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They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.
Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch,” and would be eligible to advance to first base.
There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.
Think of the elements as dangerous, radioactive, short-lived Pokémon.
If an unused charger isn’t warm to the touch, it’s using less than a penny of electricity a day.
In the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.
Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, died in 1997. A portion of his remains were placed on the New Horizons spacecraft, which will fly past Pluto and then continue out of the solar system.
apricity
the warmth of sunlight in winter.
Amanita mushrooms contain amatoxin, which binds to an enzyme that is used to read information from DNA. It hobbles the enzyme, effectively interrupting the process by which cells follow DNA’s instructions.
Radiation poisoning, like destroying angel mushroom toxicity, has a latent period—a “walking ghost” phase. This is the period where the body is still working, but no new proteins can be synthesized and the immune system is collapsing.
Extremely high radiation doses kill people quickly, but not because of DNA damage. Instead, they physically dissolve the blood-brain barrier, resulting in rapid death from cerebral hemorrhage (brain bleeding).
But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
Close behind Virginia are Maryland, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. These states have substantially more daily flyovers than any other.
In 1982, Larry Walters flew across Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by weather balloons, eventually reaching several miles in altitude. After passing through LAX airspace, he descended by shooting some of the balloons with a pellet gun.
Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet.
Near the southwestern edge of Lake Maracaibo, there’s a strange phenomenon: perpetual nighttime thunderstorms. There are two spots, one over the lake and one over land to the west, where thunderstorms form almost every night. These storms can generate a flash of lightning every two seconds, making Lake Maracaibo the lightning capital of the world.
Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much a part of what is taking place on the lunar surface . . . I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon. I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.
There’s a thing about being alone and there’s a thing about being lonely, and they’re two different things. I was alone but I was not lonely.
A neutron star is what’s left over after a giant star collapses under its own gravity.
The Sun isn’t dense enough to become a neutron star itself. After it swallows the Earth, it will instead go through some phases of expansion and collapse, and will eventually settle down, leaving behind a small white dwarf star with the bullet still lodged in the center. Someday, far in the future—when the universe is thousands of times older than it is today—that white dwarf will cool and fade to black.
