Leafs

Tuesday, 8 October 2013

A Patato has More Chromosomes than us.



Potato has More Chromosomes than Humans.
A chromosome is an organized structure of DNA (This is what makes you unique), protein, and RNA found in cells.
Even though We are one of the most complex organisms in the world, and that this would make you think we have a lot of chromosomes, we have less than something as simple as a potato!
We have only 46 Chromosomes and Potato has 48 Chromosomes.

 



Wednesday, 18 September 2013

Cthulhu Larva






The Deep Sea Holothurian, also  known as an abyssal sea cucumber, sounds like a boss from Final Fantasy and looks like something Khan would attach to the brain of a Starfleet officer.The Cthulhu Larvae are most generally  found on Demerara Abyssal Plain, but can be in abundance most anywhere except the North Atlantic Ocean. aka the SEA PIG Cthulhu Larvae are not cosidered an endangered species.The largest concern for the species is deep-sea trawling. Since the cthulhu larvae travel in groups of 300-600.Cthulhu Larvae are almost always seen facing in the same direction, towards the current.
It is only a few inches long, has no face and eats mud, which is exactly how we described our genitalia on Match.com.  The abyssal sea cucumber is one of the most successful ocean dwelling species, presumably because any predator would take one look at this thing and run home to sleep with the lights on in their parents’ room.




Friday, 30 August 2013

Fleas can jump up to 200 times their height. This is equivalent to a man jumping the Empire State Building in New York.




1. Fleas have four life stages: egg, larva, pupa, biting adult.

2. Fleas feed on the blood of their host -- humans, birds, reptiles, and wild and domestic animals.

3. The female flea can lay 2,000 eggs in her lifetime.

4. A flea can live more than 100 days without a blood meal.

5. The female flea consumes 15 times her own body weight in blood daily.

6. A flea can jump up to 8 inches high, or approximately 150 times its own height. That's like if you could leap over tall buildings in a single bound.

7. Pets with fleas may develop anemia, tapeworms or intense bouts of itching (pruritus).

8. Some pets may develop an allergy to flea saliva, which causes severe irritation and itchiness.

9. The best way to check for fleas is with a flea comb.

10. Even though there are more than 2,000 known species and subspecies of fleas, one flea species -- the cat flea -- accounts for most of the dog and cat flea cases found in the U.S.

Saturday, 10 August 2013

Processing speed of the human brain compared to computer







Processing Power and Speed
The human brain -
We can only estimate the processing power of the average human brain as there is no way to measure it quantitatively as of yet. If the theory of taking nerve volume to be proportional to processing power is true we then, may have a correct estimate of the human brain's processing power.
It is fortunate that we understand the neural assemblies is the retina of the vertebrate eye quite well (structurally and functionally) because it helps to give us a idea of the human brain's capability.
The retina is a nerve tissue in the back of the eyeball which detects lights and sends images to the brain. A human retina has a size of about a centimeter square is half a millimeter thick and is made up of 100 million neurons. Scientists say that the retina sends to the brain, particular patches of images indicating light intensity differences which are transported via the optic nerve, a million-fiber cable which reaches deep into the brain.
Overall, the retina seems to process about ten one-million-point images per second.
Because the 1,500 cubic centimeter human brain is about 100,000 times as large as the retina, by simple calculation, we can estimate the processing power of a average brain to be about 100 million MIPS (Million computer Instructions Per Second ). In case you're wondering how much speed that is, let us give you an idea.
1999's fastest PC processor chip on the market was a 700 MHz pentium that did 4200 MIPS. By simple calculation, we can see that we would need at least 24,000 of these processors in a system to match up to the total speed of the brain !! (Which means the brain is like a 168,0000 MHz Pentium computer). But even so, other factors like memory and the complexity of the system needed to handle so many processors will not be a simple task. Because of these factors, the figures we so childishly calculated will most probably be a very serious underestimate.
The computer - The most powerful experimental super computers in 1998, composed of thousands or tens of thousands of the fastest microprocessors and costing tens of millions of dollars, can do a few million MIPS. These systems were used mainly to stimulate physical events for high-value scientific calculations.
Here, we have a chart of processor speeds for the past few years.
Year
Clock Speed (MHz)
Instruction Rate (MIPS)
1992
200
200 (400)
1993.5
300
300 (600)
1995
400
800 (1600)
1996.5
500
1000 (2000)
1998
600
2400 (3600)
1999.5
700
2800 (4200)
2000
1000
?
From the chart above, we can observe some break through s in microprocessor speeds. The current techniques used by research labs should be able to continue such improvements for about a decade. By then maybe prototype multiprocessor chips finally reaching MIPS matching that of the brain will be cheap enough to develop.
Improvements of computer speeds however have some limitations. The more memory it has, the slower it is because it takes longer to run through its memory once. Computers with less memory hence have more MIPS, but are confined to less space to run big programs. The latest, greatest super computers can do a trillion calculations per second and can have a trillion bytes of memory. As computer memory and processors improve, the Megabyte/MIPS ratio is a big factor to consider. So far, this ratio has remained constant throughout the history of computers.
So who has more processing power ?
By estimation, the brain has about 100 million MIPS worth of processing power while recent super-computers only has a few million MIPS worth in processor speed. That said, the brain is still the winner in the race. Because of the cost, enthusiasm and efforts still required, computer technology has still some length to go before it will match the human brain's processing power.

Thursday, 25 July 2013

Japanese spider crab



The Japanese spider crab has the greatest leg span of any arthropod, reaching 3.8 metres (12 ft) from claw to claw. The body may grow to a size of 40 cm or 16 in (carapace width) and the whole crab can weigh up to 41 pounds (19 kg).The males have the longer chelipeds; females have much shorter chelipeds, which are shorter than the following pair of legs.Apart from its outstanding size, the Japanese spider crab differs from other crabs in a number of ways. The first pleopods of males are unusually twisted, and its larvae appear primitive. The crab is orange, with white spots along the legs. It is reported to have a gentle disposition "in spite of its ferocious appearance".
Japanese spider crabs are mostly found off the southern coasts of the Japanese island of HonshÅ«, from Tokyo Bay to Kagoshima Prefecture. Outlying populations have been found in Iwate Prefecture and off Su-ao in Taiwan. Adults can be found at depths of up to 600 m (2,000 ft), or as shallow as 50 m (160 ft). They like to inhabit vents and holes in the deeper parts of the ocean.
 


Shedding New Light On the Brightest Objects in the Universe






Shedding New Light On the Brightest Objects in the Universe

July 24, 2013 — Quasars are among the brightest, oldest, most distant, and most powerful objects in the universe. Powered by massive black holes at the center of most known galaxies, quasars can emit enormous amounts of energy, up to a thousand times the total output of the hundreds of billions of stars in our entire Milky Way.
Dartmouth astrophysicists Ryan Hickox and Kevin Hainline and colleagues have a paper scheduled for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, detailing discoveries based upon observations of 10 quasars. They documented the immense power of quasar radiation, which reaches out for many thousands of light years to the limits of the quasar's galaxy. 
"For the first time, we are able to see the actual extent to which these quasars and their black holes can affect their galaxies, and we see that it is limited only by the amount of gas in the galaxy," says Hainline, a Dartmouth postdoctoral research associate. "The radiation excites gas all the way to the margins of the galaxy and stops only when it runs out of gas."
The radiation released by a quasar covers the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves and microwaves at the low-frequency end through infrared, ultraviolet, and X-rays, to high-frequency gamma rays. A central black hole, also called an active galactic nucleus, may grow by swallowing material from the surrounding interstellar gas, releasing energy in the process. This leads to the creation of a quasar, emitting radiation that illuminates the gas present throughout the galaxy.
"If you take this powerful, bright radiation source in the center of the galaxy and blast the gas with its radiation, it will get excited in just the same way the neon gets excited in neon lamps, producing light," says Hickox, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth. "The gas will produce very specific frequencies of light that only a quasar can produce. This light functioned as a tracer that we were able to use to follow the gas excited by the black hole out to large distances."
Quasars are small compared to a galaxy, like a grain of sand on a beach, but the power of their radiation can extend to the galactic boundaries and beyond.
The illumination of gas can have a profound effect, since gas that is lit up and heated by the quasar is less able to collapse under its own gravity and form new stars. Thus, the tiny central black hole and its quasar can slow down star formation in the entire galaxy and influence how the galaxy grows and changes over time.
"This is exciting because we know from a number of different independent arguments that these quasars have a profound effect on the galaxies in which they live," Hickox says. "There is a lot of controversy about how they actually influence the galaxy, but now we have one aspect of the interaction that can extend on the scale of the entire galaxy. Nobody had seen this before." 
Hickox, Hainline, and their co-authors based their conclusions on observations made with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. Dartmouth is a partner in SALT, giving faculty and students access to the instrument. The observations were performed using spectroscopy, in which light is broken down into its component wavelengths. "For this particular kind of experiment, it is among the best telescopes in the world," says Hickox.
They also used data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) -- a space telescope that imaged the whole sky in the infrared. The scientists used observations in infrared light because they give a particularly reliable measure of the total energy output by the quasar.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130724200605.htm