While I’m looking through the daily papers I often come across odd pictures and very short stories and, having gathered a few together over the past couple of weeks I thought you might enjoy my top four contenders for the Wildlife’s Got Talent contest!!
How large is a googol in real terms? The number of grains of sand lying on the beach at Coney Island has been calculated at about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 – one followed by only 20 zeros. Much smaller than a googol!
A what??! I have to admit that I had no idea what an echinoderm was before I discovered a weird and wonderful news item in one of the daily rags the other day! But this echinoderm is unlike any of its friends or relations! Read on …
A green flash can occur at sunrise or sunset when some part of the Sun suddenly and briefly seems to change color from red or orange to green or blue. This is an optical effect caused by the larger refraction of light at the blue/ green end of the spectrum…
Various theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain the bizarre phenomenon, but to date no satisfactory answers have been found. Some commentators suggest that kangaroos in the United States are the shy descendants of animals that, on some unknown occasion in the past, escaped from a circus or zoo. One rational explanation is that they are native marsupials not yet officially discovered or classified; however, the only evolutionary ancestors come from South, not North, America.
An odd device patented in Britain in 1904 by a Prussian count, Vladimir Skorzewski, was a compressed air walking assister. It consisted of a seat and handlebars, shock absorbers, and leg extensions and soles attached to stirrups. The count’s notion was that the shock absorbers at the contraption’s joints would function much like a series of miniature pogo sticks. The user could bound along the street and still enjoy the comforts of sitting down while “walking”.
The mathematicians of ancient Greece attributed characters to numbers and awarded some of the status of perfection. For Euclid, one of the finding fathers of modern mathematics, a perfect number was one that equaled the sum of its own divisors – that is numbers that will divide into it without leaving a remainder. The first perfect number is 6: its divisors are 1, 2, and 3, 14 which add up to 6. The second is 28 (1 + two + four + seven + 14). The Greeks knew only two other perfect: 496 and 8,128.
A program being established by NASA will eventually cover and area 10 million times larger than that investigated so far. Using specially designed equipment, it will focus on some 1,000 carefully chosen sun-type stars. The hope is to detect radio signals. The equipment will also scan the entire sky over a wide range of frequencies. Although each point will be observed for only few seconds, the survey will increase the probability that all potential sites for intelligent life have been examined.
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