Bubba

Here's a write up of the above mentioned experiment http://science.krishna.org/Articles/2000/07/00059.html

basic experiments have shown that the molecular precursors to life can be formed by simply putting the corresponding elements in a solution and sparking an electric current through them. this experiment was done to show that with the aid of a little lightning the building blocks for earth can form in a wet enviromrnt. (sorry i cant remember who did this first, and google has let me down )

Thomas Kirby you raise some very good points. I especially like the implicate reference that your president is of the same calibre as CSI . I have to raise a note of disagreement with regards to "free exploitations of fantasies" surely you can't think that censorship should be completely done away with. Guidance is essential to human development, for example an act of sexual intercourse is different for a person in the throws of puberty when compared to an experienced adult who understands the physical and emotional fallout attached to such acts.

r u?

Since Yt2095 is going to point out that the above is just my opinion. Here is an example of why i hold this opinion (yes it is only an opinion i don't claim it to be more). I once saw a video of a guy falling of a skateboard and breaking his leg is spectacular fashion. It made me cringe but i still watched it a quite a few times. Why? Because besides looking brutally painful it was also kind of amusing (anyone who watches "funniest home vidoes" will also know that seeing people hurt themselves is a form of entertainment). However i have wittnessed people being hit by cars, breaking bones, heard tendons snap, and when i am actually present at the event it is NEVER funny. The one thing that never comes across the screen is the rush of adrenalin and the rising of bile in the back of your throat.

It is for exactly this reason that the internet can be potentially very dangerous. When we see events, or actions on the screen we only get a small section of the spectrum of senses and emotions that are experienced by the people involved. This can lead to misrepresentation of what is actually happening due to the detachment from reality that this medium provides.

This is a perfect examples of where to use l'Hopitals rule, if you'v learnt it yet, otherwise i can't help sorry.

Thank you all for you helpful replies. YT2095 that seems like a very reasonable hypothesis and I can see no immediate problem with it. Notice I said 'hypothesis' and not 'opinion'. It's a hypothesis because you'v used facts we know about (pore shape, sebaceous oil) to explain an observed event (the sticking coin), hence showing an excellent scientific process. Now we just need to do some experiments, test different pore size and shape against different currencies and we could publish a paper. Had you simply said “the pores on your face act as suction caps” then no self respecting journal would publish us.

this question was recently posed to me: "If i take a coin (or bottle top, paper clip etc.) and press it hard to my cheek/forehead then when i take my hand away the coin sticks to my face for a bit before falling off. why?" i suspect this is a chemistry question (Van Der Vaals forces???) but i really have no idea. Can anyone else give a good explaination for this phenomenon? ps. theres no need to make jokes about washing, it still works after you'v just washed.

I think that your trying to over complicate the problem. Mars looks brighter in opposition because it is closer to earth. The brightness of an object is proportional to 1/r^2, where r is the distance to that object. Draw a plot of y= 1/x^2 and look at how there is a steep increase in y for a small decrese in x (at small x values), hence as mars comes a little closer it becomes much brighter. I think "retrograde" and "epicycle" are probably inapropriate terms to be thinking of here.

Thats not fair, now your introducing a variable, the "uneven die". I suppose I should have specified the dice as all being equal and unweighted.

This is an interesting feature of relativity. If the sun dissapeared right now we wouldn't know about it for 8 min, so for 8min the earth would be orbiting nothing!!

Always a pleasure

Dr. Finlay, the key difference is that for 1.1, the 'above' rectangles, the height (or altitude as they call it) is measured at the right hand side of the rectangle, where as for the 'below' rectangles we measure from the left. This means that the very first below rectangle has a height measured at zero. Hence the height of the first 'below' rectangle is 0 and dose not count to the total, with this rectangle missing we are left with n-1 rectangles that contribute to the total.

shenzhou, thanks for the input, very interesting study. the point i was trying to make is you can't use the "if gays don't have kids how can they pass it on?" argument .When you think about this it seems obvious that any genetic contribution to male homosexuality would have to come from the mothers side.

It think your confusing the difference between rotate and orbit. in 8 min the earth rotates 2 degrees about its axis but only moves .005 degrees in its orbit around the sun.

JustStuit, first off good question. light dose not travel in a wave because of particles in the way, in fact (loosely put)the wave oscillates in a perpendicular direction to the direction of travel. think of a wave in the ocean. the wave front moves along at a steady speed, but the water is "pushed" up and down as the wave passes. Hence the wave travels in a straight line horizontally forward, while the water is oscillated up and down. Photons (Light) consist of an electric and magnetic field which oscillate horizontally and vertically with respect to the forward direction of travel. if you were to "look" at a photon coming towards you the electric and magnetic fields would trace out a cross, +, as the photon approached. ps. unlike with the water wave, a photon dose not actually cause an oscillation unless it is absorbed.

This is an old debate, and usually boils down to nature vs. nurture. To the best of my knowledge there is no accepted evidence of homosexuality being a physiological phenomenon, this doesn’t mean that it is or isn’t. There was however a claim in the early 90’s of a gay gene, but further tests were inconclusive. http://www.leaderu.com/jhs/satinover.html It is hard to make head way on this issue as logical reasoning some times becomes lost in peoples (very strong) personal sexual feeling and preferences. I for example am unavoidably heterosexual not matter what I do. I do not identify with the gay community but I realise that PEOPLE ARE GAY and as human being deserve respect and compassion. Rather that tell you what I think here are a few facts. 1)Some people claim not to have a sexuality at all; here is an interesting site on the subject of sexuality. http://www.asexuality.org/home/ 2)Homosexuality dose have a history. There are accounts of Polynesian communities in which the men who were too young to marry were “husbands” of the older men in the village (sorry I can’t find an appropriate link, watch this space). Similarly in Japanese communities men in the samurai class would often take a young male to bed, even though he had a wife (or two). 3)Homosexuality has been observer in some primates http://www.monkeyland.co.za/monkeybusiness.htm 4)Darwinism does not forbid homosexuality; it could be a recessive gene. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessive_gene None of this proves or disproves anything. For all I know maybe it’s an unknown viral infection that we can’t detect because it lives in an unknown part of human anatomy, the “soul” maybe. The point that really needs to be considered is why are gay/bi people treated so differently? None of this will ever be sorted out until, hetero, homo, bi, asexual, Christian right, feminist left, fence sitters and everyone else can come to this debate with a clear, objective mind and leave their personal beliefs at the door.

Pangloss, i agree with thee, whole heartedly. What wisdom you organisms have *sigh* It is never an easy subject to comment on as it is of great importance to science, and other areas as you mention

Your spot on with this but this is the expected chance, if six million people each rolled a die you would expect about 1 million to get a four. The key idea here is that if 5 million people roll and do not throw a 4 then we can't expect the next million to all throw fours (we expect 250,000 to throw fours). The probability dose not depend on what has happened, hence "dice have no memory".

Too True MattC, Biology never was a real science anyway Speaking of science heres an experiment that shows just how easily you brain can fool your eyes, and the best part is that all you kids can do at home. Ingredients: 1 pen, sheet of blank paper. Method: Draw a small cross and circular dot on the paper separated by about 15cm (6 inches if you live in the US). Hold the paper in both hands at arms length with the cross on the left. With you left eye closed SLOWLY bring the paper towards your face, focusing on the cross with your right eye. Keep you right eye on the cross, but pay attention to the dot as you slowly move the paper towards your face. Something strange should happen at about 30cm (1 foot) from your face. This is an example of our perception of the world being different from the actual physical world around us.

My apologies, upon rereading I see that my point was not clear. It was not my intention to talk about people who are quoteing ideas that they are not compleatly certain about. As you point out it is better that they say "I think... is true" and are then corrected, after all trying to explain physical principles in your own words is one of the best ways to really understand them. My comments were directed at members who claim things, often against the accepted theory, without any regard to justifying them.

At the risk of attracting much scorn, and being aware of my lowly lepton status, I think this post is needed. Your opinion is not science. I am very new to this forum, but the amount of times I’ve already read, "I think....", "I don't think....", "I don't agree with...." is astonishing. Last time I checked this was a science forum, where people discuss, and hopefully learn about, science. Saying that you don't believe in relativity, or that the universe just "ends" are perfectly fine thing to say but unfortunately have nothing to do with science. Science is about making observations of nature in order to understand how the universe works. There are some things which, like it or not, are facts. This is not to say that we should ignore everything that we do not have direct evidence for. The scientific process goes like this (roughly): Make observation. Hypothesize theory that explains observation. Test hypothesis as rigorously as possible. If we cannot disprove the hypothesis it is accepted as a possible valid model for nature. An example is string theory. String theory is a model of nature that explains observed features of the universe. It has not yet acquired any real evidence, and cannot yet be tested, hence it is not science. It is however well worth discussing because is has been formulated following a scientific method and can still be shown to be true in the future. However saying "I believe in string theory therefore Bubba is an idiot" is not following a scientific method, it is only your opinion.

While you’re spot on with the basics sergey500 it's actually a bit more complicated. Firstly galaxies move apart from each other because the universe is expanding not the other way round. You should also bare in mind that they do not move apart in the way that 2 cars driving opposite ways down a street move apart, rather they appear to have more distance between them because the space they exist in is being "stretched". The classic example is to think of a group of people on the surface of a giant balloon, as the balloon is inflated the amount of surface between the people gets bigger and they all move away from each other (the group becomes diffuse). The important point here is that from the view point of each person they are staying still and everyone else is moving away from them (a very simple, and hopefully educational, experiment that you can do is to draw some dots on a deflated balloon, measure the distance between them, inflate the balloon and measure the distance again. Also try to think about how each dot moves with respect to each other). It is this "stretching" of space that gives rise to Red Shift. Light (photons) has a frequency and wave length (if this is new to you do a quick google) the frequency determines how many times per second the photon moves a distance of one wavelength. Light that we see from distant galaxies has a longer wavelength (or equivalently, lower frequency) than expected, we can infer from this that the photon has been “stretched” out, ie. must now move further the travel one wavelength. The term Red Shift comes from the fact that red light has a longer wavelength that the other colours, hence the light seems "reddened". This effect is analogous to the Doppler effect for sound. The real question being disscused now is, what is the RATE of expansion? if this expansion is accelerating the universe could keep expanding forever, but if the expansion rate is indeed slowing gravity could win out and cause the so called Big Crunch. If we can answer these questions then can have a much better chance at understanding the mechanisms that started and continue to drive the expantion of space.

July the hottest month????? Swansont, thanks for sticking up for all the people here 'down under'.