The lammergeier

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Michael

I had the honor of viewing this bird not once but twice while in Africa:

For those who need convincing to watch the video:

  • It grabs large animal bones, flies over cliff sides, and then drops its payload so that it can smash everything open and access the marrow.
  • David Attenborough narrates this version of the “Life” series.
  • Oprah Winfrey does not ruin anything by narrating (which, in the American version, she does as if she is reading to children).
  • In case you missed the first bullet, the bird smashes bones on rocks.
  • On cliff sides.

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How many planets are in our galaxy?

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Michael

The answer is 50 billion. But I find the number in the Goldilocks zone far more interesting.

At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Hey look, every Facebook user could have one Goldilocks planet all his or her own.

These numbers could change drastically, but don’t expect to ever see any minuscule estimate by any measure. We have billions of stars in the Milky Way alone; we can predict the number of planets should reasonably be in the billions just by that fact. And if we venture our minds outside our little corner of the Universe, we realize there are more stars than grains of sand on Earth. The total number of planets in the Universe is undoubtedly in the trillions. And I’m probably being conservative. Earth is likely to be mind-blowingly mundane.

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Thought of the day

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Michael

There is probably a lot of non-Earth based life throughout the Universe.

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