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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Cox
Read between
December 9 - December 24, 2022
On Christmas Eve 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders became the first humans in history to lose sight of their home planet as they orbited the Moon on board Apollo 8.
Many of those ingredients are common throughout the Solar System and beyond, but we have as yet no evidence for life, simple or complex, beyond Earth.
To survive the harsh northern winter, they embark on one of nature’s great migrations, travelling up to 4,000 km to warmer domains in the south.
An average adult monarch has a life span of little more than four weeks, but, when faced with the journey south, a ‘methuselah generation’ emerges; a generation that lives nearly ten times longer than its parents and grandparents.
At noon in the northern hemisphere, the Sun will always be due south.
Point the hour hand at the Sun, and the line halfway between the hour hand and the 12 o’clock mark will point due south.
It is possible that biological clocks could have emerged as a form of protection against the destructive effects of the Sun’s radiation. An organism’s DNA is most exposed to damage at the point of replication, so restricting cell division to the hours of darkness would have been advantageous.
The reason for the tilt is undoubtedly pure chance – a relic of our planet’s formation and history stretching back over 4.5 billion years. Jupiter and Mercury have virtually no tilt, while Uranus rotates on its side.
Mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth. Even though it covers only 1 per cent of the land area of our planet, it is home to over 200,000 different species – 10 per cent of Earth’s bank of life.
Large areas of the Yucatan are devoid of rivers and streams because the bedrock, composed mainly of limestone, is porous.
They mark out the edge of a giant crater, formed 65 million years ago when an asteroid 10 km in diameter smashed into Earth.
In a series of experiments, Cavendish produced and isolated a gas by reacting hydrochloric acid with metals such as zinc, iron and tin. In doing so, he became the first person to identify hydrogen in the laboratory.
But Lavoisier’s names have stayed with us, so oxygen will forever be ‘the acid giver’, which it isn’t.
Indeed, from space Earth is a water world, with 71 per cent of its surface covered by the liquid.
Hydrogen forms 74 per cent of all the elemental mass. The second-lightest element, helium, comprises 24 per cent. These two elements dominate because they were formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the cosmos, at around 1 per cent by mass. Most of the rest is carbon; all the other elements are present in much smaller quantities.
After the hydrogen molecule (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO), water is the third most common molecule in the Universe.
There are over 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and each time a new star is born a chain of events leads to the production of water.
A gigantic cloud of H2O, containing 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined, was sighted over 12 billion light years away from Earth.
These hairs are also hydrophobic, making the whole animal water-resistant. Without this adaptation, a single drop of rain would be enough to weigh the creature down and sink it below the surface.
The strong bonds between the water molecules help to prevent the insects from breaking the surface.
The pond skater’s back pair of legs spreads the animal’s weight over a wider area, while the middle pair propels it through the water.
Without hydrogen bonding, therefore, there would be no liquid water on the balmy Earth – no oceans, no rivers and lakes, no raindrops and no life.
Its radiant rain has a dark side that is as dangerous as it is nourishing, and early in the development of life on Earth it is likely that the Sun was a presence to be avoided rather than cherished.
High-energy UV photons are like little bullets, smashing into biological molecules with more than enough energy to break them apart.
As the train climbed with the rising Sun, the UVB flux climbed to 260 microwatts per square centimetre, because the high-energy UVB photons had less atmosphere to pass through and were therefore less likely to be scattered or absorbed.
Even microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi employ melanin to protect themselves from UV radiation. This suggests that the use of pigments such as melanin evolved very early in the history of life on Earth – forming a fundamental component of life.
The aurora borealis (northern lights) occurs when the solar wind – charged particles from the Sun – is drawn by the Earth’s magnetic field to the polar regions.
Isaac Newton was the first to demonstrate that white light is made up of a multitude of colours when he famously revealed the rainbow hiding in sunlight in 1671 using a simple glass prism.
If flamingos didn’t ingest beta-carotene from blue-green algae in their diet, their trademark pink colour would quickly turn white.
Think about a green leaf. We see it as green because green photons do not interact with the molecules in the leaf. Red and blue photons do – they are both absorbed by a pigment called chlorophyll.
Although he didn’t realise it at the time, Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to observe bacteria, the most numerous and ancient life forms on the planet.
a year later he made the momentous discovery of spermatozoa – but it is rightly for his discovery of the bacteria that he is remembered.
A single drop of water contains, on average, a million bacteria; a gram of soil may be home to 40 million; in your body there are ten times as many bacteria as there are human cells.
The overwhelming majority of biologists today believe that eukaryotes emerged from prokaryotes around 2 billion years ago, and that this fundamental and revolutionary change happened only once.
The plant may not care, but we certainly do, because plants get their electrons from water, splitting it apart in the process and releasing a waste gas (oxygen) into the atmosphere.
They are called chloroplasts, and they are all self-evidently related to each other because they are so similar. But there is more than this, because they look for all the world as though they were cyanobacteria living inside the leaves,
At some point in the history of life on Earth, a cyanobacterium cell must have been engulfed by another cell and, instead of being digested, it survived to perform a useful purpose.
All animals, plants, algae and fungi are self-evidently related to each other, sharing multiple traits from the structure of their DNA to the use of ATP.
The rest of Earth’s heat has an origin more ancient still. It is released by the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium, which exist in vast quantities in the Earth’s upper layers – the lithosphere and mantle.
The Earth’s heat is released by the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium. We know of only one place violent enough to create these heaviest of elements – supernova explosions.
A lower pH means that there is a higher concentration of free protons floating around in the water.
The reason for the acidity of the lake is that the energy released by the volcano melts rocks close to the surface, releasing a host of gasses including sulphur dioxide. When sulphur dioxide bubbles through water it dissolves, forming a weak acid, similar in strength to lemon juice.
the recognised invention of the battery by Alessandro Volta at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Each one of us contains about 50 trillion cells, working together to create the complex structures of the human body.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system always stays the same or increases – it NEVER decreases.
The golden jellyfish of the saltwater lake on Eil Malk, Palau, follow the path of the Sun, relying mostly on photosynthesis, rather than on zooplankton, for nourishment.
The genes of a human being are 99 per cent the same as those of chimpanzees and bonobos.
If we go back further to the split with gorillas, which occurred about 6 to 8 million years ago, we find that we share 98.4 per cent of our genes.
Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain on Mars, is almost three times the height of Mount Everest. On Earth, it would weigh two and a half times as much as it does on Mars, and Earth’s crust would be unable to support it.
Mauna Kea, the Hawaiian volcano, is taller than Everest as measured from its base on the ocean floor, and it is gradually sinking under its own weight.
