10 Facts about the Sun

1. The sun is actually a star, the closest star to Earth
The sun is an average star, meaning its size, age, and temperature fall in about the middle of the ranges of these properties for all stars. While some in our galaxy are nearly as old as the universe, about 15 billion years, our sun is a 2nd-generation star, only 4.6 billion years old. Some of its material came from former stars.

* Velocity Relative to Near Stars: 19.7 km/s
* Spectral Type: G2 V
* Synodic Period: 27.2753 days
* Solar Constant (Total Solar Irradiance): 1.365 - 1.369 kW/m2

2. The sun is by far the largest object in the solar system
The sun contains over 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System (Jupiter contains most of the rest).

* Equatorial Radius: 695,500 km
* Equatorial Circumference: 4,379,000 km
* Volume: 1,142,200,000,000,000,000 km3
* Mass: 1,989,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
* Density: 1.409 g/cm3
* Surface Area: 6,087,799,000,000 km2


3. We have always known the sun
Unlike many other objects in our solar system, the sun has been known to humans since the dawn of time. There is no discovery date or discoverer.

4. Since its creation, the sun has used up about half of the hydrogen in its core
Over the next 5 billion years or so, it will grow steadily brighter as more helium accumulates in its core. As the supply of hydrogen dwindles, the Sun's core must keep producing enough pressure to keep the Sun from collapsing in on itself. The only way it can do this is to increase its temperature. Eventually it will run out of hydrogen fuel. At that point, it will go through a radical change which will most likely result in the complete destruction of the planet Earth.

5. The Greeks named the sun Helios but the Romans used the name Sol, which is still in use today. Because of the important role the sun plays in our lives, it has been studied, perhaps, more than any other object in the universe, outside out own planet Earth. Our Sun has inspired mythology in almost all cultures, including ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, Native Americans, and Chinese.

6. Ulysses was the first spacecraft to study our Sun's poles
Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery and sent towards Jupiter with powerful booster rockets. After studying Jupiter for 17 days, Ulysses used the giant planet's gravity to hurl it into an orbit out of the Ecliptic Plane, where planets orbit our Sun.

The other primary Solar mission is SOHO. The international Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been keeping a steady watch on the Sun since April 1996.
7. The sun's strong gravitational pull holds Earth and the other planets in place
It keeps the planets orbiting inside the solar system:

* Equatorial Surface Gravity: 274.0 m/s2
* Escape Velocity: 2,223,720 km/h

8. The sun is made up of distinctive areas
In addition to the energy-producing solar core, the interior has two distinct regions: a radiative zone and a convective zone. From the edge of the core outward, first through the radiative zone and then through the convective zone, the temperature decreases from 8 million to 7,000 K. It takes a few hundred thousand years for photons to escape from the dense core and reach the surface.

9. How does the sun's "surface" and "atmosphere" compare to planets?
The "surface," known as the photosphere, is just the visible 500-km-thick layer from which most of the Sun's radiation and light finally escape, and it is the place where sunspots are found. Above the photosphere lies the chromosphere ("sphere of color") that may be seen briefly during total solar eclipses as a reddish rim, caused by hot hydrogen atoms, around the Sun. Temperature steadily increases with altitude up to 50,000 K, while density drops to 100,000 times less than in the photosphere.

10. An unsolved mystery of the sun involves the corona ("crown")
Above the chromosphere lies the corona ("crown"), extending outward from the Sun in the form of the "solar wind" to the edge of the solar system. The corona is extremely hot - millions of degrees kelvin. Since it is physically impossible to transfer thermal energy from the cooler surface of the Sun to the much hotter corona, the source of coronal heating has been a scientific mystery for more than 60 years.

The secret of the eternal youth

Brooke Greenberg, 16, is a daughter of Melanie and Howard Greenberg. The couple has three other children, aged 13, 19 and 22 – all of them females. The other Greenberg girls are growing like all other kids. Brooke, who already turned 16, seems to be stuck in her infancy. Her appearance has not been changing for 15 years already.

Brooke weighs about 7 kilos, she is 80 centimeters tall. The girl has a baby’s body and face. There is no other human being like her anywhere in the world. Scientists say that the parts of the girl’s body live independently from one another. For example, Brooke has infant’s teeth and brain, but the structure of her bones corresponds to those of a ten-year-old child.
Modern medicine knows many incidents of premature aging. There are about 20 children living in the world today, who suffer from an extremely rare disease known as progeria. All of them look
like elderly people, although they are only ten years of age. The disease develops as a result of genetic mutation.
Scientists originally believed that Brooke Greenberg had an opposite of progeria. A closer insight showed, though, that the girl was not suffering from any known genetic diseases. Since the phenomenon is obvious – the girl is not ageing – scientists believe that she gives the world an opportunity to find out why it happens. They hope that they will find the gene or a group of genes, which make people change with years and eventually die.

The little girl does not speak. She can not eat alone either – her parents have to use special tubes to feed the child. Nevertheless, the secret of everlasting youth is hidden somewhere inside the poor child.

Animal Testing

I believe that animal testing is necessary nowadays. Some animals may suffer for the benefit of humans. If you prevent animal testing, should you stop people from eating meat? Many scientists say that they can't cure deadly diseases without using animals.
I believe that animal testing is extremely necessary because it is unethical to make people sick on purpose. Most experiments can only be done on animals. As a result of animal testing we have discovered diseases and cures for most of them.
If you prevent animals from being tested, should you stop people from eating meat?
Killing an animal for food isn't that different from killing an animal while testing a new product or medicine. Animal testing could be considered more necessary than killing an animal for food. People enjoy the animal "products" that they consume daily.
Many scientists say that humans can't cure deadly diseases without using animals. Without animal testing scientists believe that it may take longer to find cures for diseases like AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer's. Causing unnecessary suffering is wrong, but conducting experiments on animals is necessary for human health. The testing that scientists perform on animals can save human lives.
Animal rights activists' claim that test tube experiments, computer simulations and other methods are alternatives to testing medicines and other products on animals. Many of these techniques are valuable, and are used by scientists on a regular basis. The problems are that they don't tell us everything we need to know. Mixing human cells with a new drug in a test tube doesn't show how the drug will affect an entire human body. Animals are far too complicated for computers to simulate perfectly. Animal testing is a very important step in improving human health.

Yuri Gagarin. The First Man in Space.

His early years
Yuri was born on a farm in USSR and his family was very poor. As a teenager in World War II, he saw his first plane – a Russian fighter jet. At that moment, he knew that he wanted to be a pilot. He studied hard so that he could join a flying club. His teachers thought he was a natural pilot and told him to join the Sovietic Air Force.

What he did
He became an excellent pilot. And he was now a husband and father. But when the first Russian satellite went into space, he wanted to become an astronaut. After two years of secret training, the doctors chose Yuri because he was the best in all the tests. On 12 April 1961, when he was 27, he finally went into space. It was very dangerous, because the doctors didn’t know if Yuri could survive the journey. When he came back to Earth he was famous, and he travelled around the world to talk about his experience.

His last flight
He wanted to go into space again, so in 1967 he began training for the next space flight. He was also a test pilot for the new Air Force aeroplanes. But he next year he died when his fighter jet crashed on a test flight. He was only 34 years old.

Business Ethics.

Being honest, being correct and having integrity are ethical terms. They represent a principle for the people who are convinced they are right. These concepts represent in fact our moral standards. They can vary from an individual to individual because the values they are based on are different. Ethical issues represent real dilemmas for the managing staff because they stand for conflicts between the economical performance of the company (income-costs-profit) and the social evolution (expressed in terms of personal duties within the organization as well as outside). The origin of these duties can be open to some interpretation, but most of us agree that they include to a certain extent elements related to protecting the loyalty of the employees, to maintaining market competitiveness, providing useful and safe products and services. Fortunately the management dilemma relates to the costs of these obligations both for the company – assessed through financial standards – and for the managers – expressed through financial reports and audits. It is highly desirable for most of the managing staff in various companies to bring in people who have a clear vision of what means ‘honest’, “correct” and “integrity”. Thus any employee can be required not to act against the interest of the firm, not to offend other people and not to disclose any negative aspects about that particular company.

God Loves Man

Darwin and his theory seem to fall especially after Leakey discovered that many things previously supposed correct and universally true are in fact doubtful.
Anyway I think a joke such this one is a piece of good humour.
One day Adam was walking in Eden.

Adam says to God: "Why did you make woman so beautiful?"
God says:
"So you would love her."
"But God," Adam says, "Why did you make her so dumb?"
God says:
"So she would love you."

Fossils Challenge Old Evolution Theory

Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early humans evolved.

The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution that one of those species evolved from the other.

And it further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a briefcase-carrying man.

The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. She and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

The paper is based on fossilized bones found in 2000. The complete skull of Homo erectus (the man who stands) was found within walking distance of an upper jaw of Homo habilis (the skillful man), and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis, researchers said.

It's the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great-grandmother were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London.

The two species lived near each other, but probably didn't interact, each having its own "ecological niche," Spoor said. Homo habilis was likely more vegetarian while Homo erectus ate some meat, he said. Like chimps and apes, "they'd just avoid each other, they don't feel comfortable in each other's company," he said.

There remains some still-undiscovered common ancestor that probably lived 2 million to 3 million years ago, a time that has not left much fossil record, Spoor said.

Overall what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us," Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.

That old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the general public, is just too simple and keeps getting revised, said Bill Kimbel , who praised the latest findings. He is science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and wasn't part of the Leakey team.

"The more we know, the more complex the story gets," he said. Scientists used to think Homo sapiens evolved from Neanderthals, he said. But now we know that both species lived during the same time period and that we did not come from Neanderthals.

Now a similar discovery applies further back in time.

Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist and co-author of the Leakey work, said she expects anti-evolution proponents to seize on the new research, but said it would be a mistake to try to use the new work to show flaws in evolution theory.

"This is not questioning the idea at all of evolution; it is refining some of the specific points," Anton said. "This is a great example of what science does and religion doesn't do. It's a continous self-testing process."

For the past few years there has been growing doubt and debate about whether Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus. One of the major proponents of the more linear, or ladder-like evolution that this evidence weakens, called Leakey's findings important, but he wasn't ready to concede defeat.

Dr. Bernard Wood, a surgeon-turned-professor of human origins at George Washington University, said in an e-mail Wednesday that "this is only a skirmish in the protracted 'war' between the people who like a bushy interpretation and those who like a more ladder-like interpretation of early human evolution."

Leakey's team spent seven years analyzing the fossils before announcing it was time to redraw the family tree — and rethink other ideas about human evolutionary history. That's especially true of most immediate ancestor, Homo erectus.

Because the Homo erectus skull Leakey recovered was much smaller than others, scientists had to first prove that it was erectus and not another species nor a genetic freak. The jaw, probably from an 18- or 19-year-old female, was adult and showed no signs of malformation or genetic mutations, Spoor said. The scientists also know it isn't Homo habilis from several distinct features on the jaw.

That caused researchers to re-examine the 30 other erectus skulls they have and the dozens of partial fossils. They realized that the females of that species are much smaller than the males something different from modern man, but similar to other animals, said Anton. Scientists hadn't looked carefully enough before to see that there was a distinct difference in males and females.

Difference in size between males and females seem to be related to monogamy, the researchers said. Primates that have same-sized males and females, such as gibbons, tend to be more monogamous. Species that are not monogamous, such as gorillas and baboons, have much bigger males.

This suggests that our ancestor Homo erectus reproduced with multiple partners.

The Homo habilis jaw was dated at 1.44 million years ago. That is the youngest ever found from a species that scientists originally figured died off somewhere between 1.7 and 2 million years ago, Spoor said. It enabled scientists to say that Homo erectus and Homo habilis lived at the same time.
(source AP via yahoo)