Onward and Upward!
Bob Kalk “Gazing past the planets, looking for total view.” With this lyric from the popular sixties album To Our Children’s Children’s Children, a Moody Blues tribute band opens a unique celebration of creation spirituality with the Jubilee Community on Wall Street in downtown Asheville. It was earlier this year, on a warm night in late May, … Read more
Radioactive elements were incorporated into the Earth when the Solar System formed. All rocks and minerals contain tiny amounts of these radioactive elements. Radioactive elements are unstable; they breakdown spontaneously into more stable atoms over time, a process known as radioactive decay. Radioactive decay occurs at a constant rate, specific to each radioactive isotope. (Different forms … Read more
The Cerebellum which is located at the base of the brain, receives information from the sensory systems, the spinal cord, and other parts of the brain and also regulates motor movements. It is only 10% of the brain. This part of the brain is also found in primates that came along before humans. Scientists are … Read more
Auroras appear when solar electrons excite oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The ionosphere (which includes the upper part of the mesosphere, and most of the thermosphere) is approximately 250 miles up. That’s 1,320,000 feet over our heads. The aurora (both north and south poles experience this action) mostly happens near the … Read more
As far as I know, heavy water is used for three things. But first, what is heavy water. It is water that has a lot of deuterium in it. It is an essential component in some types of nuclear reactors that generate electricity. It is also used in producing nuclear bombs. And lastly, it is … Read more
I know that volumes a mile high have been written about this man, but there are a group of facts that I like to keep in my mind; so I jotted them down so I could go back and do a quick review of the things I most admire about this guy. First off, in … Read more
Here’s something to think about. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is part of what astronomers call the local group. It consists of the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, the Large Magellan Cloud, the Small Magellan Cloud, and other smaller galaxies. The number is more than 54. Somehow these galaxies stay in a group as they … Read more
First before I tell you where is really is, lets find out why it is called that. Starting back in 1763, two men, Mason and Dixon (Dixon was the surveyor) were commissioned to settle a boundary dispute between the estates of William Penn and Lord Baltimore and their respective colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, which … Read more
The first universal law of nature that was ever discovered by a human was found by Newton. That law is as follows: if you double the distance between two objects, the attraction between them becomes four times weaker. This idea, in itself, doesn’t mean much to most people, but with this idea, you will always … Read more
Astronomers estimate that there are approximately 100 billion stars in the Milky Way (the galaxy we live in). They also estimate that there are 200 billion galaxies in the universe. That’s around 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s 200 Sextillion stars. Just for the fun of it, after billion, there’s trillion, then quadrillion, then quintillion, then comes sextillion. Paul … Read more