TIZER'S SCIENCE NEWS

[Tizer]

That's a good video and as it reaches the end it shows the waves crashing against the new rocks - and that's the cycle starting all over again. The volcanic rock is being eroded, will form sand and silt, then be compressed and heated to form new sedimentary rock which will eventually be subducted back down into Earth's mantle, become magma and pop up somewhere else - after some tens of millions of years!

[Stanley]

How long before it all cools down? It can't go on forever. Should we be worried about that as well as climate?

[Tizer]

It can go on for a very long time because the mantle contains radioactive elements that are continuously producing heat. They've been doing it for billions of years and still have a long way to go!

This is an interesting development and I can almost hear the Brexiteer climate deniers saying `See, it's good we got you out of Europe' - except they're wrong because we are still influenced by the European Court of Human Rights...
`European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction' LINK
It's good to see young Greta working with the older ladies!

[Stanley]

I heard that eport of the court's decision and couldn't quite believe that it would make a difference...

[Cathy]

Here’s one for you Tize…
Maz had some purple hand dishwashing liquid (Shine), poured in some green hand dishwashing liquid (Palmolive) over the Shine , shook the container.
The purple rose to the top. They don’t mix. How odd, any ideas why?

IMG_2082.png

[Tizer]

Interesting Cathy! I can only suggest that one was oil-based and the other water-based. Oil is light than water so when the mixture was left to settle the oil-based layer floated to the top. The purple dye must be oil-soluble and the green pigment water-soluble too.

[Cathy]

Yes interesting, thanks Tize

[Stanley]

It's observation of the world around us that quite often produces new lines of research. Well done Maz and Cathy!
I have a question of my own. Does liquid warmed in the microwave cool down more quickly that the same liquid heated in a pan?

[Tizer]

I think it would be difficult to make a comparison because you'd need to be able to determine the temperature of the liquids throughout the experiment, both heating and cooling. The distribution of heating is different in the two cases and the microwave can superheat due to the focusing of the energy in the centre. Also the two containers for the water would need to be the same..

[Stanley]

My feeling is that liquids in the microwave do cool slightly quicker than say those heated in a pan on the hob.

[PanBiker]

Depends on the size of the vessel and what it is made of, (which as Peter says should be identical for a true result) and any container in the microwave is likely to be much smaller and not made of metal like a pan on the hob. Sorry but a feeling is not good enough for a proper test.

[Stanley]

I never suggested it was, just reporting a suspicion doesn't require absolute proof.....

[Stanley]

I saw THIS BBC report and thought this could be the place for it.
Scientists have identified what was probably the largest marine reptile ever to swim in the seas - a creature longer than two, nose-to-nose buses. The creature lived around 202 million years ago alongside the dinosaurs. Its fossilised jawbone was found in 2016 by a fossil hunter on a beach in Somerset, UK. In 2020 a father and daughter found another similar jawbone. Experts now say the fossils are from two giant ichthyosaur reptiles, which could have been 25m long. That is bigger than a huge pliosaur whose skull was found embedded in Dorset cliffs and was in the David Attenborough documentary the Giant Sea Monster. "Based on the size of the jawbones - one of them over a meter long and the other two metres long - we can work out that the entire animal would have been about 25m long, about as long as a blue whale," according to Dr Dean Lomax, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, who wrote the scientific paper published on Wednesday. But he says more evidence, like a complete skull and skeleton, is needed to confirm the exact size of the creature because just a few fragments have been found so far.
The statement that it lived '202 million years ago' intrigues me. It seems a strangely precise number.......