Space Station Tour
Most of the modules in the International Space Station have four sides and they’re put together that way so the people can work on a flat plane; wall, floor, another wall, or the ceiling. All you have to do is turn yourself around and your reference changes. People always ask about sleeping in space. Do you lie down? Not really, because it doesn’t matter. You don’t have the sensation of lying down, so you just sit in your sleeping bag.
The sleeping stations are like phone booths, but pretty comfy and you can sleep in any orientation in them. Astronauts don’t have any sensation that tells them that they’re upside down. In the same time sleeping booths are small offices with a laptops, toys, books, and clothes in them.
One of the things that astronauts also do is exercise. They need to exercise because they lose bone density and muscle mass while they’re up there, and that’s a result of not having to fight against gravity. They keep themselves in a shape with a bike, treadmill and a weight lifting machine. The bike doesn’t have a seat, because the astronauts don’t sit down. They actually haven’t sat down for six months.
The bike is not firmly attached to the wall because if they start putting forces on the space station it’s going to make the solar panels bounce around a little bit. So to prevent that, the machines in the space station bounce around a little bit and that way they don’t put any forces onto the structure of the spacecraft and out to the solar panels.
There is also a module where everybody meets in the morning. After you wash your face, and brush your teeth, you want to find something for breakfast. There are all sorts of foods in the kitchen module: drinks, meat, eggs, vegetables, cereals, bread, snacks, side dishes, and some power bars. Some of this food is dehydrated, some of it is readymade.
There are spacesuits ready and primed up to go outside (the astronauts call it space walking) in case they need to do anything outside of the space station. Most of the things they do outside are repairs. There are lot of electrical boxes and machinery that are outside and sometimes they don’t work quite right because the space is actually extremely cold vacuum.
The spacesuits are pretty big and part of the reason they’re so big and bulky is because of their backside. The backpack and the suit weigh about 136 kilograms. Luckily in space nothing really weighs anything so you don’t feel the weight.
Dressed to Live: Wildlife Styles
The skin functions as a thermal insulator, as protection against potentially harmful agents, as a warning, as camouflage, as a means of communication between members of the same species, or as a sexual signal. Thanks to its variety and adaptation, life is extended throughout the planet.
Fish are one of the most sensitive animal types on the planet. Most of them possess an extremely sensitive skin throughout their body since many of them live in turbulent and murky waters in which visibility is a problem. One of evolution’s solutions to aid sight is to provide their skin with sensors, which receive information from the exterior. Their skin is a true suit of sensations.
The line on the side, present on many species is a group of epidermal cells distributed linearly on both sides of the body. These specialized cells are capable of informing the animal of changes in pressure and movement of objects close by. Fish are capable of interpreting them and knowing if it’s a fellow species member or maybe a potential predator on the prowl. In this case, the skin has become the most refined and effective sense for the continuation of life.
However, aquatic mammals have developed a skin that is not necessarily sensitive but quite the contrary, an almost perfect insulator against the cold exterior. Walruses have an insulating wetsuit made up of various layers, which add up to almost 4 cm in thickness. Their wrinkled skin possesses a fine texture with soft and short hairs, which are almost absent along the neck and shoulders of the male. It is precisely there where the skin is at its thickest in order to resist the impact of its rival fangs. Underneath the hair, which is very dense, it has a sub dermal layer of fat, which is 7 to 10 cm thick.
This layer exists throughout the body and because it is such a poor conductor of heat, it isolates muscles and organs from the exterior. These arctic animals always live in areas in which the highest temperatures are never more than three or four degrees Celsius. The Walrus’ finest sense of touch is in its whiskers, which have become a very sensitive tool capable of finding and distinguishing mollusks in the dark waters of the ocean where sunlight can barely make its way.
Hackers: Outlaws and Angels
This alarming program reveals the daily battle between the Internet’s outlaws and the hackers who oppose them by warding off system attacks, training IT professionals and police officers, and watching cyberspace for signs of imminent infowar.
Through interviews with frontline personnel from the Department of Defense, NYPD’s computer crime squad, private detective firm Kroll Associates, X-Force Threat Analysis Service, and several notorious crackers, the program provides penetrating insights into the millions of hack attacks that occur annually in the U.S. – including one that affected the phone bills of millions and another that left confidential details of the B-1 stealth bomber in the hands of teenagers.
The liabilities of wireless networks, the Code Red worm, and online movie piracy are also discussed.
The Changing Ape
In the sweltering heart of Senegal, in a place called Fongoli, a chimpanzee performs an earth-shattering act.
She strips a branch of its leaves, chews the tip into a point and jams the tool into a hole in a tree, killing a bushbaby. In short, she has been making tools and using them to hunt.
Only humans are supposed to be capable of that. Anthropologist Jill Pruetz takes us deep into the fascinating world of the creatures she has studied for 9 years, giving us exclusive access to not only their groundbreaking hunting skills but their other strangely human ways.
They spend most of their days on the ground, they splash in swimming holes and they even curl up in caves to sleep. With the help of experts on our earliest ancestors and newly discovered evidence of the chimp stone age, we take an eye-opening scientific journey that reveals as much about ourselves as it does about the remarkable chimps of Fongoli.
Abonner på:
Opslag (Atom)



