mystery

11Dec

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

ENVIRONMENT

The Great Meteorite Mystery!

For the past fifty years, scientists who study meteorites have been attempting to solve a mystery concerning the origin of chondrules which are tiny millimeter-size glassy droplets of once-molten rock that meteoriticist Henry Sorby described as "drops of fiery rain" in 1877. These mysterious little droplets are seen in 85% of the meteorites that shower down upon our planet. Solving this great meteorite mystery is difficult, because chondrule formation has not been observed in modern times--the right conditions for their formation probably have not existed for over 4.5 billion years in our Solar System, when a primordial disk of dust and gas (called a protoplanetary disk) circled our newborn Sun. In July 2013, scientists suggested that they may have discovered the strange origin of these...

The mystery of the missing portrait of Robert Hooke, 17th-century scientist extraordinaire

Groundbreaking discoveries in science often come with two iconic images, one representing the breakthrough and the other, the discoverer. Known as Mary Beale’s ‘Portrait of a Mathematician,’ could the circa 1680 painting depict Hooke? Mary Beale, CC BY For example, the page from Darwin’s notebook sketching the branching pattern of evolution often accompanies a portrait of Darwin in his early years when the notebook was written. Likewise the drawing of the orbits of the moons of Jupiter often accompanies a portrait of Galileo. Hooke’s famous etching of the tiny magnified cells he saw in a piece of cork. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, 1665/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Another groundbreaking discovery in science was the discovery of the cell by Robert Hooke (1635-1703). The iconic image of the brea...

Gerald Cotten Dead Or Alive: A Crypto Mystery

QuadrigaCX shut down weeks after its CEO died, leaving 76,000 users out of $163m in cash and cryptocurrencies. Skepticism around the demise of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange founder Gerald Cotten just won’t go away. The “questionable circumstances” behind the death of QuadrigaCX’s chief executive last year in India at 30 led lawyers representing customers of the collapsed trading platform to request on Friday that his body be exhumed. QuadrigaCX shut down in January, weeks after Cotten died while on his honeymoon, leaving some 76,000 users out of pocket for about C$215 million ($163 million) in cash and cryptocurrencies. Odd details surrounding his death and the mystery of what happened to clients’ Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, has fueled...