English is a great assimilator of words from other languages. It has borrowed heavily from French, Spanish, Latin, Arabic and many others. Most words in modern English can either be traced to Old English, a modified type of German spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, or from these other common languages elsewhere in the world.
But there are exceptions. Then suddenly in the Middle Ages the word dog — a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word — displaced it. No one has any idea why.
This displacement happened rapidly, certainly in less than a hundred years and probably in more like fifty, sometime in the 12th century. While linguists do not know what caused this to occur, and due to the lengthy time period since may never know, there are theories. As their popularity grew, so did the use of the word. Another theory, listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, is that dog was a local slang term for the animal, that caught on. Slang words are regularly created out of thin air, and to this day often find their way into common usage think of recently coined words like fomo, or bae.
But even if either of these theories can be proven, it just shifts the mystery down the road; what caused the dog breeds to become popular, or what caused the new slang term to catch on? We will probably never know.
As a footnote, the word dog has also become one of the most versatile words in English. People say things have gone downhill when they have gone to the dogs. Your feet can be dogs my dogs are barking , and so can a sausage in bread a hot dog and so can a book page with the corner turned over dog eared. Well, we know the answer to this one… right?
Gravity is the thing that keeps you attached to planet earth, and that means when you drop an egg it hits the ground and breaks.
Gravity is associated with mass; the larger the object, the greater its gravitational footprint. This is not a new concept, the Ancient Greeks knew about it thousands of years ago, and Sir Isaac Newton described it mathematically in the s.
Think of the universe as a rubber sheet, and the stars and planets as weighted balls. Place a ball on the sheet, and it will sink into it and curve the surrounding area. Roll another, smaller, ball towards this one, and the curvature made by the first object will influence the rolling balls trajectory, directing it towards the larger ball. But this does not tell us why it works that way; what quality of mass produces this space-time curvature?
No one knows. Sophisticated experiments to try and find gravitons, using particle accelerators, are ongoing. Consider this simple experiment. Place a paperclip on your coffee table; it will sit there, held in place by the gravity of planet earth. Now get a fridge magnet from your fridge door, and hold it over the paperclip; the clip will leap into the air and connect itself to the magnet.
That is how weak gravity is comparatively; the magnetic force from this tiny magnet can overpower the gravitational force of a planet. Further reading and more further reading. Favouring one hand over the other is a physical trait found only in primates.
From an evolutionary perspective, scientists think this relates to our ability to use complex tools; as the tools we made became more sophisticated, and were used for more intricate work, it became an advantage to have one hand specialise in their use. But there is no reason why being a right hander or a left hander would be more advantageous, so you would expect to see an even spread of each. And this is what we see in other primates; apes and monkey populations both show roughly a split between righties and lefties.
What hand you favour is genetic. So now that the right handers are in the majority, this is likely to continue; they are passing on their right handed genes to their kids. What is unknown is how this imbalance arose in the first place. There is some tentative evidence that suggests a connection between left-handedness and certain neurological conditions. People with Down Syndrome and autism have been shown, in some studies, to be more likely to be left handed.
While left handedness does not cause these conditions, it may be an indicator of unusual brain development. Why do we move forwards in time? It could be an illusion, or we might need to rescue the flow of time by meddling with our concept of space Read more.
Why does space have three dimensions? Can we get energy from nothing? What is glass? Glass is a weird kind of solid liquid — and how it comes to be like that defies all explanation Read more.
Why is ice slippery? How long does a proton live? Is the universe infinite or just very big? Both are destroyed in an instant. So antimatter has the potential to destroy us and everything we love. But fear not! When antimatter and matter meet and destroy one another, it releases energy. In a PET scanner, anti-electrons are created and their annihilation in the body allows doctors to create sophisticated images.
In the grand scheme of things, human beings are just small fry. And yet, we currently seem to be the only ones at the party. The Fermi Paradox refers to the contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the apparent lack of evidence that such life exists.
So why the radio silence? There are numerous theories, ranging from the possibility that intelligent life is exceptionally rare or short-lived, to the notion that alien species are purposefully avoiding detection. A constant staple of sci-fi thrillers, black holes are violent, vastly destructive and invisible. Black holes are regions of space in which the force of gravity is so powerful that everything around is drawn in.
Experts think there could be up to million black holes in our galaxy alone, and these monsters can grow to become billions of times more massive than the sun. In space, no—one can hear you scream. It can last for more than a second, which is long for lightning, but still Explanations have ranged from electrically charged meteorites to hallucinations induced by magnetism during storms.
One theory is that when lightning strikes something it explodes in a cloud of highly energized nanoparticles, notes the Weather Channel , but for now that remains just speculation. If only we could ask Zeus. While ball lightning is known for its infrequency, Catatumbo lightning is famous for just the opposite: its astounding prevalence. Occurring over a swamp in northwestern Venezuela almost every evening for centuries, this "everlasting storm" averages 28 strikes per minute in events lasting up to 10 hours.
When things really get going, lightning strikes every second. Oh, and the lightning is colorful, and does not produce thunder. Sometimes it just stops for a few weeks at a time. What the heck? To be certain it has inspired plenty of speculation.
The only answer so far is that it's produced by a perfect storm, so to speak, of topography and wind. There was a crooked man, he walked a crooked mile Nobody has any idea why. Adding to the mystery is the fact that they are part of a larger forest of normal unswerving pines. What is known is that they were likely planted in the s and whatever caused them to waver in their sky-striving happened when they were seven to 10 years old. Theories abound, but until trees can talk, we may never know the real story.
At one point, his measurements spiked with an uncanny signal that lasted for 72 seconds. It seems to have come from within the Sagittarius constellation, which lives by the star Tau Sagittarii, a mere light-years away.
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