What’s Hiding at the Most Solitary Place on Earth? The Deep Sea
Sometimes this world appears, there is a little boring, we visited a remote island, we visited a remote island, conquered the arctic V, deep jungle, however, there is still a place not to explore, this is a much water and deadly wasteland, and to live completely in the dark and mysterious creatures to their homes, deep sea, let's take a look at the dive,
When we see the earth the sea is vast, and it's hard to believe that only less than 2% of the biological life here, and that 2% 90% of settled within the 200 meters below the surface, which is the starting point of our journey, the sun still here can penetrate the surface of the water, is still in operation, the photosynthesis of phytoplankton, including trillions of single-celled algae and bacteria, Forms the basis of the Marine ecosystem.
They are consumed by larger plankton, while the latter is food for other creatures, the seabed here can like the amazon rainforest, the seabed here similar to the amazon rain forest, mostly covered by coral reefs, algae and other Marine plants, have mostly been bashan, mostly covered by coral reefs, and other Marine plants, algae, is the home to a lot of sea animals. Since before we focus on the most is a relatively peaceful environment,
we pay attention to at present most is a relatively peaceful environment, also is our hanging hook, swimming, pollution and research, so, again to dive deep, Ding Guang so, again to dive deep, from the familiar to the shore to further deeper in the water, we finally arrived at the edge of the continental shelf, And here we see the continental slope -- a huge slide down into the deep ocean, and for every meter we go down,
the light gets dimmed dramatically, which means less plant life.
Look steep continental slope to the surface of the moon, looked out front is seemingly boundless stagnant water, away from the continental slope, we entered the so-called twilight zone, the entrance of the deep sea, continues to sink, water pressure rise to fatal, scuba diving is the minimum record of 332 meters, the depth, the water pressure as you make the top 200 cars, However we only completed 3% of the journey,
even if it seems bad environment, where many fish and other animals or "half", during the day, here is a good rest and to avoid predators in the vast waters, at night, they can be more safely to fertile shallow fill the stomach, in the transition area between the light and dark, light becomes a powerful tool, More than 90% of the species that live here.
Can be generated by the bioluminescent chemical energy, they are under the dim light of camouflage, sends a signal to potential with times or confuse intimidation attacker, or, the hunt, in light of another means to survive in the dark is teamwork, we can meet in 700 metres deep tube community of jellyfish, they can be more than 50 m, the length of the But only sweep the handle so thick, their length can be more than 50 meters,
but only the sweep, handle so thick, in order to attract prey, they are a very beautiful blue or red, and mount of the tentacles of the curtain is full of poison needle, needle can kill any creature, near the needle can kill any creatures near, but most of them live in the life need to rely on a rare resources, Sea snow, white flakes that continue to sink from the surface of the sea.
It is made up of dead animal and plant debris, feces, shells, sand dust, even if it sounds not very good, but without this kind of important resources, deep-sea residents will go hungry, is here, too, will be a pair of enemy exciting showdown, sperm whales hunted house the size of a colossal squid, even squid fierce counterattack, but they basically lost, But they will leave permanent scars on the sperm whale skin,
when we arrived at 1000 metres deep, deep enough to put humans build the highest building in, we must be careful, this is the middle of the night, was completely shrouded in darkness, a few have been explored in the wilderness, in addition to the darkness and the open waters ACTS, Swimming at this depth is harder than a spacewalk, food is scarce and life must adapt to make the most of its energy, like a three-decimeter long ghost crest floating motionless in the water.
Only a slender claw arm, claw arm stiff hairs from the water surface distribution to filter food, rather than active prey, this method saves a lot of energy, for predators, finding food more difficult, after all here live prey are extremely rare, zhu unexpectedly here live prey are extremely rare, predators have to do the right things right at the first blow, or prey will be escaped into the darkness, Many deep sea predators has many fatal long teeth,
such as snakes fish to make good use of its fangs trapped and trapped or even greater than its prey, and the swallow, a mouth wrinkle crocodile sharks as many as 300 backward crooked teeth, prey can be trapped in the mouth, let us then sinking, less than 3800 meters, close to the Titanic's residual, we went to the deep sea, The creatures here lead a slow life.
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Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever?
Since ancient times, we seem to have been bound by the laws of physics and our consciousness has been imprisoned by the creation of our bodies
Immortality seems far out of reach
Human thinking, life is limited in a short river of time
But try to imagine.Throw our flesh and blood, upload our consciousness into the digital world, is it not eternal life?It's complicated
The important thing is that consciousness is an indeterminate concept
It's a synthetic ability that allows you to dream, to feel, to dream
Uploading consciousness is making a copy of our thoughts and transferring it to a computer to simulate your thoughts
But whatever your problem is, the discussion of uploading consciousness has to be solved in the brain, right
No, you can continue to exist if your mind has been in one place forever, and of course if it is damaged by data, then your mind may also suffer, and you may fall into an abyss of pain or delusion or endless mental breakdown.
The biological version of you and the digital version can coexist.Pain, sadness, all emotions
They're all the result of neurons in your brain
If you can fall in love at the touch of a button, then the body may have lost its meaning and instead you may end up looking for new experiences
The longer you live with your digital awareness, the more knowledge you may eventually acquire about yourself and the ability to change your inner self
It could be as simple as erasing your memories. You could swap out the secrets of your personality, hate addiction, or laziness, and simply erase them.
Free of biological constraints, your abilities evolve as technology advances
Knowledge accumulates, and the true potential of digital immortality is awakened and you can explore projects that have never been possible before
Of course not every digital mind is working for the future of humanity, and our current incarnation isn't quite as noble
Some seek power, some hoard resources for themselves and so on
Perhaps our consciousness will not adapt to immortality, and our digital consciousness will begin to stiffen
How much good or evil can a self-nurturing conscious time do
It's beyond our current technological capabilities
We can only do what we like with the limited time we have in our bodies
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Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass Ejections
Climate has justifiably been a hot topic in advanced economies over the past decade. The study warns that unless we urgently change the way we treat climate, the problem will become increasingly intractable. But the earth's climate is not the only problem facing humanity. There is another kind of climate problem that needs our attention and we can't do anything about it.
Solar storms, known technically as coronal mass ejections, were until recently thought to be extremely rare -- occurring roughly every two centuries or so. But there's reason to believe it could be more frequent than that. This is a problem, to put it mildly, as people become more dependent on electricity.
In 1859, the Sun spewed out high-speed plasma, which broke through the sun's magnetic field and headed toward Earth. The coronal mass ejection hit the Earth's magnetic field and twisted it, causing telegraph outages around the world, known as the "Carrington event." It has long been the scientific consensus that solar storms on this scale are rare.
In the 19th century, the telegraph was cutting-edge technology. But right now, we have power grids, airplanes, satellites and computers that could be affected by another solar storm. We know that. Carrington events and even worse solar storms occur more frequently.
Earlier this month, after the release of the study results, Hisashi Hayakawa, said the study has concluded that "for the modern civilization, the carrington event is the most severe space weather events once, but if a century, this kind of event occurred frequently, we have to rethink how to prevent and reduce this kind of space weather disasters."
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Could Your Phone Hurt You? Electromagnetic Pollution
Cell phones are a very important presence in today's society. Mobile phone is just like a small computer, which can provide people with work, entertainment, study and other needs. The existence of mobile phones has undoubtedly accelerated people's communication and convenience. Although the advantages of the mobile phone are numerous, but it also has certain harm.
Speaking of the harm of mobile phones, many people may not care. Because the function of mobile phone is too powerful, so that people ignore the harm of mobile phone. Perhaps some parents often persuade their children to play less mobile phones, but most parents also use mobile phones for work and entertainment, so to reduce the harm of mobile phones to human body, not simply reduce the use of mobile phones, but correct and scientific use of mobile phones. After all, work and study are inseparable from mobile phones.
1. What is electromagnetic radiation?
The harm of mobile phones generally comes from the electromagnetic wave it radiates, because electromagnetic wave is a kind of invisible energy body, so it generally does not attract people's attention. Electromagnetic radiation is to point to the electromagnetic field that electricity and magnetism produce commonly, the spread of electromagnetic field resembles water current, wave one wave diffusion, and do not see to touch.
In people's cognition, radiation generally includes non-ionizing radiation and ionizing radiation, among which, non-ionizing radiation includes radio waves, microwave, infrared ray, etc. Since such radiation and other energy will be converted into heat after entering the human body, ionizing radiation will not appear. These include X-rays and gamma rays, which destroy atoms and strip them of electrons, so ionization can be very dangerous.
2. Is non-ionizing radiation harmful to human body?
Despite the advances in technology, there is still no concrete answer to the question of whether non-ionizing radiation is harmful to humans. Although there is no evidence that non-ionizing radiation is harmful to human health, the issue remains controversial. In fact, the study of electromagnetism began in 1996, but there was no conclusion because of the complexity and difficulty of the electromagnetic wave.
The influence of electromagnetic wave on people is generally divided into thermal effect and non-thermal effect. The general thermal effect refers to the conversion of electromagnetic wave energy into heat after entering the human body. Since the transmitting power of mobile phone is small, it will not affect the human body. And non-thermal effect refers to the human body long-term exposure to low thermal effect of electromagnetic, human body may appear other physiological effects. Non-thermal effects are also troublesome to study because they can affect so many people.
There have been many studies on the dangers of cell phones, but the conclusions have been polarizing. Some classify mobile phones as possible carcinogens, while others believe they can inhibit tumor growth under the skin. Because of the possibility of both studies, there is no obvious tendency to draw conclusions about mobile phones.
3, mobile phone radiation standards
Out of the need to protect human health, but also considering the importance of mobile phones to people, international organizations also customized standards for mobile phones. The standard addresses SAR, or magnetic fields generated by communications devices, on human health. In addition, taking into account the differences of people in different countries and their mobile phone usage habits, international organizations also conducted more rigorous studies and finally obtained the required SAR value.
4. What should we do?
The importance of mobile phones is self-evident, but the harm of mobile phones to people is also obvious. Perhaps the radiation produced by mobile phones is not harmful to human body, but the existence of mobile phones has formed people's habits of not exercising, lowering their heads, staying up late and so on. Therefore, for the use of mobile phones, people should weigh the advantages and disadvantages, not only to maximize the benefits of mobile phones, but also to reduce the harm of mobile phones to people.
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Why Are You Alive - Life, Energy & ATP
In the few seconds you actually have lasted on the edge of life and death.You probably won't feel that your body is undergoing an incredible activities of these activities will never stop.Suppose you are a scroll down in the upward escalator spring toys.Part of representative cell division.Escalator represent push you forward principles of physics.Live is like a walk in, but what also can't.If you arrived at the top of the escalator, you won't slide down again, you will never dieGo to.A little disturbing is that the universe wants you to reach the top.
What do you do to avoid this kind of situation? And why are you still alive?All life is based on cells.Cell is different from the lifeless universe, it can perform voluntary activities.When reached the limits of life, the cells will be dismantled, back to space again.Unfortunately, the universe seems to want to let life be aborted.The universe doesn't want to let the world become wonderful, want to let all things is very boring.We call this phenomenon "drops", he is one of the basic principles of the universe.Very difficult to explain, it is hard to understand, we are again fine in another articleSaid.Now, you have to know living creature is exciting.Cell is made up of millions of such proteins and the water molecules.Occur into dry tens of thousands of times per second, cell divisions in the reaction and activities.Alive means cells must avoid itself drops continuously, to death.Cells must always be separated from the universe.One way is to keep the inside and outside the cells to different types, the extra molecules discharge cells in vitro.To do this, cells need energy.Energy can let the matter in the universe work, displacement, produce change, make a change.
Energy cannot be created, not destroyed, cosmic energy sum unchanged forever, we don't know why, but that is the case.In the hundreds of millions of years ago, the biggest challenge is to obtain available early cell energy.Early cells from a simple chemical reaction in chemical energy, in addition we don't know much they found the ultimate energy conversion systems: the building blocks of life, a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP)Its molecular structure make receiving, releasing energy and convenient.When cells need energy, such as the need to rule out molecules or repair function, ATP cells decomposition, and using chemical energy to work or produce change, this is why living creature can respond.We don't know when and where the first ATP produced on the earth.But all creatures will use ATP or close to the ATP, to keep the internal functionJump.It for all plants, fungi, bacteria, and is vital to the survival of the animal, no ATP there would be no life on earth, it might be, also in the universe.Although the decomposition to produce chemical energy is very useful, but missed the early life of the biggest energy available:Solar energy.
The sun to fusion of atoms, releasing photons, the energy released into the solar system. But this kind of energy is original, not to absorb, must be refined.After thousands of years of evolution, has finally figure it out how to use the solar energy cell.It absorbs solar energy, and most of them into a can be used to sustain lifeLearning material.We call this process: photosynthesis.Will contain a photon of electromagnetic energy is used for molecular combination, electromagnetic energy into chemical energy, stored in the ATP molecules.Some cells so start making glucose, or sugar.Easy to decompose, more energy, also is quite good to eat. This process is very convenient, let many cells give up trouble of photosynthesisBy consuming other cells to obtain nutrients directly. Many people think that this is one of the largest in the history of betrayal.
After evolution continues to photosynthetic cells can only be collected on the surface of the energy, so the output is limited, restricted their channel evolution.With the passage of time, some cells sugar, other is responsible for the cell to gobble up.For millions of years of evolution degree is almost the same.Until one day, a cell ate another cell, but did not kill the cells.So, the two cells. It completely changed the future of the planet. The cells became the ancestor of all the animals on the earth.Whether it is the blue whale, deformation, dinosaurs, jellyfish, of xu or the monkey." Of course you are. These creatures can be traced back to this moment.The fusion of two creatures are very important, because the two fusion cells more powerful.Parasitic drag out an ignoble existence cells no longer, but focus on the production of ATP, it became the cells of plants: mitochondria.By focusing on host cell survival and provided food for the mitochondria.Mitochondria are actually reverse photosynthesis, is also very complex.It was obtained from other cells place of sugar, and oxygen and molecular precursor, produces ATP molecules are full of energy.This process is just like a melting pot, emit carbon dioxide, water and a small amount of kinetic energy (PS: it is your body temperature)
In a certain stage, the cells will be combined to form a community, and lead to multicellular organisms, eventually form you!Today, you are composed of trillions of cells, each cell has a lot of energySmall machines.Even if capacity process is interrupted for a few minutes, you will die.Since life is so fragile, stored ATP can is a good idea?As stored in fat and sugar can let us in a short period of time can live without breathing.If life to solve the obstacles of so much let you survive why life is so short?Simple organisms such as e. coli, in every division between 50 times the mass of the ATP produces them.
Your body need a lot of ATP to stay alive.Every day, your body produces 90 * 10 ATP node 26 points.And your weight, the production is so much to live one day, store it is impossible for a few minutes of ATP.Although ATP can quickly convert energy, but it is hard to store energy, because 1% of its energy only glucose molecules, the quality is 3 times as much,So ATP production of fast, consume faster.This is a simplified description of life, what makes you become the spring on the escalator.This is an extraordinary story, you need the molecule to survive, do not produce ATP means death.And you must own production, it is like driving a car at full speed at the same time, also must pick up roadside garbage production of gasoline.As far as we know, it all started in billions of years ago.A small part of the dead universe breeds life, can sustain itself and development.The spring toy leap as always, from the first cell to you is reading this article.At some stage, you will again and the dead of the universe, you might and its description of your adventures.But in the end you can appreciate the beauty of life, let the dead of the universe, full of fun.
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Dark ForestWhy Blue Whales Don't Get Cancer - Peto's Paradox
Whales Don't Get Cancer-Peto's Paradox Cancer Dark ForestWhy Blue Whales Don't Get Cancer-Peto's Paradox Cancer is a creepy and mysterious thing that has yet to be solved by humans. Cancer also affects many animals, including cute cats and dogs. Among all the theories, the most accepted one is mutation accumulation. Our cells work on the basis of protein synthesis, guided by the genetic material DNA. Cells break down old proteins and make new ones, so metabolism goes on methodically. But there are millions of metabolic processes that can't go wrong. Small mistakes can build up and eventually lead to cancer cells.
From this point of view, cancer cells are possible in any animal made of cells. In general, the larger the animal, the more cells it has, the more likely it is to accumulate errors and develop cancer.
However, there are some large animals in the animal kingdom, such as elephants, blue whales and naked mole rats, that are less likely to develop cancer. In the 1970s, Richard Peto, an epidemiologist at The University of Oxford in England, discovered this phenomenon and came up with what became known as Peto's Paradox -- if cancer is due to randomly activated mutations, then larger animals with more cells should be at greater risk of developing cancer early in life. But confusingly, large animals have far fewer cancers than theory suggests, and there is no correlation between an animal's body size or relative longevity and the chance of developing cancer in all of these cells.
Peto speculates that as animals get older and larger, there may be built-in biological mechanisms that prevent cancer cells from forming.
Why are large animals less susceptible to cancer? What implications does this have for cancer treatment? Could eradicating cancer endanger human evolution? The new thinking triggered by Peto's paradox has far-reaching implications for cancer treatment and drug design. If we can one day find a perfect explanation for Peto's paradox, we may be able to conquer cancer.
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Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest
The Milky Way has 200 billion stars and perhaps 100 billion planets. If only a small fraction of those planets harbor life, and even if only a small fraction of those planets have intelligent life forms, our galaxy will be teeming with alien civilizations.
If an advanced civilization had the technology to travel between stars at just 0.1 percent of the speed of light, it could colonize our Galaxy in about 100 million years.
Given that the Milky Way has been around for billions of years, that's not long -- so in principle any space-felling civilization should be able to spread rapidly over vast areas of the Galaxy. Yet we see nothing, we hear nothing, the universe seems empty.
And the seeming dissonance between how many advanced civilizations there should be in space and the lack of any evidence is known as the Fermi paradox. Over the decades, it has led to many hypotheses and potential solutions.
Some argue that life was rare to begin with, others that the development of intelligence is a bottleneck, and still others believe that most civilizations will survive only a short time before exploding or, conversely, will never even invent radio.
However, one solution is darker than the others!
The dark forest theory explains why we haven't heard from aliens by assuming they've been deliberately quiet.
Why haven't we heard from aliens yet? If this solution is correct, they purposely hide in the darkness of space out of fear of death. Now compare this dark forest to our own universe and each hunter as a separate civilization. We humans will be one of those hunters, as will unknown alien civilizations -- we all live in total silence, without any other contact. We're just following the rules in this forest... That is to avoid contact with anyone at all costs.
In terms of trying to survive in this deep, dark forest, we never know what's out there waiting for us. Are we digging our own grave, or are we welcoming new friends? Maybe it's up to us when we meet aliens in the future!
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You Are Immune Against Every Disease
Congenital immunity a person who has genetic immunity can carry HUMAN immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or harmful genetic mutations without developing disease. Identifying and studying these "immune individuals" might lead to new treatments. However, there are not many of them.
Your co-workers, neighbors, even yourself... It is possible that each of us is an "immune" hidden in the crowd -- that is, with an unusual genotype that protects against a disease that almost everyone else cannot.
In the case of AIDS, some people (less than one percent of the world's population) are immune to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) even if they contract it. Because their bodies are naturally immune to the virus.
Similar "immunity" seems to exist for other diseases, whether infectious, genetic or otherwise.
Time will tell if this strategy will lead to new treatments, although it has already broadened people's horizons by making them think more positively about health. "Understand that human biology is the study not only of what we are not good at, but what we are strong at." "Concludes Carrie Stephenson. And that strength comes from a few superheroes in the human race -- our immunes.
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Are GMOs Good or Bad? Genetic Engineering & Our Food
As "high-tech" products, the price of gm products sold in shopping malls is not much different from that of traditional goods, or even lower? These products are cheap because genetic changes allow plants to grow resistant to pests and diseases, reduce pesticide spraying and increase yields. Such a product, the price will naturally be low. We have it in our supermarket, you can go to the supermarket and look at the oil. Soybean oil in particular. Genetic technology is a double-edged sword, which can both benefit and harm human beings. While genetic engineering brings a bright future to human beings, its own disputes have to be paid attention to. Compared with conventional food, whether gm food is harmful or not needs to be evaluated. Experts believe that all gm foods approved for production have been evaluated for safety and are safe to eat.
Humans should be very cautious about genetically modified organisms lest they produce unpredictable results. When people change the genetic structure of a plant or an animal, can they really ensure the safety of the new creature? We don't know for sure if there are aliens lurking at the other end of the genetic spectrum. So while enjoying the surprises brought by new technologies, we must always keep in mind that we are not corrupted by the power to change our genes. What we can do is actually a very crude, very primitive fraction. For billions of years, nature has done most of the "miracle of life" for us. We must not forget that mankind's past has been filled with man-made tragedies, and that the first thing we should do now is to try to avoid them.
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A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place - Egoistic Altruism
Egoism includes a lot of content, for example, I satisfy vanity, make oneself happy, also calculate egoism. But I'm probably happy because I helped one person, I saved another person, which is also typical altruism.
In fact, there is no clear distinction and boundary between the two, but people mistakenly believe that things always have "black and white" two sides after the wrong understanding of "dialectical". That's why I had this weird idea.
The key is to look at the problem from a personal point of view, as I continue with the previous example
It's true that WHAT I'm doing is both selfish and altruistic, but maybe there's another patient that I could have treated earlier, but I delayed because I was treating this patient, and I'm not doing that to his detriment?
The relationship here is simply your Angle.
There are different results from where you look, but that doesn't mean there are too many and too few results.
Because the actual useful results and impact, it depends on you to choose the most typical, that is, your own relevant content to consider eno
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1,000km Cable to the Stars - The Skyhook
To many, getting into space with current rocket technology is like climbing into a unicycle with a backpack full of fireworks.
This is because, in order to escape earth's gravity with a rocket, you have to burn a lot of fuel and you have to fly at 40,000 kilometers per hour, which brings huge costs and risks of accidents.
And even if you do successfully launch a rocket, there are actually only a handful of payloads that can be sent into space and that's where Skyhook comes in
Skyhook, like Bridges, ports, rail tracks and ropeways, is based on the idea of building the infrastructure to support space roads
A similar concept is a rail elevator that extends from the ground to geostationary orbit, but unlike rail elevators,Skyhook doesn't require a huge initial investment or magical new technology
If you connect a spacecraft to one end of a cable hundreds to thousands of kilometers long......Take the spacecraft down the cable to the other end...The basic idea behind Skyhook is to send it into space at high speed.
Connecting the planets of our solar system one by one through connections is not a dream.
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The new history of mankind - the Age of Man
About 65 million years ago, a width of about 16 kilometers meteorite impacts on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula today, a huge disaster, at the time on earth, including dinosaurs, two-thirds of all animal species dying extinct, end of the golden age of reptiles, primitive mammals escape disaster after a long time to survive, after the rapid evolution.
About 50 million years ago, primates evolved rapidly in a radiative way, from lower primates (such as lemurs and tarsiers) to higher primates (such as apes, rhesus, golden monkeys, baboons and apes).
Note: China's "Daw-ape" is older than the early higher primates, simian, basically belongs to the early prosimian, that is to say, the so-called "Daw-ape" is actually a monkey, not the origin of human beings, if "Daw-ape" is the origin of monkeys almost.
About 25 million years ago, monkeys began to evolve into apes, and primitive apes emerged and gradually separated from monkeys. It's not exactly human at this point.
The earliest ancient anthropoids appeared in south East Africa, gradually evolved from primitive apes, divided into: lower anthropoids (such as gibbons), higher anthropoids (such as orangutans), hominid and so on. About 12 million years ago, the earth's crust movement in eastern Africa a rift valley is formed on the earth, the formation of the rift valley to Africa is divided into east and west two independent animal systems, rift valley this barrier becomes the key to people and apes parted ways, to the west of rift valley is still thick wet trees, little ape in order to adapt to changing environment, They didn't have to change much to harmonize, and they were destined to remain at the stage of apes, such as gorillas. Rift valley east due to crustal movement, gradually decreased rainfall, forest land disappeared in the grassland, together with the ancestors of today's apes most ethnic and extinction, a small fraction of used to climb the apes adapted to the new environment, learning activity in the earth
in the open environment life, formed the unique evolution model, to avoid the crisis of extinction. About 6 million years ago, a large, barely bipedal, two-handed primate called ----- hominid, named australopithecus because it was found only in southern Africa, emerged.
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What Happens If We Bring the Sun to Earth?
Depending on which part of the sun it is, like most of the matter in the universe, our sun is neither solid nor gas, but a plasma state, which is when something is so hot that its nuclei and electrons can be separated and move around freely, creating a sticky substance.
So you can think of our sun as a big ball filled with a sea of very hot goo, and the deeper you go, the thicker and weirder the goo gets.
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Climate change: What are the most effective ways to save the planet
It is now an indisputable scientific fact that the earth's climate is warming, and the impact on human life is already evident: Global warming has increased the chances of flooding in Miami and elsewhere, threatening the lives of millions of people along the Brahmaputra River in South Asia and disrupting plant and animal life.
So we no longer have to ask whether climate change is happening, or whether humans are to blame. What we should be asking is: What can I do for myself?
What can you do to help slow the planet's warming? Here are our suggestions.
1. What is humanity's top priority in the coming years, and what does it mean for me personally?
Top priority? Limit the use of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas, and switch to cleaner, renewable sources of energy, while increasing energy efficiency. Kimberly Nicholas, Associate Professor at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUSUS) in Sweden, said: "We need to reduce co2 emissions by almost half (45%) over the next decade."
There are things you can do on a daily basis that can contribute to this change -- like driving and flying less, switching to "green" energy providers, and changing your eating and shopping habits.
Of course, climate change won't be solved by changing your personal shopping or driving habits, but many experts agree that it's important and can influence others to do the same (sooner or later), and that other necessary changes can only be made at a larger, more systematic level. Such as changing the system of subsidies that subsidise the energy and food industries (which still encourage the development of fossil fuels) or devising new rules and incentives for farming, logging and recycling.
Refrigerants are a good example of the importance of this approach. An advocacy group of researchers, businessmen and ngos called Drawdown found that scrapping HFCs (chemicals used in fridges and air conditioners) was the most effective way to reduce emissions, which are 9,000 times worse than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The good news is that we've made global progress on this. Two years ago, 170 countries agreed to begin phasing out HFCS in 2019.
This matters, says the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an intergovernmental body under the United Nations, because we need "unprecedented changes in all aspects of society to cope with climate change". "Everyone has to be involved," said Debra Robert, IPCC co-chair of the report.
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