A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

Credit: Vulcan Vesuvio and Pompei ruins, the Forum; Getty images

On the 24th of August 79CE, the most famous volcanic eruption occurred. Mount Vesuvius in Italy ejected a cloud of stones, ashes, and volcanic gases to a height of 33 km (21 mi), erupting molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 6×105 cubic meters per second. That event resulted in the destruction of the Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Stabiae, and many smaller settlements. The number of people that have died is unknown though it is believed that there are around 1000 victims. The only written account made by an eyewitness of that event that has survived are two letters from Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

When Mark Abbott and his team pulled a 300-foot-long core of mud from a lakebed high in the Peruvian Andes, he hoped it might provide a glimpse of the past 160,000 years of climate change.

Instead, the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported researchers revealed in the journal Nature that the lakebed had recorded the ebb and flow of glaciers for more than 700,000 years — the longest glacier record for the tropics, and among the longest records of historical climate. In that lake mud, the team found clues for how climate change may shape the modern-day world.

"This is unlike anything we had before," said Abbott, a geologist and environmental scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. "We now have a land-based record of glaciation from the tropics that is in many ways equal to our records from the ice caps at the poles and from the ocean, and that's really been lacking."

Credit: Getty images

Approximately 1,800 miles beneath our feet, swirling liquid iron in the Earth's outer core generates the planet's protective magnetic field. The magnetic field is invisible but is vital for life on Earth's surface because it shields the planet from the solar wind—streams of radiation from the sun.

 About 565 million years ago, however, the magnetic field's strength decreased, to a level of only 10% of the strength it has today. Then, mysteriously, the field bounced back, regaining its strength just before the explosion of multicellular life on Earth.

Credit: Wikipedia

1. "I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none."

2. "Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics."

3. "When all the thoughts are concerning one thing and the person loses interest in other things, the melancholy begins."

Credit: Getty images

It's funny how scientists often speak about their new invention as a discovery or vice versa. Well, one thing is to discover a cave with ancient drawings inside and another to discover a physics law. On the other hand, have we invented musical harmonies or we have found them because it's obvious that some chords sound well together, others don't and that's far from subjective? 

Maybe, we can say that there are cases when something is both a discovery and invention, which is not necessarily a contradiction. It's a ticklish topic that has been discussed for centuries but still, there is no definitive resolution. Perhaps, we haven't posed the right question yet, or the best answer to it is to stay open and thus provocative and stimulating for the imagination of future thinkers.