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Writer's pictureMike Gorlon

5 Really Interesting and Insightful Thoughts To Read


(1). "If the entire timeline of the universe were broken down into a single calendar year, all known human history - every king, civilization, major event, and person you know - have only been around for the last 30 seconds."


                                                                                  - Brian Hertzog


(2.) "DNA, of course, is the stuff of genes, the hereditary material.  It codes for human being and amoeba, mushroom, and bacterium, everything on this earth [but] a few viruses... Every time an organism reproduces, it passes a copy of its DNA to its offspring."


                               - Nick Lane, Life Ascending - The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution


(3.) "Let's take a tour of the flowing, rushing components of our newly discovered home, Laniakea (1), starting with its most familiar part - you.  No matter how slow or fast you are traveling on Earth as you read this, you are spinning around the sun along with the rest of our planet at about 30 kilometers per second.  The sun in turn orbits the galactic center at roughly 200 kilometers per second, and the entire Local Group (2), including the Milky Way, is hurtling toward a mysterious concentration of mass in the direction of Centaurus (3) at more than 600 kilometers per second.  You probably never realized you could move so fast simply by reading a magazine article - or doing nothing at all."

                       

- Noam Libeskind and R. Brent Tully - Scientific American July 2016 Issue


(1) Laniakea - A larger region of space that is packed with superclusters, or in other words lots of galaxies. The Milky Way is a part of Laniakea and there are 100,000 other galaxies also


(2) Local Group - the group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way.  There are more than 54 galaxies in the Local Group


(3) Centaurus -  One of the largest constellations in the sky


(4.) "Why is the sky blue? Blue light rays from the Sun are selectively scattered (reflected) by air molecules, producing the blue daytime sky away from the Sun's direction.  Violet light, having an even shorter wavelength than blue light, is scattered even more efficiently than blue light, but there is not as much violet sunlight, and human eyes are not as sensitive to it.  Green light, having a longer wavelength than blue light, is not scattered as efficiently as blue light, so blue is the predominant color of the daytime sky.


                  - Alex Filippenko, The Great Courses - Understanding the Universe


(5.) "In terms of DNA (1.) sequence, chimps, humans, are around 98.6% identical."


                                                                                        - Nick Lane - Life Ascending


(1.) DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)  is a molecule that carries the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms and many viruses. (Wikipedia) 

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