Science Archives - Page 3 of 4 -

Breathing earth…

September 9, 2008 · 8 Comments

… or heartfelt ways!
When you are relaxed and calm your heart rate slows down.
The effects are similar to when you breathe deeply.

Deep breathing can help slow your heartbeat,
making the heart work more effectively to pump blood around the body.

“Airways”
• watercolor, wax, digital effects • Lisa Rivas © 2008

Plants breath by taking in gases from
the air and give off others through pores in their leaves. It’s a
passive process, since there is no active pushing and pulling of air as
animals do with lungs.

Nightshades…

September 2, 2008 · 1 Comment

The eggplant or aubergine or brinjalis is a native to India.
Greatly admired for its glossy "deep purple" color,
as well as its pleasantly unique bitter taste and spongy texture.

It belongs to the "nightshade"
family of vegetables, which also includes tomatoes, sweet peppers and
potatoes. Other nightshades plants are the petunia, tobacco, as well as
the poisonous belladonna.

Nightshades contain a special group
of substances called alkaloids. These biochemicals are designed to help
protect the plants from insects. They are known to cause ill
side-effects to individuals that have osteoarthritis, rheumatoid
arthritis, or other joint problems like gout.

Uppity up tomatoes!

August 25, 2008 · 5 Comments

Within "The Land" pavilion which is part of the EPCOT theme park in the Walt Disney World Resort at Lake Buena Vista, Florida is this amazingly huge “Tomato-Tree”.
It was achieved by using the "vertical growing technique" in which by providing a matrix of structural supports for the entire
plant this enabled it to grow much bigger than it ever would under
ordinary circumstances where gravity would be weighing it down.

This “Tomato-Tree” produces over
32,000 tomatoes in a 16-month period. It was recognized by Guiness
World Records as both the largest and most productive tomato plant in
the world.

EPCOT stands for “Experimental
Prototype Community of Tomorrow” and was originally intended to be a
futuristic model community based on utopian modernist ideas of communal
living, no cars and no private ownership.

Like diamonds…

June 1, 2008 · 1 Comment

…in the rough! Comets consist of dust, ice and rock.
They have a variety of different orbital periods, ranging from a few years, to hundreds of thousands of years. Orbits extending only as far as Jupiter while others have orbits extending well beyond Pluto.

As it approaches the Sun, the sun’s radiation warms and excites the comet’s nucleus causing it to glow and reflect the solar radiation. Solar wind pushes the excited material away causing a tail to form.
The tail follows an incoming comet and proceeds an outbound comet.

Comet Hyakutake
Discovered less than three months before it’s closest approach to Earth 3/25/96.
It was the brightest comet in 22 years with a tail extending across half of a dark night sky.
Comet Hyakutake should return to our part of space in 29500 years!

Comet Hale-Bopp
Discovered in July of 1995 it’s closest approach to Earth was on 3/22/97.
An extraordinarily bright comet, 1000 times brighter than Comet Halley when discovered.
It was even brighter than Hyakutake, but it had a pair of short tails, one of yellowish dust and reflected sunlight and the other a bluish tail of ionized gas. Hale-Bopp should return in 2980 years.

SYZYGY…

May 29, 2008 · 1 Comment

…is the alignment of three or more celestial bodies in the same gravitational system along a straight line. The word is usually used in context with the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon or a planet, where the latter is in conjunction or opposition.
Solar and lunar eclipses occur at "times of syzygy", as do transits and occultations.

These Web-eStamps show two astronomy syzygies, a transit and an eclipse.

These photos are courtesy of my friend John Cara and the following explanation:
The transit of Venus across the face of the Sun as seen from Earth are among the rarest of predictable astronomical events. They occur in a pattern repeating every 243 years in pairs 8 years apart separated by gaps of approximately 121.5 and 105.5 years. The last transit was 6/8/2004, the next is 6/6/2012. After that, it’s likely not a person alive today will see the next transit in December of 2117.

Syzygy is also the highest scoring word that can be played in Scrabble without using an a, e, i, o, or u.

ART EXHIBITIONS / COLLECTIONS

Recent Comments

Search

INSTAGRAM

Art Statement