Today I share two videos with you. The first is an episode of BBC Four’s “The Joy of Stats”. The other is a TED talk.
Both are presented by Hans Rosling.
In these videos Hans Rosling visually demonstrates statistical data on the world’s wealth, health, family size, & daily income among several others by continent and country. The demonstrations are amazing. Enjoy
The sparks that appear on the baseball-sized rock (starting at :17) result from the laser of the ChemCam instrument on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover hitting the rock.
ChemCam’s laser zapping of this particular rock was the first time the team used Curiosity’s arm-mounted Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera to try and capture images of the spark generated by the laser hitting a rock on Mars. Their efforts were a success.
The video is compiled from single images from the MAHLI camera, taken during the 687th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars (July 12, 2014).
Since Curiosity landed in Mars’ Gale Crater in August 2012, researchers have used ChemCam’s laser and spectrometers to examine more than 600 rock or soil targets. The laser itself has been fired more than 150,000 times. The process, called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, hits a target with pulses from the laser to generate sparks, whose spectra provide information about which chemical elements are in the target. Multiple laser shots are fired in sequence, each blasting away a thin layer of material so that the following shot examines a slightly deeper layer. In this case, “Nova” displayed an increasing concentration of aluminum as a series of laser shots from the rover penetrated through dust on the rock’s surface.
source: NASA Rover’s Images Show Laser Flash on Martian Rock
This month as well as the following two months will have three consecutive supermoons. The exact dates and (rise) times (Beirut time) of these supermoons are as follows:
Supermoons are moons that happen to be at a point of their orbit whose distance is the shortest to Earth. That is they happen to be closest to Earth.
This particular (close) point of the orbit is called the “perigee” thus the scientific term for a supermoon is the “perigee moon“.
Some people have linked supermoons with natural disasters such as tsunami’s like the 2011 tsunami that occurred facing the coast of Japan which destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the 2004 tsunami that hit the Indian ocean since they occurred in a 1-2 week period within a supermoon.
Scientifically no evidence has been found in this regard. For a detailed explanation check the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory Outreach Program FAQ “Can the position of the moon or planets affect seismicity?” under “Common Myths and Misconceptions”.
Beware of the comming supermoons… whooo!
Lebanon has long been a country abundant in water and as such most Lebanese have taken water for granted thinking that they will never have a shortage in or problems with it.
It was apparent that this year has had very little rain [1,2]. Indeed the numbers indicate that the precipitation levels have not even reached half the average annual of 900 ml. This, of course, has led to a huge deficiency in water reserves [3,4]. But the main problem does not lie in the low precipitation levels this year rather it lies in the incompetence of the Lebanese authorities “and most Lebanese” to manage and conserve water.
On one hand, the authorities have not been doing their job of investing in the main source of life by managing the water (and sewage as a matter of fact; see below on this) in order to effectively exploit it and not waste it. They have not been working on conserving this abundance in water by preventing leakage, building dams, replenishing underground reservoirs, introducing artificial ponds, or dealing with the r
andom wells being dug and un-licensed water suppliers.
This is demonstrated in what Claude Tabbal, an expert on the water resources in Lebanon, said to Azza el-Masri and Raed Khalil of the Al-Akhbar newspaper [4] on June 26:
”We get 800 cubic meters of water per year, but up to 65 percent of it is lost each year”
Ibrahim El Merehbi 
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