To put things into a perspective, here are the moons of our solar system (including our moon) and their sizes compared to Earth.
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The Timeline Of Earth
We’ve evolved here on Earth, and for tens of thousands of years, we just thought the Earth is also the universe, or at least the most important and the biggest part of it. Our brains have been adapted to the basic survival needs. So we can deal with the moderately sized objects which have moderate velocity, and we can conceptualize small numbers like 1, 2, 50. But when the numbers get bigger than that, the problem begins: our puny brains cannot conceptualize them anymore. The larger a number grows, the harder it becomes to deal with. Take the age of the Earth, which is almost 4.6 billion years. We don’t have an intuitive sense of what this number means. But, visualization can help: we can better understand things if we visualize them. Author Andy Bergmann just did that. He created a Timeline of Earth to get a better sense of how key events relate in time over our planet’s 4.6 billion year history. It’s hard to get a sense of how vast it is until you can see it laid out visually.
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Astronaut describes seeing Earth from space for the first time
In a video published by the European Space Agency on Twitter, retired American astronaut Scott Kelly describes seeing Earth from space for the first time.
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Two new innovations to save children from dying
Thanks to improvements in healthcare and many other areas, people today are living longer, healthier, and happier lives than ever before. And what’s more, these improvements are global. It’s happening in the developing countries as well. Africa, the poorest continent (eighteen of the poorest countries by GDP per capita are in Africa) is also no exception: the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) declined significantly between 1960 and 2001. For example, in Ethiopia, as late as 1980, almost a quarter of the children died before their fifth birthday. Today, fewer than 6% die, which is still far too many, but the numbers continue to fall. And vaccines play a very crucial part here. But, supplying vaccines to distant clinics in hot climates served by poorly developed transport networks is a big problem. The vaccines must be kept between 2 and 8° C (36 to 46 °F). They need to be distributed in a temperature-controlled supply chain, which is called “cold chain”. Now, there are two new innovations addressing this problem.
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The Lost Rainforest of Mount Mabu
One day back in 2005, Dr. Julian Bayliss was sitting at his laptop looking at Google Earth in 2005, to look for potential unknown wildlife hotspots in Africa. He was working an isolated mountain in Malawi, then he noticed that there were similar mountains over the border in Mozambique. There was nothing written about these mountains. As he zoomed in, he saw a dark green patch suddenly emerge, which looked like a rainforest. An expedition was scheduled, and it turned out to be just that: a rainforest, which was unknown to plant and animal scientists. Today, Mount Mabu forest is frequently referred to as the “Google Forest”.
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Incredible Images of the Earth and the Moon Captured from Chinese Satellite
On his Twitter account, Andrew Jones, a journalist reporting on China’s space programme and related activities, has published amazing images of the Earth and the Moon captured from China’s Queqiao lunar communications relay satellite, a key component of Chang’e 4 lunar landing mission.
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Hubble Space Telescope Launch
On April 24, 1990, Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit from space shuttle Discovery (STS-31). It orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 350 miles (560 kilometers). For a comparison, the International Space Station (ISS) maintains an orbit with an altitude of between 205 and 270 miles (330 and 435 kilometers). The telescope is 43.5 feet (13.2 meters) long, weighs 24,500 pounds (11,110 kilograms).
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Moon Illusion: why the Moon looks larger when it’s near the horizon?
If you go out on a clear night when it’s full moon, you may notice how gigantic the Earth’s satellite looks when it’s near the horizon. But, in fact, that moon is the exact same size as every other time as you’ve ever seen it in the sky. You can test this by holding your thumbnail at arm’s length and comparing it to the size of the Moon when it is near the horizon and high in the sky, and you’ll see it doesn’t change size. Photographs of the Moon at different elevations also show that its size remains the same. In fact, it plays a trick on your brain which called the “Moon Illusion”. This illusion has been known since the ancient times, and an explanation of this optical phenomenon is still debated.
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Bananas have died out once before – don’t let it happen again
You probably take bananas for granted. In the United Kingdom, one in four pieces of fruit consumed is a banana and, on average, each Briton eats 10 kg of bananas per year; in the United States, that’s 12 kg, or up to 100 bananas. When I ask people, most seem to think bananas grow on trees. But they don’t, in either the literal or the figurative sense: in fact, they’re in danger of extinction.
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An amazing view of our one and only planet
NASA Astronaut Ricky Arnold published an amazing “selfie” from space on his Twitter account saying “An amazing view of our one and only planet”. He took this selfie during the May 16, 2018 spacewalk to perform upgrades on the International Space Station. We can see the Earth, the beautiful blue marble, reflecting on his helmet’s visor.
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