CULTURAL QA03-2021-30 Being a compilation there may be errors . All the QA are based onscience principles
Q1 What event are scientists still unable to explain? A1 Gomes March 14-2021 Livesin London Hi. Here’san event that happened 500 years ago, that still puzzles scientists,historians, and anyone who wants to understand it. In July 1518, in the town ofStrasbourg, Alsace (now France), something unexpected happened. A housewife, called Frau Troffea,came out of her home onto the street and started dancing. People found it odd,including her husband, but no one gave it much attention. She literally danced all day only stopping when she fell asleep due toexhaustion. The next morning, as soon as she woke up, she started dancingagain. This time people did payattention as this was highly unusual, and they formed a crowd around her to seeher dance to no music. At thispoint, her feet were already bruised and bloodied but she didn’t appear to be willing to stop. But, within the next 4 days, something even weirder started happening. 34people also started dancing non-stop. Within 4 weeks it is believed that up to 400 people weredancing uncontrollably. Those who weren’t affected had no idea what to do as they saw theirdancing neighbours screaming in pain and begging for help, seemingly not being able to stoptheir killer moves. Because it was summer at the time, up to 15 people a day were dyingbecause of the heat, dehydration, and exhaustion. The city council asked for the help of local physicians to try and stopthis madness and eventually they diagnosed the poor dancers with “hot blood”. “Hot blood” meant that the brain was overheated, which caused madness. But they couldn’t use their remedy, bloodletting,since people couldn’t stop moving for long enough to have a bit of their blooddrained. So the council decided to try something else. They hired musicians and brought more people into the town in order tohave a party and try to tire the dancers out. It seemed to be working as the dancer's moves were slowing down, but thehired musicians decided to change the pace and play a moreupbeat song, causing the villagers to once again, get back on the previousgroove. Seeing that this wasn’t working they decided that this wasn’t a case of“hot blood”, it was something far worse . . . it was a curse on the city. A curse put upon it becauseof all the sinners in it. So the council decided to take action. They closed down all gamblinghouses and brothels and they banished all those, who they considered being asinner, from the city. They were so desperate that they even made music and dancing illegal. But, as you probably expected, this did nothing to stop those bloodied and bruised feet from dancing. This lasted all the way till September. To this day it’s still notknown what caused this, even though there are some theories such as masshysteria brought on due to extreme poverty and the superstitions surrounding St. Vitus, whom they believedhad cursed them. And surprisingly enough, this happened quite a few times, all throughoutEurope. There were similaroutbreaks in 1247, 1278, 1375, 1381, 1428, and probably more that weren’tdocumented. There were cases where people not only danced but had delusions and caseswhere the afflicted wereall children. It’s been centuries since the last reported case of The Dancing Plague, but it’sstill scary to think about since there isn’t any explanation as to why it happened to this day. Q2 What force causes the Earth to spin? Do we know? A2 C Stuart Hardwick UpdatedJanuary 30, 2020 Scifi author and science nerd. We know it spins at a constantspeed, because the length of our days doesn't vary. Earth’s spin results from the residual momentum of the material fromwhich our solar system formed. As this vast planetary nebula began to collapse under mutualgravitational attraction, all the random motion was cancelled out throughimpacts and gravitational interactions between various bits of matter until only one principal motionremained—rotation in a plane. The sun, as well as all the planets and most of the moons and otherobjects (with the notable exceptions of Uranus and Venus) all still rotate and orbit inthat direction. Earth’s rotation is inclined 23 degrees from that plane(and the moon’s orbit 5 degrees) because of an impact with a Mars-sized proto planetlate in Earth’s formation, which blasted out the material that eventuallyformed our moon. Uranus and Venus probably alsowere impacted late in their formation. Objects in the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt follow the same pattern, forthe same reason, but with more variability in orbital plane. Objects in the Oort cloud move more randomly, either because they weretoo far apart and away from the sun to fully cancel out such randomness, orbecause they are populated by objects ejected from the inner solar system byencounters with the gas giants, or both. Nothing but inertia is needed to keep the Earth spinning, however is doesnot do so at a completely constantrate. Over time, Earth’s rotations speeds up and slows down due to changes theits distribution of mass due to the movements of the tectonic plates and to thedeformation of those plates due to glaciation. Currently, Earth’s rotation is slowing down in part dueto the continued rebound of the continental plates after the withdrawalof the ice sheet several thousands years ago. In addition, tidalinteraction with the moon is slowly draining away Earth’s rotational energy andtransferring it to the moon’s orbit, pushing the moon farther away. Whenthe moon formed, this effect was much more pronounced, but today it’s almostnegligible. If you like science and space, you might like my free award-winning scifisampler. Q2 Are clouds actually soft to touch, or is that a lie? A2 Rich DeAngelis UpdatedFebruary 18, 2020 Electronic engineer, test, manufacturing and design in manyindustries. Are clouds actually soft to touch, or is that a lie? If you’ve ever been outside on a foggy day, you know what it feels like. Pretty much like nothing. Fogis nothing more than a cloud at a low enough level that we are inside thecloud. You may feel a bit ofthe moisture if you wave your hands around in it and it is dense enough.But you will never be able to “feel” it in the traditional way because itexerts no more pressure on your senses beyond what clear, dry air does. This is why airplanes and jets can fly through clouds and not take anydamage. Travelling 500+ mph would destroy them if the cloudexerted any force on the aircraft. The only danger here is not seeing anotheraircraft or mountain or radio tower - those would hurt! Q3 Will there ever be a man-made light so bright that it isvisible from space/from the moon? A3 Steven Haddock March 17-2021Studied at York University (Canada) Yes. There already is one. Becausethey brag about it during the pre-show The IMAX projector xenon arc lamp. Capable of 600,000 lumens. That’s roughly how bright the sun looks from earth.By comparison, if youwere on the Moon and looked at the surface, that would only be about 50,000lumens, and you can easily see the moon from earth. NASA uses them to illuminatelaunchpads at night Frankly, from the moon’s surface, you can see lights on earth at night.The xenon lamp is so bright you could clearly make it out if one were on themoon. It’s much brighter than the moon’s surface. Q4 Why weren't theApollo capsules just lifted from the water after splashdown and flown to thecarrier with the astronauts inside? A5 Mark Shulmann UpdatedJune 1, 2020Studied the Apollo program all my life Because we’re not cruel,heartless people. OK, that was a bit overdramatic. But let me explain. Let’s look at the timeline for Apollo 11, which was pretty typical. Splashdown occurred on July 24,1969, at 4:50 pm GMT. Just a little over an hour later the crew was aboard the recovery ship(5:53 pm) and about 5 minutes after that they were in the Mobile QuarantineFacility and could start getting cleaned up. A few ceremonial dutiesfollowed, and then they could relax. By contrast, the Apollo 11 Command Module (CM) wasn’t hauled out of thewater until 3 hours after splashdown (7:50 pm), and it was another 15 minutesafter that until the hatch was opened aboard ship (8:05 pm). So if the crew had stuck with thespacecraft and nothing else had changed, the crew would have had to sit in thecramped Command Module, on theirbacks, bobbing in the ocean, for an extra 2 and a quarter hours, having justspent over a week on a physical and emotional roller coaster, most of the timecooped up in a cramped spacecraft. If I were them, I’d want out! Now granted: If the recoverycrews hadn’t had to spend time extracting the astronauts, maybe they could havegotten the CM aboard the recovery ship a little bit faster, but I don’t thinkit would have been much faster. Lastly, reentry and splashdownentailed some risk of injury — after all, tons of men and machine wereplummeting out of the sky — and therecovery crews needed the ability to get at the astronauts quickly in case theywere injured during entry and landing. It happened twice: In 1969 Alan Bean was struck bya camera when Apollo 12 splashed down, and Bean received a concussion. In 1975 Deke Slayton, VanceBrand, and Thomas Stafford were exposed to toxic fumes during descent as part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Brandlost consciousness, and they all had to be hospitalized. One additional incident: OnApollo 15, one of the main parachutes failed (ironically due to venting the same toxic fumes that affected the CM onApollo-Soyuz) and the spacecraft hit the water harder then normal. Thankfullynone of the crew was injured, but it does highlight the potential for injury.Had the fumes affected two parachutes, they would have had a mess on theirhands. (Apollo 15 with a failed parachute, just before landing) So the capability to get at the astronauts quickly has to be available,and if the capability is there, why make them wait in the spacecraft? Edit: Several other people havepointed out that the CM was too heavy for the recovery helicopters to lift itout of the ocean, and this is true — the reason it took so long to recover the CM is that it had towait for the aircraft carrier to use its crane to lift it out of the ocean. All the above QA are based onQuora on 31-03 - 2021. Quora answers need not be 100% correct answers Compiled and posted by R. Gopala krishnan on 31-3-2021. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/1924660183.1828509.1617196924211%40mail.yahoo.com.
