with the wings of a pterosaur that can repel musket fire. Now it just needs to breathe flames. This is where no parallel exists—there are no known animals that can spit fire or even a flammable liquid. But there are some beetles that can shoot caustic chemicals from their abdomen that can burn people's skin, so it's not totally out of the question that some animal at some point in time could make a flammable liquid. Cobras can spit venom with great accuracy at objects six feet away; the dragon could borrow that ability to propel the flammable liquid. As for lighting it? "Well, maybe, if you had some specialized organ like an electric eel's tail dangling in the mouth, that could spark that liquid and allow the creature to breathe fire," Conrad says. "Of course, this is all very theoretical.

By Andrea González 2°C

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Which Is The World´s Smallest Vertebrate?

It is a fly-size frog

The record was broken about 2 years ago by Paedophryne amauensis, which has an average length of only 7.7 mm. Actually, it's a double record, as Paedophryne amauensis became both the world's

smallest known frog and the smallest known vertebrate.

The existence of a frog that is just a bit bigger than the common fly is really mind-blowing!

Why so small? 

Austin believes that P.amauensis and other tiny frog species have evolved this way in an effort to fill a niche that nothing else is filling. Their tiny size allows them to consume very small invertebrates, like mites, that no other predator eats.

Description
P. amauensis has an average body length of only 7.7 millimetres (~0.30 in) and comes with dark-brown, earth-like colors that allow it to blend in with the leaves of the forest floor. Individuals are essentially invisible to the naked eye.

Their skeleton is reduced and there are only seven presacral vertebrae present.

Discovery
The species was discovered in August 2009, by Louisiana State University herpetologist Christopher Austin and his PhD student Eric Rittmeyer, during an expedition to explore the biodiversity of Papua New Guinea. It was formally described in January 2012, and was discovered near Amau village in the Central Province.

In their paper, the researchers note that discovering the species was not easy. Male frogs use calls that resemble sounds made by insects and both sexes camouflage themselves in the leaves of the forest floor. These two traits, combined with their tiny stature is most probably why the species has gone unnoticed for such a long time.

To catch them, the researchers resorted to sound triangulation, as the high pitch of the calls made them especially hard to locate using human hearing.

Finding the frogs was not an easy assignment. They are well camouflaged among leaves on the forest floor, and have evolved calls resembling those of insects, making them hard to spot. -"The New Guinea forests are incredibly loud at night; and we were trying to record frog calls in the forest, and we were curious as to what these other sounds were," said research leader Chris Austin from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, US. -"So we triangulated to where these calls were coming from, and looked through the leaf litter. -"It was night, these things are incredibly small; so what we did after several frustrating attempts was to grab a whole handful of leaf litter and throw it inside a clear plastic bag. -"When we did so, we saw these incredibly tiny frogs hopping around," he told BBC News. The Paedophryne amauensis was identified only recently, and consists of a number of tiny species found at various points in the eastern forests of Papua New Guinea.The tiny limbs of amauensis (top) and swiftorum are rendered translucent

They're occupying the relatively thick leaf litter of tropical forest in low-lying parts of the island, eating incredibly small insects that typically are much smaller than insects that frogs eat," said Professor Austin.

“And they're probably prey for a large number of relatively small invertebrates that don't usually prey on frogs."

Predators may well include scorpions.

Before the Paedophrynes were found, the title of "world's smallest frog" was bestowed on the Brazilian gold frog (Brachycephalus didactylus) and its slightly larger Cuban relative, the Monte Iberia Eleuth (Eleutherodactylus iberia). They both measure less than 1cm long.

The smallest vertebrates have until now been fish.
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We will run out of breathable oxygen ?




Here's why you might be worried: Burning oil, coal, gas, wood or others

organic materials uses molecular oxygen, the O2 we breathe, to breaks

carbon-hydrogen bonds and release energy. This reaction, better known as combustion, also pairs each broken-off, positively charged carbon atom with two negatively charged oxygen atoms, forming carbon dioxide, or CO2.

Although that does cut into the amount of O2 in the atmosphere, there's no need to fill your basement with oxygen tanks. Nitrogen accounts for 78 percent of the gas in the atmosphere, but molecular oxygen, the O2 that we breathe, is the runner-up, at 20.94 percent. The remaining 1 percent and change falls into the "other" category, predominantly water vapor but also argon and hydrogen gas; CO2 accounts for just 0.04 percent.

Because of this relative bounty of oxygen, scientists such as Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration don't fear that carbon emissions will cut off our oxygen supply. "Even if we were to burn another 1,000 billion tons of fossil fuels, we would only decrease the oxygen in our atmosphere to 20.88 percent," he says. And even then, the effects that action would have on the environment—more particulate pollution, hotter temperatures—would be far worse than oxygen depletion.

Roberto Garcia Padilla.

What happens to the space remaining after oil or gas are removed ?

Blue = Oil field
Green = 1st bore cones
Yellow = 2nd bore cones
Red = Final bore cones

Rocks are mostly solid. Most production of oil and gas comes from rocks that have an average porosity (percent of holes) of about 13%. That is also the average porosity of most concrete. So in 99% of all wells drilled there is no effect of the fluid withdrawal. The particles of the rock hold the total rock together as if nothing has happened. 

As well, when oil or gas is produced, something needs to fill the voids. As nature will not tolerate a vacuum, water fills in the space. All pore space in rocs are normally filled by fluid - either gas oir oil; gas is treated as if it were a fluid since in many cases it exists as such underground.) These rocks are under pressure of the overburden - the material above them, 1,000's of feet of rocks. So the fluid in the pore space also has the same pressure on it. As oil or gas is produced, the remaining fluid fills the space with a slightly lower pressure until the water begins to be produced. 

When a well goes "dry" it does not mean that the well has ceased producing fluid. It has started to produce too much water to be economically produced. There is still a lot of oil left behind. The amount can be up to 95% of original in-place oil, usually dependent on the shale content of the rock. There is a lot of oil still to be extracted in old oil fields. Gas fields are  different.

Why does the Titan arum (flor cadáver) smell so bad?

The Amorphophallus titanum , known as the titan arum , is a flowering plant with the largest unbranched inflorescence (number of flowers in the branch) in the world.

The titan arum's inflorescence is not as large as that of the talipot palm, but the inflorescence of the talipot palm is branched rather than unbranched.

Due to its odor, which is like the smell of a rotting animal, the titan arum is characterized as a carrion flower, and is also known as thecorpse flower, or corpse plant .

It is native only from western Sumatra, where it grows in openings in rainforests on limestone hills. But , The plant is cultivated by botanic gardens and private collectors around the world.

The titan inflorescence each over 3 metres  in height.   it consists of a fragrant spadix of flowers wrapped by a spathe, which looks like a large petal. In the case of the titan arum, the spathe is a deep green on the outside and dark red on the inside, with a deeply soft texture .Near the bottom of the spadix, hidden from view inside the sheath of the spathe, the spadix bears two rings of small flowers. The upper ring bears the male flowers, the lower ring is spangled with bright red-orange carpels.

The odor of the titan arum resembles rotting meat, attracting carrion-eating beetels and flesh flies that pollinate it. The inflorescence's deep red color and texture contribute to the illusion that the spathe is a piece of meat. During bloom, the tip of the spadix is approximately human body temperature, which helps the perfume volatilize; this heat is also believed to assist in the illusion that attracts carcass-eating insects.

That is why the titan arum smells so bad and a description of it .

Why not just dispose of nuclear waste in the sun?

-The sun is a constant nuclear reaction that's about 330,000 times as massive as Earth; it could swallow the tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear rods as easily as a forest fire consumes a drop of gasoline .

It is not a good idea to send radioactive waste from earth into space as a disposal method as the cost of the rocket is so large and the risk of an accident during the process is too large. If your goal is a way to spend money to fix the nuclear waste problem, fuel recycling is a much better option. Fuel reprocessing is expensive but it eliminates the vast majority of the waste and decreases the dangerous period from 100,000 years to 1,000 years. At the moment, the current cost of launching stuff into orbit is about $20,000 per kilogram of your payload. That's just to get into orbit, that's not counting the additional fuel kick needed to get your vessel going to the sun. Also, that's not counting the fact we can't really recycle these craft that are getting sent to the sun. One accident trying to launch one of these rockets means you've just splattered a ton of radioactive waste all over the launch facility (or worse, the upper atmosphere). Basically, you've just caused another catastrophy in an entire region or country, depending on the altitude of the explosion, local wind speeds, nuclear payload, etc.All in all, we're better off shooting them into the core of the Earth. Of course, by that, I mean burying it. It's closer, and it's less dangerous. If we're lucky, sometime in the future, someone will work out a way to transmute certain wastes into usable fuel really cheaply, or accelerate the decay of the really nasty stuff so that it won't be radioactive for millions or billions of years.It´s a very complex mission and it could end destroying more the Earth, instead of taking away a part of the waste.This proyect must be studied during a lot of time until obtaining a result without negative consequences.

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