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The Sun is not just one big and bright ball.

In order to produce the energy we detect as light and heat, it fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, a process called fusion. The Sun can be divided into six layers: core, the radiative zone, the convection zone, the photosphere, the chromosphere and the outermost layer, the corona

1. The core is where all the energy that we detect as light and heat originates from, produced by nuclear fusion reactions with temperatures reaching 15 million degrees Celsius.

2. Above the core is the “radiative zoen”. It extends about 3/4 of the way to the surface( the core only 1/4 ) and it transports the energy created from the core to the surface. However, due the the very high density of the plasma the radiation does not travel directly outwards, but it is bounced around countless times. It may take several hundred thousand years for the radiation to make its way from the core to the top of the radiative zone.

3. The convection zone is just the opposite of the radiative zone. The plasma is as “cool” as 2 minion degrees Celsius and does not allow radiation to be transferred upwards. This is done by large bubbles of hot plasma that move with currents upwards(this process is similar to a boiling pot of water that is heated at the bottom)

4. The visible surface is called the “photosphere” and is “only” 5500 degrease Celsius. Above it is the “chromosphere” which appears red because it can be detected in red hydrogen alpha light.

5. The outer most layer the “Corona” is about 2 million degrees Celsius, solar flares are even hotter, which makes it much higher temperature than the visible surface. Why it is so much hotter than the surface has been a mystery for decades which scientists are hoping to resolve by sending the Parker Solar Probe which will fly into low solar corona.

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According to some scientists, you can never actually touch something.

If you’re reading this right now, it’s a sure bet that you are touching something, be it your cellphone, laptop, chair, desk, or a nice plush bed with Egyptian-cotton sheets (we can dream, right?). Speaking of that nice plush, comfy bed, I hate to shatter the illusion, but you aren’t actually touching it.

Everything you can see, touch, and “feel” is made up of atoms — the infinitesimally small constituent parts of matter. The field of study related to these, called “quantum physics,” gives us plenty of mind-bending things to consider about the world around us — specifically, the indistinguishable activities going on at an atomic scale.

Ultimately, it may seem the atomic world isn’t particularly relevant to our day-to-day lives. However, this information is a key point when it comes to our understanding of how the four forces shape the physical world, and thus, it is key to understanding the universe. After all, you can’t understand how large things work without knowing the ins-and-outs of the small stuff, too.

Among the phenomena it encompasses, we have: quantum entanglement, particles that pop in-and-out of existence; the particle-wave duality, particles that shape-shift at random; strange states of matter; and even strange matter itself. Quantum mechanics also tells us that we are made up of particles, which means that, microscopically, all sorts of strange things are going on within us that aren’t perceivable to the human eye — things that sometimes seem to make little sense.

A bit more about particles.

To understand why you can never touch anything, you need to understand how electrons function, and before you can understand that, you need to know basic information about the structure of atoms

For starters, almost all of the mass an atom has is concentrated into an incredibly small region called the nucleus. Surrounding the nucleus is a whole lot of seemingly empty space, except for the region within an atom where electrons (and protons) can be found orbiting the central nucleus. The number of electrons within an atom depends on the element each atom is supposed to comprise.

Like photons, this funky subatomic particle also exhibits the particle-wave duality, which means that the electron has characteristics of both a particle and a wave. On the other hand, they have a negative charge. Particles are, by their very nature, attracted to particles with an opposite charge, and they repel other similarly charged particles.

This prevents electrons from ever coming in direct contact (in an atomic sense and literal sense). Their wave packets, on the other hand, can overlap, but never touch.

The same is true for all of humankind. When you plop down in a chair or slink into your bed, the electrons within your body are repelling the electrons that make up the chair. You are hovering above it by an unfathomably small distance.

Why do we think we touch things?

I’m sure some of you will wonder, “If electron repulsion prevents us from ever truly touching anything, why do we perceive touch as a real thing?” The answer boils down to how our brains interpret the physical world.

In this case, a number of factors are at work. The nerve cells that make up our body send signals to our brain that tell us that we are physically touching something, when the  sensation of touch is merely given to us by our electron’s interaction with — i.e., its repulsion from — the electromagnetic field permeating spacetime (the medium electron waves propagate through).

Also note, various things play a role here in making collections of particles into tangible things. We have things such as chemical bonding and, of course, the four primary forces mentioned above. Chemical bonds allow electrons to “latch on” to imperfections within an object’s surface, creating friction.

All in all, isn’t it amazing how these things relate? It’s a fundamental scientific truth that things are often not as they seem, or at least, they are not as we perceive them to be. It throws everything we think about the universe into a new light.

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This bizarre, hexagon-shaped vortex has been forming above Saturn’s North Pole as the northern hemisphere enters summer, a long process which has been going on since 2009. As one year on Saturn is roughly 30 years here on Earth, this makes the winters long and “full of terrors”, with temperature above the northern stratosphere reaching minus 158 degrees Celsius. This phenomenon spans 32,000 kilometres wide, which is 2.5 times as wide as Earth, and composed of air moving at a devastating speed of 320km/h. The smaller circular vortex at the centre has been monitored since it was first spotted 38 years ago in 1980 and 1981 by both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts. However, we have been receiving more details about the hexagon when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft began orbiting the ringed gas giant. Unfortunately, the low temperatures of minus 158 degrees Celsius in the stratosphere were compromising the probe’s infrared spectrometer, leaving the higher-altitude regions unexplored for many years. Since it gradually started worming up, scientists were able to analyse it for the first time in 2014. Since then the hexagon has been drastically increasing in size and temperature, surrounding the smaller circular vortex at it’s core.

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Did you know that humans share about 60% of their DNA with that of a banana?

We’ve long known that we’re closely related to chimpanzees and other primates, but did you know that humans also share more than half of our genetic material with chickens, fruit flies, and bananas? 

Since the human genome was first sequenced in 2003, the field of comparative genomics has revealed that we share common DNA with many other living organisms — yes, including our favorite yellow peeled fruit. 

Almost all living creatures come with an instruction manual, its genome, which tells it how to grow, build itself and operate. These instructions are made up of DNA that tell an organism how to make protein molecules. And proteins make us who we are. They determine physical characteristics, such as eye and hair color, and comprise substances essential for life, such as enzymes, antibodies and hormones. 

By sequencing the entire genome of various organisms, including yeast, rice, and frogs, researchers have found that all living things on our planet have some similarities in their instruction manuals. The overlap exists because we all evolved from a common ancestor,  a single-celled organism that lived three or four billion years ago, known as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).  Many of these common genes have been conserved through billions of years of evolution.

Studying our genes common to other organisms is helping us to better understand what makes us uniquely human, as well to understand the genetic underpinnings of disease.

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It takes only 92 minutes and 49 seconds for the International Space Station to orbit Earth, which is 7.67 km/s or 27,600 km/h. . Since it’s launch in 1998 new modules have been continuously added to the ISS, making the largest man-made object in low Earth orbit. The ISS provides a microgravity and space platform for conducting scientific research and experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology,, weather, space weather, medicine and testing new materials, electronics and long term human exposure to low orbit and space radiation. According to the original Memorandum of Understanding, the ISS is planed to be a laboratory, observatory, provide transportation maintenance and act as a staging base for possible future Moon, Mars and asteroid missions, and as of 2010 it was assigned additional roles of serving commercial, educational and diplomatic purposes.

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One of the last images of Saturn taken by NASA’s space probe Cassini. After 13 years of calling it “home” Cassini was sent into the giant planet’s atmosphere and melted.

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Nuclear Fusion is the process by which the Sun and other stars generate heath and light by smashing light atoms together and producing energy. Fusion as oppose to Fission, efficiently generates energy with very little radioactive waste with much lower half-lives, which is why it is considered to be the ‘perfect energy source’. In order to achieve Fusion here on Earth, Tritium and Deuterium (isotopes of Hydrogen) are fused together and result in the formation of Helium with an extra mass that is converted into the kinetic energy of the neutron. This process is very difficult to achieve since it occurs in extremely high temperature and density environment. We are basically creating a mini Sun in a lab and harnessing its energy.

Firing up and keeping Fusion reaction stable requires a lot of energy and it has to produce more than it consumes in order to be efficient and replace Nuclear Fission.

With the first commercially available reactor set to be switched on by 2033, scientists are looking forward to making Fusion energy globally available in the early 2040s.

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Gravitational waves are 'ripples' in the fabric of space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. Einstein's mathematics showed that massive accelerating objects (such as neutron stars or black holes orbiting each other) would disrupt space-time in such a way that 'waves' of distorted space would radiate from the source (like the movement of waves away from a stone thrown into a pond). Furthermore, these ripples would travel at the speed of light through the Universe, carrying with them information about their cataclysmic origins, as well as invaluable clues to the nature of gravity itself. The strongest gravitational waves are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, the collapse of stellar cores (supernovae), coalescing neutron stars or white dwarf stars, the slightly wobbly rotation of neutron stars that are not perfect spheres, and the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the birth of the Universe itself.

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Coral reefs consist of huge numbers of individual coral polyps – soft-bodied, invertebrate animals – linked by tissue. The Great Barrier Reef is an interlinked system of about 3000 reefs and 900 coral islands, divided by narrow passages, just beneath the surface of the Coral Sea. Spanning more than 2000 km and covering an area of some 350 000 sq km, it is the largest living structure on Earth and the only one visible from space. The southern part of the reef is pictured here. Creating conditions for coral polyps to colonise here took some time. The reef we see today originated during the last Ice Age when water from the melting ice inundated the edge of the continental shelf. It is believed to be built upon a platform from an earlier reef structure dating back some 18 000 years. As diverse as a rainforest with numerous types of habitats, the reef hosts thousands of marine animals, including sharks, barracuda, turtles and some 1500 tropical fish species.

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What is the connection between cooking and brains? Understanding how and why our brains got so big has been a major puzzle because such a brain is metabolically expensive. In fact, the brain needs more energy for its size than any other organ. Although it might seem being smarter is always better, having a big brain exerts a high toll. Ancestral humans may have compensated for this energy cost by cooking food. Like all ideas about human evolution, the cooking hypothesis can only be tested indirectly—without a time machine we cannot know exactly what happened in our evolutionary history. But there are several converging pieces of evidence that support Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis.

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UV light is instrumental in triggering vitamin D production, which helps to strengthen the immune system, bones and muscles, reduces depression, prevents diabetes and obesity, fosters normal cell growth and helps to maintain hormonal balance. UV light helps some skin conditions, such as psoriasis, by reducing the itchy, scaly skin patches. Finally, UV light stimulates melatonin production, thus helping to reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), regulate your moods and enable a regular sleep schedule. UV is an environmental human carcinogen. It’s the most prominent and universal cancer-causing agent in our environment. There is very strong evidence that each of the three main types of skin cancer (basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma) is caused by sun exposure. Research shows that as many as 90% of skin cancers are due to UV radiation.

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1. The distance between your device and the routed/sender 2. The amount of background noice, eg microwave ovens, power sources, poorly shielded cables and devices that operate in the 2.5GHz and 5GHz channels. 3. The amount of users in the network. 4. The amount of nearby WiFi networks, they all work in the same frequencies and can affect your signal. 5. The available transmitting power of both the router and your device. 6. Materials with high signal blocking potential between the router and your device. A few of these are concrete, bulletproof glass and metal.

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It is true that not all parts of the brain are active all the time, but over a day we use 100% of our brain, most of it active all the time. This is due to energy efficiency reasons, even though it amounts to 5% of a person’s body weight, the brain consumes as much as 20% of our body’s energy. Work at a 100%, firing all 86 billion neurones, would be “mind blowing”.

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