Wow Wednesday - Wasps that are smaller than amoebas
Thrips are tiny insects, typically just a millimetre in length. Some are barely half that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’ egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.
That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp – complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is actuallysmaller. At just 200 micrometres (a fifth of a millimetre), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive and a miracle of miniaturisation.
Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.
Click through to read more about this ridiculously awesome animal.
6:19 PM EST
Wow Wednesday - Central Park
Central Park is something you don’t think much about, but is pretty damn impressive. Just look at it. That massive patch of green and blue is at the center of one of the largest, densest metropolitan areas in the world.
I started to list all of the features and trivia but the list got too long. Just go read about it here.
My favorite two are there is an obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle, originally erected around 1450 BCE in Heliopolis, Ancient Egypt. And in 2005 the real estate value of the park was estimated at $528,783,552,000.
Wow Wednesday - The Dragon Blood Tree
A tree that’s shaped like an umbrella, bleeds a blood red sap, and is only found on one island off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula.
The varnish for the Red Violin was likely made with Dragon’s Blood. It is still used to varnish violins to this day.
Wow Wednesday
The Yakhchal
By 400 BCE, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert. The ice could be brought in during the winters from nearby mountains, but more commonly they had a wall made along an east-west direction close to the yakhchal. In winter, the qanat water was channelled to the north side of the wall. The shadow of the wall made the water freeze more quickly so more ice was produced per winter day. Ice was stored in a specially designed, passively cooled refrigerator.
Wow Wednesday
On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest thermonuclear explosion in human history. The Tsar Bomba.
Roughly 50 Megatons(1400 times Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined) this massive multiple-stage fission explosive created such an intense shockwave it prevented the massive fireball itself from actually touching the ground. The heat from the explosion could give anyone within a 100km radius third degree burns(if they weren’t vaporized within its massive death zone.)
This remote Arctic Sea island still bears the scars and crater from this infamous and terrifying experiment.
Here is footage of the preparation and the actual test of the bomb.
5:29 PM EST
Wow Wednesday - Kamchatka Volcano
Taken by Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin
(from space)
Wow Wednesday
In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope took the image of a millenium, an image that shows our place in the universe. Anyone who understands what this image represents, is forever changed by it.
How Can the universe be 78 billion LY across? I explain that in this article:
http://www.deepastronomy.com/hubble-deep-field.html
There is also a link to a science paper on the topic, that paper actually states 96 billion LY.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310233
Wow Wednesday
Andrea Pozzo was an Italian Jesuit Brother, Baroque painter and architect, decorator, stage designer, and art theoretician. He was best known for his grandiose frescoes using illusionistic technique called quadratura, in which architecture and fancy are intermixed. His masterpiece is the nave ceiling of the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome. Through his techniques, he has become one of the most remarkable figures of the Baroque period.
His masterpiece, the illusory perspectives in frescoes of the dome, the apse and the ceiling of Rome’s Jesuit church of Sant’Ignazio were painted between 1685–1694 and are a remarkable and emblematic creation of High Roman Baroque. For several generations, they set the standard for the decoration of Late Baroque ceiling frescos throughhout Catholic Europe.
On the flat ceiling he painted an allegory of the Apotheosis of S. Ignatius, in breathtaking perspective. The painting, 17 m (55.7 ft) in diameter, is devised to make an observer, looking from a spot marked by a brass disc set into the floor of the nave, seem to see a lofty vaulted roof decorated by statues, while in fact the ceiling is flat. The painting celebrates the missionary spirit of two centuries of adventurous apostolic spirit of Jesuit explorers and missionaries
5:30 PM EST
Wow Wednesday
