In several European languages like French and Danish, 20 is used as a base, at least with respect to the linguistic structure of the names of certain numbers (though a thoroughgoing consistent vigesimal system, based on the powers 20, 400, 8000 etc., is not generally used).
"Eighty-seven" in English is "quatre-vingt sept" in French; "four twenties seven", which is basically what he's saying.
Fully-aquatic mammals that I can think of, like whales or dolphins, aren't furry, so I'd say that while fur may be a net positive for animals that spend some time out of the water, it's probably not because of their time in the water.
It'll increase drag, which means that they have to expend more energy to move through the water.
It might have some insulation benefit, but I'm not sure how significant that is in water, and I'd guess that fat is probably preferable in that case.
My guess is that the main benefit is for outside water.
First, thermal insulation, where the fur limits convection of air, so you get air pockets, which doesn't conduct well.
Second, as a disposable, dead layer, it also provides protection against UV light and such. We don't think of living out of water under the direct radiation from the sun as being particularly difficult or the environment harsh, because we casually do it every day, but it was a very hard problem for life to solve.
Ourasphaira giraldae is an extinct process-bearing multicellular eukaryotic microorganism. Corentin Loron argues that it was an early fungus. It existed approximately a billion years ago during the time of the transition from the Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic periods, and was unearthed in the Amundsen Basin in the Canadian Arctic. This fungus may have existed on land well before plants.
I know that when people are moving dolphins and whales around, they keep them covered, partly to keep them wet, but also because they will suffer badly from sunburn if not done. This dolphin had a lot of its skin get destroyed and fall off its body after being exposed to the sun for some hours:
If that weren't the case, you really only have two options:
Sharks maintain their height out of the water via using their pelvic fins or similar to generate lift via Bernoulli's principle and are required to thus maintain very high speed as long as they want to stay out of the water. Think of a hydrofoil, but a shark, sharks cruising around skimming the water at a hundred miles an hour or something.
The shark has a dramatically-lower density than water, has a greater-than-neutral buoyancy, which I suspect would create difficulties with crushing when the shark wants to dive deep.
Knowing Randall's "What If" history of giving real scientific explanations that extend into the lunatic consequences of a scenario, I'm surprised that he didn't jump on that in the comic.
fuel facilities generally do a pretty good job of keeping the water clean, but it’s radioactive enough that it wouldn’t be legal to sell it as bottled water. Which is too bad – it’d be an amazing energy drink.
The Revigator was intended to add radioactivity (radon) to drinking water. Water without redioactivity was “devoid of its life element.” Water without radioactivity was like air without oxygen.
The glazed ceramic body of the jar has a porous lining that incorporated uranium ore. Water placed inside the jar would absorb the radon released by decay of the radium in the ore. Depending on the type of water, the resulting radon concentrations would range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand picocuries per liter.
Advertised as “an original radium ore patented water crock,” it sold in the hundreds of thousands between 1924 and 1930.
A company brochure stated, “Results overcome doubts.” “The millions of tiny rays that are continuously given off by this ore penetrate the water and form this great HEALTH ELEMENT–RADIO-ACTIVITY. All the next day the family is provided with two gallons of real, healthful radioactive water… nature’s way to health.”
Users were provided the following printed instructions on the side of the jar:
Fill jar every night.
Use hydrant or any good water.
Drink freely when thirsty and upon arising and retiring. Average six or more glasses daily. Scrub with a stiff brush and scald monthly.
The tan version shown here is the most commonly encountered style of Revigator.
But according to a new study, radiation from the jug wasn’t the biggest problem. Makers of the Radium Ore Revigator promised the jug would enrich drinking water left inside overnight with “the lost element of original freshness—radioactivity.” The “treated” water was supposed to relieve everything from arthritis and senility to flatulence.
(Related: “Radiation in Teeth Can Help Date, ID Bodies, Experts Say.”)
Such a seemingly wacky belief came from the fact that spring water naturally contains radioactive radon gas, said study leader Michael Epstein, an analytic chemist at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
It wasn’t too big a leap to assume that radioactive water would be a healthy elixir, Epstein said. In the early 20th century, the Revigator sold by the hundreds of thousands in the U.S.
“Unfortunately for them, they were wrong,” Epstein said. By the 1930s scientists had realized that exposure to radiation can cause cells in the body to go haywire, triggering cancer.
However, Epstein and colleagues were curious just how big a risk radiation played compared to the ore itself.
What they found is that the jar’s uranium-ore lining released surprising amounts of toxic elements, such as arsenic and lead, into the drinking water.
Arsenic can also cause cancer, and lead can severely damage the nervous, urinary, and reproductive systems.
Toxic Water
For their study, Epstein and colleagues bought four Revigators from antique stores or on eBay. The jars still exude the same amount of radiation as they did in the early 1900s.
Uranium ore contains some amounts of the highly radioactive metal radium, which decays into radon gas.
The team first used a Geiger counter to measure the amount of radon gas the jars emitted. Though radon levels were higher than an average person’s exposure, the risk of death from the jars’ radiation was relatively low.
Epstein’s team also used a highly sensitive instrument called a mass spectrometer to analyze the concentration of toxic elements in the radon-infused water.
If a person had followed the Revigator company’s advice to “drink freely when thirsty and upon arising and retiring,” the toxic water would have drastically exceeded healthy exposure levels currently recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
For instance, the maximum level of exposure to uranium set by the EPA is 0.030 parts per million—one of the Revigators expelled up to 0.056 parts per mllion of the substance.
(Related: “Pick Your Poison—12 Toxic Tales” in National Geographic magazine.)
What’s more, if people added a slightly acidic beverage such as wine or fruit juice to the jar, the resulting fluid contained 300 times more than the maximum arsenic intake recommended by the EPA.
So…probably not really a radiation risk, more that uranium itself is toxic independent of any radiation, and more-importantly that the ore had other elements that could enter the water that were also not great for you. But it’s kinda been done.
According to this, that is about as hot as the temperatures that existed during the Hadron epoch, or the time period when the universe was between 20 microseconds and 1 second old.
In physical cosmology, the hadron epoch started 20 microseconds after the Big Bang.[1] The temperature of the universe had fallen sufficiently to allow the quarks from the preceding quark epoch to bind together into hadrons. Initially, the temperature was high enough to allow the formation of hadron/anti-hadron pairs, which kept matter and anti-matter in thermal equilibrium. Following the annihilation of matter and antimatter, a nano-asymmetry of matter remains to the present day. Most of the hadrons and anti-hadrons were eliminated in annihilation reactions, leaving a small residue of hadrons. Upon elimination of anti-hadrons, the Universe was dominated by photons, neutrinos and electron-positron pairs.
I don’t want to start making assertions without knowing the specific manufacturer and model of the drive involved, but given that hard drives generally rely upon the existence of electrons to function, which don’t exist at that temperature, one might want to keep an eye out for any other potential signs of trouble showing up, like slower access times or unusual noises.
xkcd #2946: 1.2 Kilofives ( xkcd.com )
Alt text:...
Does having fur help or hinder animals like otters/beavers/polar bears when they swim about?
xkcd #2923: Scary Triangles ( imgs.xkcd.com )
https://xkcd.com/2923...
xkcd #2920: Survey Marker ( imgs.xkcd.com )
https://xkcd.com/2920...
What if you swam in a nuclear storage pool? | xkcd What If? ( youtu.be )
Can Parents Prevent Their Sons From Sliding to the Right? ( www.thecut.com )
At what point should I start worrying about my hard drive temps?/s ( programming.dev )