OK, it's really a mathematics equivalence, rather than a scientific fact, but Euler's Identity:
e^iΟ^ + 1 = 0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_identity
it shows a profound connection between the most fundamental numbers in mathematics.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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I dunno whether it counts: but that science has effectively cured AIDS.
In 2004, 2.1m people died from it. Twenty years later that figure was a little over a quarter at 630k. The goal for 2025 is 250k. I think that's absolutely remarkable.
As a child in the 80s I was terrified of AIDS. It made me low-key scared of gay men because the news made it sound like I could I could get it from any one of them. And here we now are, able to provide a medication that can almost completely ensure that you will never be infected by HIV.
Astonishing, really.
Yeah.
There's waaay worse things you can catch.
I'm terrified of going into lakes and rivers because of what might find its way into my skin.
That our species took millions of years of evolution and the chance for it to be exactly this way was so infinitesimal... And yet here we are, chasing arbitrary numbers on paper-slices and in some bank-account while also being sexists, racists, whatever-ists and destroying the very rock we exist on. Yet things like star trek are called utopia not actual-ia.
This always baffle me.
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Retinal photosynthesis, also known as the Purple Earth Theory. Colours are weird. Earth plants absorb red and blue light, they look green to us because thatβs the wavelength of light that cannot be used by the chloroplasts.
Itβs hypothesized that this was advantageous on Earth because blue light goes further into water than the other wavelengths, facilitating the development of photosynthetic algae
Retinal photosynthesis is another viable chemical chain reaction that could be used to create ATP (usable biological energy) from light.
Itβs another molecule similar to chlorophyll, but it absorbs green light instead of red/blue - alien planets might be purple!
Thereβs a viable parallel evolutionary pathway that leads to plants with magenta leaves
So humans vision is much more sensitive to green than other colors. it's why camera sensors are 50% green 25% red 25% blue. Which makes sense as being able to detect small differences in plant cover is useful in both detecting predators and prey.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
If humans had more flat color detection range we woulda actually be able to see that the sky is purple and not blue.
alien planets could be purple
So the prophecies are true...
Actually, there's some contradicting evidence that came up recently-sh. If you factor in the challenge of not being fried by the very incoming light you need, every photosynthesiser is about the right colour for it's environment.
By that, alien planets would be coloured depending on their star type, and the ancient cyanobacteria of Earth were probably green too.
When the moon is at its farthest orbit from earth, all of the planets in the solar system can fit in between earth and the moon.
Just in general how spread apart everything is in space is wild. As big as planets and stars are, thereβs still unfathomably more nothing in between them all. And thatβs in a solar system where itβs comparatively βdenseβ compared to interstellar space let alone intergalactic. It makes the vastness of the ocean look tiny.
My old school had a scale model of the solar system. It used the same scale for the planets size and distance. The sun was a 12" ball on one end of campus. Around campus were poles with little glass domes on top inside were tiny pins with little planet models on them.
the implication of einsteins mass-energy equivalence formula is mind-blowing to me. one gram of mass, if perfectly converted to energy, makes 25 GWh. that means half the powerplants in my country could be replaced with this theoretical "mass converter" going through a gram of fuel an hour. that's under 10 kilograms of fuel a year.
a coal plant goes through tons of fuel a day.
energy researchers, get on it
Because this is a science thread I'll be a bit pedantic. Mostly because I think it's an interesting topic. It's a mass-energy equivalence (β‘) and not just an equality (=) they are the same thing.
So it's meaningless to say convert mass into energy. It's like saying I want to convert this stick from being 12 inches long to being 1 foot long.
You can convert matter (the solid form of energy) into other types of energy that are not solid. But the mass stays the same.
It's like when people say a photon is massless. It has energy and therefor mass. It just has no rest mass. So from the photons frame of reference no mass but from every other fame of reference there is mass.
Yep. The Higgs field interacts with matter, both holding the waves it's made up of "in place" (so it can seem macroscopically like it's not a wave), and carrying a bunch of energy.
There's also mass-energy just in the very fast and powerful internal movements and fields of the nuclei and the individual protons and neutrons (which are made of gluons and quarks). Not sure about the breakdown off the top of my head, though.
If you blew up an atomic bomb in a magically indestructible sealed container, it would stay the same weight, just with a noticeable contribution from pure electromagnetism now.
Neat. I know almost nothing about the the Higgs field.
That's most of what I understand, honestly. It also connects to the weak force somehow, and I think other fields can have the same effect in certain case.
I'm confident about the basic quantum mechanics of matter here, but I can't actually do quantum field theory, so I guess I could still be misunderstanding something. Buyer beware.
thanks! love me some science pedantry.
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That time passes differently in galaxies with different gravities. One of these galaxies is Mormon heaven.
...wtf?? How do you have negative one downvote?
This fact blows my mind the most.
I saw that recently too. There's some bug somewhere.
If you downvote it it goes back up to zero and everything.
Lemmy Easter egg. Gives access to Bizzaro Lemmy. They get a mustache. That's it.
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There are more hydrogen atoms in a molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
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The fact that planes are kept in the air by the shape of their wings, which forces air to go over at a pace when it can't push down on the wing as hard as it can push up from underneath. It's like discovering an exploitable glitch in a videogame and every time I fly I worry that the universe will get patched while I'm at 10,000 feet.
I mean, it's not something for nothing. You still get drag at least matching lift to conserve energy.
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