Category: –

Sunday

Clouds are made of water evaporated from the Earth’s surface suspended in the air as droplets or tiny ice crystals, since the water has condensed (or also frozen) at higher altitudes where it is cooler. These droplets form by water first adhering to a particle such as dust, dirt, smoke, pollen, or sea salt, which are known as “nuclei.”

Monday

These nuclei can be put in the sky artificially to encourage precipitation by a process called “cloud seeding.” Silver iodide, which has a structure similar to ice, is typically used, and tiny ice crystals tend to form around this seeding particle. According to several studies, this has increased snowpack in mountainous areas by 10-15%.

Tuesday

Fog is really just a cloud that’s very near the ground and, by definition, reduces visibility to one kilometer or less.

Wednesday

There are four main types of clouds, and in addition to being different shapes, they’re typically found at different heights. They are cirrus (thin and wispy), cumulus (puffy), stratus (layered like a blanket), and nimbus (rain clouds).

Thursday

Fluffy floating clouds seem nearly weightless, but they are not, since water is heavy. A modest-sized cumulus cloud measuring one km on each side, for example, weighs about 551 tons, or about the weight of 42 school buses.

Friday

Other planets have clouds, but they’re scary. These clouds can be made of, among other things, ammonia, sand, and metal.

Saturday

Concert organizers once paid $55,000 to make the rain clouds go away before a 2004 Paul McCartney concert in St. Petersburg Palace Square. Three jets sprayed the heavy clouds with frozen carbon dioxide, which theoretically should make the clouds disperse, though this is difficult to prove. In any event, the clouds disappeared, and Sir Paul played “Good Day Sunshine” under a clear sky.

The Seven Natural Wonders of the World, a list compiled by the news network CNN, are:

Sunday

The Grand Canyon, over one mile deep, seventeen miles wide, and two billion years old, is aptly named. Eons of Earth’s life are visible in the geology and erosion of rock layers visible to any visitor. President Teddy Roosevelt declared that it was a sight which could not be improved on, and now five million visitors come to the enjoy it annually.

Monday

The huge Harbor at Rio de Janiero, also known as Guanabara Bay, is surrounded a picturesque granite mountain range that also includes the site of Christ the Redeemer (one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, see previous week) and dotted with over 130 islands. This busy bay is now both a natural gem and a major economic port.

Tuesday

The Paricutín Volcano, found in Michoacán, Mexico, is strikingly smooth and conical, but also very young, having only first appeared in a cornfield in 1943, burying the town of Paricutín as it grew over the next 9 years. This eruption not only created an intriguing tourist attraction, but gave the scientific opportunity to study a volcano from its birth.

Wednesday

Fittingly named “the smoke that thunders” in the native Lozi language, Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, empties a mind-boggling 165,000,000 gallons of water per minute into the single largest sheet of water in the world. The spray from the massive falls is visible over 30 miles away and keeps the surrounding rainforest permanently wet.

Thursday

Mount Everest, rising nearly 5.5 miles above the Nepal-Tibet border, is the highest peak and tallest point on Earth. Roughly shaped like a 3-sided pyramid, Everest attracts many ambitious climbers every year. Sadly, many do not survive the brutal weather and low-oxygen extreme altitudes.

Friday

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, composed of over 2,900 individual reef systems and 900 islands across an area as large as 70 million football fields. This remarkable aquatic treasure is home to fully 25% of all known marine species in the world, including 134 species of sharks alone.

Saturday

Aurora Borealis, AKA The Northern Lights, may be the least predictable spectacle on this list, but they wow nonetheless. Caused by energized particles from the sun being pushed to Earth’s poles by our planet’s magnetic field, these dramatic lights in the sky can appear green, pink, red, blue, purple, and white.

In 2000, over two millennia since the first list was compiled, a Swiss foundation collected 100 million votes for the New Seven Wonders of the World. The results were:

Sunday

The Colosseum, built about 70 AD, was a marvel of size, engineering, and gruesome spectacle. Besides the gladiator battles and human-animal combat, the Colosseum was sometimes flooded for mock naval battles, with an estimated 1/2 million people meeting their death there. After some centuries of earthquakes and neglect, the building was restored in recent times and now draws about 7 million tourists annually.

Monday

Chichén Itzá, on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, is a city first founded by the Mayans in the 5th century AD. Among the remarkable temples is El Castillo, a stepped pyramid where natural shadows combine with carved stone snake heads to give the appearance of serpents slithering down one side on the two annual equinoxes.

Tuesday

Machu Picchu, high in the Andes Mountains of Peru, is another rare well-preserved pre-Columbian site in the Americas, this one built by the Incas. Dating from the 15th or 16th centuries, this extensive and elaborate complex of over 350 structures is surrounded by terraces and aqueducts and was likely the site of a palace.

Wednesday

Petra, in modern Jordan, is also called the “Rose Red City” for the color of the rock that the many elaborate buildings are carved out of. Though the surrounding area has been used by humans for at least 10,000 years, this capital of the ancient Nabatean Arabs has been around since about the 3rd century BC, and thrived until an earthquake and a later change in trade routes left it all but abandoned until a more recent “rediscovery” about 200 years ago.

Thursday

The Christ the Redeemer statue, rising 125 above the peak of Mt. Corcovado in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, was originally inspired by fears of “an advancing tide of godlessness.” Built in the 1920s during the heyday of Art Deco architecture, it is the largest statute of that style in the world, is covered by over six million tiles, and is hit by (and damaged by) lightning surprisingly often.

Friday

The Great Wall of China, easily one of the largest-scale building projects undertaken by humans, was built along the country’s northern border to protect against invaders. The Great Wall is actually a series of walls and fortifications, many parallel to each other and in varying states of maintenance, making a definitive length measurement tricky. A conservative estimate might be 5,500 miles for the best-preserved stretch up to 13,170 total miles, with construction beginning in the 7th century BC and with repairs going on as late at the 11th century AD before modern renovations.

Saturday

The Taj Mahal is an enormous and elaborate marble masoleum built by Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved wife, who died in 1631 while giving birth to their 14th child. The shah was later overthrown by one of his sons and imprisoned nearby. The Taj Mahal is easily the best-recognized building in India and attracts about 3 million people a year.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as described by 2nd century BC Greeks, are:

Sunday

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in what is now southern Iraq, were supposedly built about 600 BC and described in many narratives, but the nature of these gardens, and even their exact location, has been debated for decades.

Monday

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, built over the course of 33 years starting in 280 BC, was for centuries the tallest man-made structure after the pyramid at Giza. Ships entering the harbor at Alexandria, Egypt were guided by the fire atop and a reflective bronze mirror until 15 centuries and multiple earthquakes finally took their toll on the lighthouse.

Tuesday

The Colossus of Rhodes, a 110 foot tall statue of the sun god Helios, was built about 280 BC to celebrate the city’s survival of an extended siege. Though an earthquake broke it off at the knees about 60 years later, even the fallen statue continued to attract visitors for the next 800 years.

Wednesday

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, 40 feet tall seated and made of gold and ivory by the same sculptor who oversaw the Parthenon and Acropolis’ construction, amazed onlookers for nearly 1,000 years.

Thursday

The massive and opulent Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was named for Mausolus, the ambitious 4th century governor in what is now Turkey, who started its construction during his life. About 140 feet in height, the building lasted 17 centuries, with parts of it still to be found in museum exhibits.

Friday

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was described as twice the size of the Parthenon and both longer and wider than a modern football field, not to mention made entirely of marble. This enormous temple to the Greek fertility goddess took 120 years (or by one account, 200 years) to complete.

Saturday

At forty-five centuries old, weighing in at 5.75 million tons and made of 2.3 million massive blocks of limestone and granite, the Great Pyramid at Giza is the only wonder of the ancient world still largely intact. Built for the pharaoh Khufu over 20 years by between 20,000 and 100,000 workers, it sits in a complex that includes smaller pyramids and with sides that align with the cardinal directions and was called “perhaps the most colossal single building ever erected on the planet.”

Sunday

Although we often think of rats and mice when hearing about rodents, this is actually the single largest group of mammals and includes beavers, porcupines, capybaras, squirrels, hamsters, gerbils, and chinchillas.

Monday

Think that subway rat you saw was a big rodent? Capybaras have an average weight of 108 lbs and stand about 2 feet tall at the shoulder. They are easily the world’s larges rodent, and even have webbed feet for swimming.

Tuesday

Gamblers used to bet on actual rat races, with colored ribbons tied to the rodents to tell them apart. Later this term was applied to a fighter plane training exercise, but the term now means career competition, often in an unsatisfying job, but with the hope of future reward, such as promotion or status.

Wednesday

“Rodent” is from the Latin “to gnaw,” and for good reason. A defining trait of the rodent order is that their incisors never stop growing, so rodents must chew frequently or grind teeth together to keep their teeth worn down enough to function. Because of the unique tooth anatomy, however, rodent teeth are actually harder than many metals, including iron, and rats have been known to gnaw through metal pipes.

Thursday

Rats might be unfairly blamed for spreading bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. New research suggests the deadly bacteria spread too fast to be carried by rats, nor do there seem to be enough rat remains from the time. It was more likely carried by fleas and lice which rode on humans, not rodents.

Friday

Rodents have many gifts, but predicting the seasons is not one of them. Beloved groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, supposedly the knowing forecaster of springtime’s approach, is accurate less than half of the time.

Saturday

No rodents can truly fly, but flying squirrels can fake it pretty well with long glides on the skin between their legs. One giant flying squirrel set a record of 450 meters (1,475 feet) for “farthest glide by a mammal.”

Sunday

Australia is home to the oldest civilization on Earth. Recent genetic studies indicate modern Aboriginal Australians have origins going back about 75,000 years.

Monday

Speaking of Australian ancients, specimens of the earliest known life on earth, stromatolites, appear on the continent in both living and fossilized forms. Dating back 3.5 billion years, these organisms gave Earth’s atmosphere the oxygen which allowed modern life to thrive.

Tuesday

After lots of camel importing between the late 19th and early 20th century to help settle the vast interior, Australia has more non-native Arabian (Dromedary) camels than anywhere on Earth.

Wednesday

Australia’s long history of geographic separation, along with its unique environment, have led to the evolution of many fascinating animals unique to the continent, such as dingoes, cassowaries, Tasmanian devils, bilbies, brolgas, wallabies, wombats, platypus, koalas, and of course, kangaroos.

Thursday

The term “kangaroo court” – implying a sham court which operates without the usual procedural safeguards of justice – actually has American, not Australian origins.

Friday

Australia is the world’s smallest continent, but the only continent which is a single country.

Saturday

The European first colony in Australia’s Botany Bay was famously a British penal colony, but the convicts included women and weren’t the most hardened criminals, since British prisons were overcrowded and a faraway sentence didn’t reflect the crime committed. Many had been sentenced to seven years “transportation,” the then-legal lingo for being taken to a distant colony.

Sunday

The first siren, consisting of air forced through a disc with evenly-spaced holes spun to produce the noise, was developed in the late 18th century by philosopher and physicist John Robison. The device was further modified for steam-powered use in lighthouses.

Monday

Despite being bombed by German zeppelins in WWI, British government officials debated the deployment of an air raid siren system, but finally had one developed and in frequent use during the nightly German bombings of WWII.

Tuesday

The ancient Greeks and Egyptians developed alarm functions on water clocks, and ancient Chinese had candle clocks performing the same function.

Wednesday

Early mechanical alarm clocks were developed as early as the 15th and possibly even 13th centuries. In the more modern era, American inventor Levi Hutchins developed a smaller household alarm clock in 1787 which could only ring at 4am, following Levi’s firm rule to always rise before the sun and pray. Sixty years later, Frenchman Antoine Redier patented the first adjustable alarm clock.

Thursday

The first fire alarm which wasn’t simply people relaying fire information was a telegraph-based electric system developed for Boston in 1852. It was successful, but depended on people staying in or near burning buildings long enough to operate the crank and alert the local fire department.

Friday

The United States and Canada use the multiple alarm fire (two-alarm fire, three-alarm fire, etc.) to indicate how many firefighting units and how much equipment should be sent to fight the blaze. The higher the number, the more people and equipment needed.

Saturday

The original sirens belonged to Greek myth. These half-bird, half-woman creatures sang a song so beautiful that sailors were lured near, only to have their ships smashed on rocks and lives lost.

Among the many books named for Shakespeare lines:

Sunday

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”

–Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

Monday

Band of Brothers by Steven E. Ambrose

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”

–Henry V, Act IV, Scene III

Tuesday

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

–Hamlet, Act V, Scene I

Wednesday

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

“Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in ’t!”

–Tempest, Act V, Scene I

Thursday

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, and with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.”

– Sonnet 30

Friday

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

–Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II

Saturday

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

–Macbeth, Act V, Scene V

Sunday

Every continent except Antarctica has a “continental divide,” often a mountain range, which separates the direction water flows by rivers and streams into larger water bodies. From this divide, additional hydrological divides often further distribute the water into lakes, seas, and oceans.

Monday

While most of the world’s rivers flow southward, there are some very notable exceptions, including the mighty Nile, the world’s longest.

Tuesday

Certain river crossings are famously irrevocable. In mythology, the recently dead are carried across Hell’s River Styx by the ferryman Charon. Julius Caesar, crossing the Rubicon River toward Rome with his army in a forbidden act which he knew would spark a civil war, declared “the die is cast” as he crossed.

Wednesday

As long, defined lines, rivers are a natural choice for political borders. One 2020 study found that rivers constitute 23% of all national borders, 17% of state and provincial borders and 12% of county borders.

Thursday

The original poem “Over the River and Through the Woods” involved a trip to grandfather’s house, not grandmother’s, and came from an author working to rebuild her career after she was shunned for writing a 1833 book strongly condemning American slavery.

Friday

Some rivers run underground naturally, but a surprising number are intentionally buried, typically because they are in the way of urban development. Some of these rivers, buried decades or centuries ago, are now being brought back to the surface.

Saturday

The first European to discover the Amazon River in 1541 named it for the female warriors of Greek myth because the indigenous groups which confronted and battled him along the river included women.