In Memoriam

By a quirk of fate, three major events in space flight happened at this time of year namely.

On the 27th of Jan 1967 Apollo Astronaut's Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee sadly lost their lives in a fire aboard Apollo One.

On the 28th of Jan 1986 we lost Challenger on takeoff with the loss of Francis Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnick, Ellison Onuzuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.

On the 1st of Feb 2003 we lost Columbia on re-entry with the loss of Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, and Laural Clark.

I myself watched the TV with horror for the last two and wanted to pause for a moment to remember their names and say a quick poem.

High Flight Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long delirious, burning blue, I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew - And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untresspassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee No 412 squadron, RCAF Killed 11 December 1941

Rest in Peace.

Something for the Weekend

Thing one is a nice infographic (oh how I love these things) which shows the many various sciences and the links between them. It shows off nicely that no science exists in isolation and that they feed off advances in each other.

http://hvarfredriksen.posterou
s.com/map-of-science-looks-li k e-milky-way-1

BTW click to enlarge.

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Thing two is something to look out for tonight ie. the 29th/30th Jan. There is going to be the largest full moon of 2010 as our satellite will be at its closest and will be about 12% bigger than average.

Here is the link to Astronomy.com all about it http://www.astronomy.com/asy/d
efault.aspx?c=a&id=9022

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Finally, although I didn't see it myself I understand a strange thing happened to the moon last night too, it got a halo/pillar. This link gives more info on something which is pretty rare, so kudos to anyone who was lucky enough to see it.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool
/Astro/moon/moonring/

The wandering Earth

The shape of the Earth's orbit stretches from circular to more elliptical and back again, with a periodicity of about 100,000 years.

Just beaten by Lucy

Boron Nitride (BN) in its cubic form is the second hardest substance known to man, only beaten by Diamond. It is commonly used as an abrasive when machining steel and is insoluble in iron and nickel, something it has over Diamond which is soluble in both to form carbides.

The Hundredth Monkey Effect

This phenomenon is considered to be due to critical mass. When a limited number of people know something or do something in a new way, it remains the conscious property of only those people. The Hundredth Monkey Syndrome hypothesises that there is a point at which if only one more person tunes in to a new awareness, a field of “energy” is strengthened so that new awareness is picked up by almost everyone.

The Hundredth Monkey Effect was first introduced by biologist Lyall Watson in his 1980 book, ‘Lifetide.’ He reported that Japanese primatologists, who were studying Macaques monkeys in the wild in the 1950s, had stumbled upon a surprising phenomenon. While they were studying the habits of monkeys on some islands in the ocean off the shores of Japan, they found one particularly smart little fellow and taught it to wash its food before eating it. He learned to do this quite quickly. Soon the other monkeys in his family also began to wash their food before eating it. Later this behaviour spread to other monkeys in the clan. About the time one hundred monkeys were washing their food prior to eating it, suddenly all the monkeys on all the islands, some thousands of miles away, began to wash their food before eating it. This surprising observation became known as the Hundredth Monkey Effect and has been repeatedly observed in nature. Incidentally this same phenomenon is true in humans as well. It is part of the reason we have trends in fashion, the economy, and politics, etc.

Awww shucks

When you blush your stomach lining also reddens, strange but true.

Who first determined the speed of light and how did they do it ?

The velocity of sound in air is slow enough that we can easily detect time delays as it travels. For instance, the slap of distant thunder is delayed five seconds for each mile traveled. But light must have a much larger velocity because it appears to arrive at all observers instantaneously. To produce an easily measurable time delay, the light must travel a very large distance.

The first person who observed and measured such a delay was the Danish astronomer Olaf Romer in 1676. He made careful observations of the "moons" of Jupiter. The innermost moon goes around Jupiter in less than two days and is eclipsed by Jupiter once in each orbit. Romer found that this moon did not reappear at exactly the time he expected. Instead, the time of the eclipses varied periodically during the year. When the Earth was farthest from Jupiter, the eclipses were about 11 minute late; when the Earth was nearest Jupiter (about 6 months later), they were about 11 minuets early. Romer deduced that this variation must be due to the annual variation in the distance the light had to travel to get to the Earth from near Jupiter. The 11-minute delay must be about he time that it takes light to travel a distance equal to the radius of the Earth's orbit. More refined measurements of the eclipses gave a value of about 186,000 miles per second for the velocity of light. That is a million times faster than sound!

Something for the Weekend 2.0

This evolution infographic shows nicely, A. How late in the game humans have evolved and B. That 99.9% of evolutionary branches are dead ends. Makes me think how lucky my DNA is to be here at all, how about you?

http://evogeneao.com/images/Ev
o_large.gif

Something for the Weekend

This weeks something should be titled how to make £20,000 look like about 20 billion (the rough cost of the Hubble) as that's exactly what amateur astronomer Peter Shah from the UK has done in his back garden. Here is the link to his site showing his images taken over the last six months or so, which just go to show what one dedicated and talented guy can achieve.

Link to site: http://astropix.co.uk/index.ht
ml

Link to images: http://www.astropix.co.uk/ps/i
ndex.htm

Ps. its worth looking at his equipment page as that shows his set up.

Our skin of four colours

All skin, without colouring, would appear creamy white. Near-surface blood vessels add a blush of red. A yellow pigment also tints the canvas. Lastly, sepia-toned melanin, created in response to ultraviolet rays, appears black in large amounts. These four hues mix in different proportions to create the skin colours of all the peoples of Earth.

So be you from Haiti or Helsinki, its all just a slightly different mix of the same stuff.

Cavernous and Crystal Caves

The largest cave in the world, the Sarawak Chamber in Malaysia, is 2,300 feet (701 meters) long, 980 feet (299 meters) wide, and more than 230 feet (70 meters) high.

As additional cave stuff, here is an article with both pictures and a short film of the spectacular Cave of Crystals in Mexico one of the hidden gems of the natural world.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci
/tech/8466493.stm

Red Sky at night scientist's delight

The sun’s changing colours at sunset (and sunrise) are the result of us seeing the rising and setting sun through our atmosphere. When the sun is high in the sky, we are looking directly at it, so only a thin layer of air lies in the way. At sunset, though, we are looking towards the horizon through a much thicker layer of atmosphere.

As the light from the sun enters the earth’s atmosphere it is affected by air molecules. Individual photons of light collide with these molecules and are bounced of, scattering in different directions depending on their wavelength and colour. Blue light has the shortest wavelength so and is scattered the most, so as previously posted, the sky looks blue.

At sunset, the scattering effect increases as the light has to travel a greater distance through the atmosphere.First green then yellow are affected, until finally the only light we see directly from the sun is orangey-red giving it its red glow.

Outmunbered 2.0

If you laid all of the viruses on the planet end to end the line would be about 200 million light years long (Milky Way is only about 100,000 light years across so its 2000 of those).

Pi to the N'th degree

The 2,699,999,989,951th decimal of Pi is a 3.

This record breaking calculation wasn’t performed by some MIT guys with a supercomputer, but by a French computer scientist called Fabrice Bellard using a home PC running 24/7 for 104 days to produce a result which was then verified and converted from binary to base-10.

This sort of calculation is often used to check supercomputers are running ok and are going to give you accurate results when they perform tasks which are going to be far more critical. So it does have practical applications.

Below is a link to the story about this record breaker and how he beat the big guys.

http://www.physorg.com/news182
067503.html

Things are not what they used to be

It took radio 38 years to hit 50 million users, the Internet took 4.

Connected to the above factoid is this video which illustrates how rapidly things are changing.

Did You Know 4.0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=6ILQrUrEWe8&feature=rela t ed

Big ones and little ones

Every year it is estimated over 1 million earthquakes shake the Earth, of course most of the the time we don't even notice unless we work for someone like the National Geological Survey. Every once in a while though one causes unimaginable devastation and suffering like the one that struck Haiti yesterday.

Here are the stats: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear
thquakes/eqarchives/year/eqst a ts.php

The Parallax effect and how it tells us the distance to everything from sticks to stars

Did you ever ask yourself why we have two eyes? Try the following experiment. Hold some object with your hand (a pencil or a stick), extend your arm in front of you and look at it, now with the left, then the right eye. See how the object you hold projects against different parts of the distant background as you blink. The size of that apparent displacement, technically known as "parallax", depends on how far you keep the object from your eyes: the displacement is larger if the object is close, smaller if you keep your arm fully extended. Parallax could not be measured if we had only one eye.

Our brain estimates distances to nearby objects by automatically carrying out this experiment for objects in our vicinity. It is so used to doing it, that we don't need to blink and we are not even aware that the associated computations are being made.

The same principle helps astronomers.

As the Earth revolves around the Sun, our perspective of the heavens changes just so slightly. If you look at a given nearby star twice, six months apart, it's as if you blinked with a pair of eyes separated from each other by the diameter of the Earth's orbit around the Sun: the apparent displacement, or parallax, of the star against the background of more distant objects (which is very tiny and imperceptible by the naked eye) tells astronomers how far away the star is.

Ps. Its also used in 3D movies like Avatar to make us go wow!

Euwww don't do that!

The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.

What exactly is Ozone?

Oxygen exists in several forms. It can exist as a single oxygen atom, which is very rare. Usually, it exists as a diatomic molecule composed of two oxygen atoms linked by a chemical bond. Diatomic oxygen is the form of oxygen that we breathe every day.

Ozone is yet another type of oxygen. Ozone is a triatomic molecule composed of three oxygen atoms linked by chemical bonds. Like its molecular cousin, diatomic oxygen, ozone is an important component of the earth's atmosphere.

The atmosphere can be divided into two main regions. The troposphere is a layer of gases that extends about 10 km above the earth's surface. The stratosphere is located above this layer, extending an additional 40 km away from the earth. Diatomic oxygen is located throughout both the troposphere and stratosphere, whereas ozone is present mainly in the middle of the stratosphere.

Ozone is produced in the stratosphere by chemical reactions involving diatomic oxygen and sunlight. Light, in fact, can cause many chemical reactions because light carries energy. For example, the visible sunlight that reaches the earth's surface provides energy for plants to make food via the photosynthesis reactions. Similarly, ultraviolet light from the sun provides energy for the production of ozone.

Ultraviolet light has a higher energy than the visible light that we see every day. Due to its higher energy, ultraviolet light can break chemical bonds in a process known as photolysis. This is precisely how ozone is produced. Ultraviolet light emitted from the sun strikes diatomic oxygen molecules in the stratosphere, providing enough energy to split the oxygen molecules into single oxygen atoms. These oxygen atoms then crash into other diatomic oxygen molecules and combine with them to form ozone.

Ozone itself can be split by ultraviolet light back into diatomic oxygen and a single oxygen atom. This leads to a cycle where ozone is produced and destroyed, and ultraviolet light is constantly absorbed. This is an important process because it prevents ultraviolet light from reaching the earth, where it would cause harmful photolysis reactions in living organisms.

Transfer complete!

That's most of the entries transferred across, now its onward into 2010. The search for the facts continues.

Paul.

Ps: Feel free to leave comments so I can hopefully improve things as I go along.

Ten things about snow

1. The average snowflake has a top speed of 1.7 metres a second.

2. They are always hexagonal but the majority are not symmetrical – uneven temperatures, dirt and other factors usually cause them to be lopsided.

3. Many believe that it can be too cold to snow because icy temperatures reduce the number of water droplets available to freeze into snowflakes. But according to the experts, this is a myth. "It is never too cold to snow," apparently.

4. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest snowflake on record measured 38cm wide and 20cm thick. It was observed in Montana, USA in 1887 and described by witnesses as "larger than a milk pan".

5. It is a myth that Eskimos have 100 different words for 'snow'.

6. Chionophobia is a fear of snow.

7. The world's largest snowman was actually a snowwoman. Residents of Bethel, Maine built the 122 ft giant in 2008, giving her 30 ft spruce trees for arms and skis for eyelashes.

8. Around 12 per cent of the Earth's land surface is covered in permanent snow and ice.

9. Japanese scientists have developed a snow-eating robot, fitted with GPS, which shovels snow from the drive and compacts it into ice bricks.

10. it is possible to grow your own snow. Kenneth G Libbrecht, Professor of Physics at the California Institute ofTechnology, claims it can be done simply using dry ice, a plastic cola bottle, three Styrofoam cups, nylon fishing line and a paper clip. See how it's done.

The man with two brains

Dr Michael Gershon, has proved we all have two brains; this is because your gut (ie your greater & lesser intestine and colon) has its own Enteric Nervous System (or ENT) and is the only part of the body that can operate perfectly if all connection is cut from the upper brain. It essentially is a brain with one purpose, to keep you fed with all the necessary nutrients you need and to dispose of the rest in a timely manner.

Why does your voice change when you inhale Helium?

The first thing to say about breathing in helium is: DON'T DO IT! There are reported cases of people trying to have fun with the effect of this gas, but actually dying instead. It's not that helium is poisonous; it's actually the least reactive of all the chemical elements. The problem is simply that helium displaces the air from your lungs, and you need the oxygen in air to live. That said lets talk science!

In order to understand the effect of helium on speech, it is useful to talk a bit about how we make sounds to each other. When you choose to speak, you begin by causing the vocal chords in your throat to vibrate (wiggle up and down). That action, in turn, causes the air in you throat and mouth to experience moving waves of alternating compression (increased density) and rarefaction (decreased density). These are actually sound waves. When someone hears a sound, it is its frequency, or pitch - rather than its wavelength that he or she perceives. If you think about it a bit, you will recognize that, for a fixed wavelength of sound, the frequency must depend on how fast the waves are moving. The faster they move, the higher the frequency. We'll come back to that point in a moment.

The next thing to know about speech is that your wiggling vocal chords don't make sound of just one frequency. There are a whole bunch of sound waves of different frequency, all produced at once. Some of the frequencies come out louder than others, because of a phenomenon called resonance. Resonance really means the matching of one thing with another. You encounter it in a playground if you try to push a small child on a swing. If you time the pushing motion of your arms just right, you can use the energy produced by your muscles with maximum efficiency to propel the swing higher and higher, whereas if you push at the wrong time the effect is much less pleasant for all involved! The matching of your pushes with the motion of the swing is an example of resonance. In the case of sound waves, resonance can occur if the wavelength of the sound for air in a pipe (or some multiple of the wavelength) exactly matches the length of the pipe. All of the pipes that you see in a church organ have different sizes so that they will be in resonance with sound of different wavelengths, and hence frequencies. The equivalent of the organ pipe when you speak is the combination of your throat and mouth - sometimes called the vocal tract. It's more sophisticated than a simple pipe, because you can change its shape, but nevertheless it does emphasize some of the sound waves produced by your vocal chords by being in resonance with them. It is the emphasized frequencies that you hear most obviously when someone talks to you.

Finally we come to the helium. The sound waves in a gas require the particles (atoms or molecules) of the gas to get pushed about. Not surprisingly, lighter particles can be pushed about more easily, and so sound waves travel faster through gases consisting of lighter particles. Helium atoms are, on average, only about one quarter as massive as the nitrogen and oxygen molecules that are the primary constituents of air, and so sound travels much faster through helium. But remember how wavelength and frequency are related to how fast the waves are travelling? By increasing the speed of the sound, we have increased the frequencies of the sounds that are in resonance with the vocal tract, and hence the overall perception of a listener is that the pitch of the speech has gone up.

And in the process has made someone sound like a Munchkin!

If I could turn back time (I'd be an astronaut)

The effects of Relativity make Astronauts a fraction of a second younger upon their return to Earth after long durations in orbit.

Cosmonaut Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalyov currently holds the record for the most time spent in space with a total of 804 days spent in orbit. He has clocked up this impressive total crewing first MIR and then the International Space Station (during that time he has also completed 8 EVA’s).

I wonder how much of that time he spent staring out the window ?

98.6 special or just something for the textbooks?

Most home health books tell us the average or normal body temperature is ninety-eight point six degrees. Glass thermometers designed for measuring body temperature often include a marker at ninety-eight point six indicating where the mercury is supposed to stop. But what does it mean if we’re above or below that mark?

In fact, the temperature of a healthy body is so variable that there is no single normal temperature, even for an individual. For example, some parts of the body are warmer than others, so a temperature taken rectally may be a degree higher than a temperature taken orally, which is usually a degree higher than a temperature taken under the armpit.

Exercise can raise the temperature as much as four or five degrees; so if you’re running hard to make that doctor’s appointment, don’t be surprised if your temperature reads a little high. When you stop running, your temperature drops, but other factors are harder to control. During the second half of the menstrual cycle, women’s body temperatures go up about one degree. Everyone’s temperatures, regardless of physical activity, goes up and down around two degrees with the low around 4 A.M and the high around 4 P.M.

In short, everyone’s body temperature has a very wide range, probably between ninety-seven and a hundred degrees, with some even higher or lower. So does body temperature tell us anything at all? Yes, because a very high temperature, say over a hundred degrees, usually means that someone is sick. But there’s nothing magical about ninety-eight point six that makes it any different from a lot of other nearby numbers.

A truly sweet discovery

Saccharin, the oldest artificial sweetener, was accidentally discovered in 1879 by researcher Constantine Fahlberg, who was working at Johns Hopkins University in the laboratory of professor Ira Remsen. Fahlberg's discovery came after he forgot to wash his hands before lunch. He had spilled a chemical on his hands and it, in turn, caused the bread he ate to taste unusually sweet. In 1880, the two scientists jointly published the discovery, but in 1884, Fahlberg obtained a patent and began mass-producing saccharin without Remsen. The use of saccharin did not become widespread however until sugar was rationed during World War I, and its popularity increased during the 1960s and 1970s with the manufacture of Sweet'N Low and diet soft drinks.

An easy smile

It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. Unless you’re trying to give your face a bit of a workout, smiling is a much easier option for most of us. Anyone who’s ever scowled, squinted or frowned for a long period of time knows how it tires out the face which doesn’t do a thing to improve your mood.

What makes a star shine?

It’s a question we rarely give much thought; it just does. However, there is a scientific explanation for this commonplace phenomenon.

The sun, like every star, was created by the effect of gravity.

Originally, all the matter that makes up the sun was in the form of dust and gas floating in space. This dust was composed of many different elements, with the most prevalent being hydrogen.

Over time, the force of gravity caused the dust to lump together; the larger the lump became, the more dust it accumulated. These lumps continued to grow and connect, until a few billion years later a titanic mass was formed, called a proto-star.

Soon, the gravitational attraction of the proto-star bagan to pull its parts tighter and tighter together. As the proto-star became larger, the more powerful this pull became, thus the tighter it compacted.

This continued until the proto-star became so tightly packed that hydrogen atoms began to fuse with each other, releasing a blast of energy containing a new element, helium.

At this point the proto-star has become an actual star, crushing hydrogen into helium in an ongoing controlled explosion. The outward force of the explosion keeps the star from contracting too small, while the inward crush of gravity keeps it from blowing apart.

Once this equilibrium is reached, a star such as our own sun can stay balanced and shining for literally billions of years.

Ps. Our Sun is about halfway though its life and probably has about 5 billion years of hydrogen left to burn.

Tesla: The greatest genius (oh and mad) inventor there has ever been?

If you’ve ever played Command and Conquer then you’ll be familiar with the name TESLA as you’ll inevitably have been zapped by him.

Behind the name though lies the ultimate mad inventor.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a Croatian born engineer and visionary

genius who almost single-handedly developed technology that harnessed the power of electricity for household use and invented things like electrical generators, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights, and giant machines that shot enormous, brain-frying lightning bolts all over the place like crazy. He had an unyielding, steel-trap photographic memory and an insane ability to visualize even the most complex pieces of machinery – he did advanced calculus and physics equations in his head, memorized entire books at a time, and successfully pulled off scientific experiments that modern-day technology STILL can't replicate. For instance, in 2007 a group of lesser geniuses at MIT got all pumped up because they wirelessly transmitted energy a distance of seven feetthrough the air. Nikola Tesla once lit 200 light bulbs from a power source 26 miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of the desert. To this day, nobody can really figure out how he pulled it off, because two-thirds of the schematics only existed in the darkest recesses of Tesla's all-powerful brain.

Of course, much like many other eccentric geniuses Tesla was also troubled. He was prone to nervous breakdowns, claimed to receive weird visions in the middle of the night, spoke to pigeons and occasionally thought he was receiving electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrials on Mars. He was also obsessive-compulsive and hated round objects, human hair, jewellery, and anything that wasn't divisible by three. He was also asexual and celibate for his entire life.

Another thing about Tesla is that he conducted the sort of crazy experiments that generally result in hordes of angry villagers breaking down the door to your lab with torches and pitchforks. While he was working on magnetic resonance, he discovered the resonant frequency of the Earth and caused an earthquake so powerful that it almost obliterated the 5th Avenue New York building that housed his laboratory.Picture the scene, stuff started flying off the walls, the drywall was breaking apart, the cops were coming after him and Tesla had to smash his device with a sledge hammer to keep it from demolishing an entire city block. Later he boasted that he could have built a device powerful enough to split the Earth in two.

Nobody dared him to prove it.

During his adventures blinding half of the world with science, Tesla harnessed the power of Niagara Falls into the first hydroelectric power plant, constructed a bath designed to cleanse the human body of germs using nothing but electricity, and created a 130-foot long bolt of lightning from one of his massive coils (a feat which to this day remains the world record for man-made lightning). But perhaps his most frightening invention was his face-melting, tank-destroying, super-secret Atomic Death Ray. In the 1920s he claimed to be working on a tower that could potentially have spewed forth a gigantic beam of ionized particles capable of disintegrating aircraft from 200 miles away and blinking most men out of existence like something out of a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers comic. His weapon, known as the "Teleforce Beam" allegedly shot ball lightning at 60 million volts, liquefying its targets with enough power to vaporize steel, and while it could shoot further than 200 miles, it's effectiveness beyond that range was limited only by the curvature of the Earth. Luckily for all humans, this crazy insanity never came to fruition – most of the schematics and plans existed only in Tesla's head and when he died of heart failure in 1943, little hard data on the project existed.

Still, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI confiscated all his personal stuff and locked it away, just to be safe.

Despite being incredibly popular during his day, now Tesla remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of the modern era. Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the light bulb, but it was his one-time assistant and life-long arch-nemesis, Nikola Tesla, who made the breakthroughs in alternating-current technology that allowed for people to cheaply use electricity to power appliances and lighting in their homes. They constantly fought about whether to use alternating or direct-currents (their bitter blood feud resulted in both men being snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee), but ultimately it was Tesla who delivered the fatal kick-to-the-crotch that ended that battle – at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, his AC generators illuminated the entire experience, marking the first time that an event of that magnitude had ever taken place under the glow of artificial light. Today, all homes and appliances run on Tesla's AC current.

To summarize Nikola Tesla was one of those super-geniuses whose intellect placed him dangerously on the precipice between "great scientific mind" and "utter madness". He held 700 patents at the time of his death, made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, robotics, steam turbine engineering, and magnetism, and once melted one of his assistants' hands by overloading it with X-rays - which isn't really scientific, but is still pretty cool. And honestly, if there were one man on this planet who was ever capable of single-handedly destroying the entire planet through his insane scientific discoveries, it was Tesla. That alone should qualify him as a pretty mad genius.

When we loose weight. where does the weight go?

After weeks of trimming a few calories here, exercising a little more there, you put on a pair of jeans, and like magic, the waist has grown. You button them up to behold a welcome space between your belly and the fabric. How did that happen?

With an ever larger percent of the adult population either overweight or obese , a lot of people are trying to drop some pounds at any one time. Through dieting , exercise, surgery or a host of other alternatives, they hope to reach the goal of a smaller body. But to where does that weight disappear when the hard work pays off?

The short answer is that our bodies convert molecules in fat cells to usable forms of energy, thus shrinking the cells. But getting this to happen isn't just about sweat bands and short shorts. Understanding how our bodies perform this tummy-trimming trick requires a little more detail.

We know that weight loss hinges on burning calories. Calories measure the potential energy in food you eat in the form of fats , proteins and carbohydrates.

If our bodies were cars , energy would be the gas to keep everything running. Lounging in front of the television is like cruising the strip, while sprinting around a track is more like drag racing at maximum speeds. In short, more work means more energy.

The body uses some of those calories to digest food. Once the food is broken down into its respective parts of carbohydrates, fats and proteins, it either uses the remaining energy or converts it to fat for storage in fat cells. Fat cells live in adipose tissue, which basically acts like an internal gas station, storing away fuel reserves.

To lose weight, you must burn more calories, or energy, than you consume to start using up that fuel reserve. Essentially, you're not ingesting enough calories to fuel your additional exercise, so your body must pull from fat stores.

How We Burn Fat

According to the Law of Conservation of Mass , matter is neither created nor destroyed, but it may alter its form through chemical reaction. Essentially, that tells us that while we lose mass in our bodies by burning up fat, it does not just disappear. It simply changes form, like water and steam.

When we eat, the glucose and sugar harnessed from carbohydrates are the first fuel sources. The liver stores the glucose in the form of glycogen and releases it into the bloodstream as necessary to keep our body trucking along. Think of your bloodstream as an interconnected conveyor belt that takes necessary nutrients to the body parts that need them. Once that glucose runs out, fat takes over. Harnessing energy by burning fat is referred to as ketosis.

Hormones regulating our blood sugar levels activate an enzyme in the blood vessels of fat tissue called lipase. Lipase ignites fat cells to release macromolecules called triglycerides, which are what make fat cells fat. Triglycerides are made of glycerol and three fatty acid chains. When they receive the signal from lipase to exit the fat cells, the triglycerides break up into their respective components and enter the bloodstream for use. The liver snatches up the glycerol to break it down for energy, and some of the fatty acids move to the muscles that can farm them for energy as well.

This action of breaking down triglycerides into usable energy is called lipolysis . Once inside the mitochrondia, or power source, or muscle or liver cells, the components of the glycerol and fatty acids are shuffled and reshuffled to harness their energy potential, producing heat, water , carbon dioxide and adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP hauls potential energy in its molecular bonds for use when we exercise like cellular carb loading. The water exits our bodies as sweat and urine, and we exhale the carbon dioxide.

Sounds easy when you put it like that don’t it. Now where did I put my running shoes? Oh yeah that’s right in the doughnut box!

When you shake a bottle of fizzy drink, why does it fizz when you open it?

The gas that makes fizzy drinks fizzy is carbon dioxide, which is dissolved in the drink like sugar in a cup of tea. However, while the bottle is on the shelf it gradually leaks out and collects in the space between the bottle cap and the drink – called the head space. Usually when you open a bottle of drink this gas can escape easily and you only hear a slight psssht.

But when you shake the bottle vigorously the carbon dioxide contained in the head space gets mixed up in the drink and forms pockets of carbon dioxide within the liquid itself, which cant easily escape when you open the bottle. Instead these pockets rise rapidly to the top of the bottle dragging some of the drink with them.

This then flows out over the top of the bottle and a fine old mess is created.