Short answer: A very long time.

The distance from the Sun to the Earth is around 93 million miles. Theoretically, If a person drove a car (with an unlimited amount of fuel) at a speed of 93 miles an hour (about 150 km/hr), then it would take 1,000,000 hours, or over 114 years before he arrives at the Sun.

(Image Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory/ NASA)

We’ve heard the phrase “time flies fast when you’re having fun.” But have you ever wondered why that is the case? Why does time seem to slow down at times, and why does it seem to speed up on others? What causes our elastic sense of time?

The answer might be found in dopamine.

… decades of research suggest that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a critical role in how we perceive time. Dopamine has myriad effects on how much time we think has elapsed in a given period, and these effects may conflict confusingly. Some studies have found that increasing dopamine speeds up an animal’s internal clock, leading it to overestimate the passage of time; others have found that dopamine compresses events and makes them seem more fleeting; still others have uncovered both effects, depending on context.

Head over at Quanta Magazine to know more about this topic.

(Image Credit: Pavlofox/ Pixabay)

We all have unique DNA. The different variations in a person's genes affects the way his body metabolizes nutrients. To put it simply, it can be said that our genes have a hand in the way we handle food. With this in mind, it is only reasonable to think that we all should have a personalized diet, and this personalized diet could be made possible because of nutrigenomics, the science that deals with the relationship between the human genome and nutrition. Some critics, however, believe that this idea of a personalized diet is oversold.

This begs the question: is diet based on our DNA the best way?

Know more about this over at Discover Magazine.

(Image Credit: Mahmoud-Ahmed/ Pixabay)

One of the gripes against the well-loved The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Game was its lack of the traditional temple-like dungeons we saw in previous iterations of the Zelda franchise. Waikuteru showcases their mod of the Skyview Temple implemented in the game. Watch the forty-minute walkthrough of the temple. Honestly, the amount of detail in the mod shows how much time and effort they spent finishing the custom dungeon! 

Ask students this question and you’ll get a few responses of affirmation. Most would probably say no. Who wants to suffer through extremely detailed computations and formulas? I sure don’t. Mathematician Daniel Rockmore asks the provocative question:  “Is it time to kill calculus?” and what kind of mathematics do we need people to learn, as Popular Mechanics details: 

What math are people really using, and how can we prepare them to do it better, faster, and with more confidence? With arithmetic, that means ideas like rapidly making change or doing other transactional or household math in your head. And with Levitt’s new committee for reforming math curricula, it means more focus on statistics over calculus.

There’s another key point here. As more and more students study computing and programming, there’s incentive to give them access to discrete mathematics, which is the counterpoint to calculus’s continuous mathematics: think counting numbers versus decimals that stretch into infinity. And what Levitt wants to include—data science—is an interesting middle ground between the two, with rays that extend into programming, data entry and management, and even proofreading, a multidisciplinary field that teaches key ideas from many areas of study.

Levitt most directly advocates for turning the current model of high school math, the “algebra-geometry-algebra sandwich,” into something where students have more options for the second algebra. If that means more kids who opt away from precalculus because of their interests elsewhere, honestly, Sir Isaac Newton probably approves.

Image via Popular Mechanics 

It’s not the operating systems we are working with, that’s for sure. Take for example the European Space Agency (ESA)’s recently-launched Solar Orbiter. Since the spacecraft will get close to the Sun, it will have to withstand harsh solar conditions. The Solar Orbiter then needs an operating system that can operate under specific conditions. The ESA developed a real-time operating system (RTOS) for Solar Orbiter that can react to dangerous situations in 50 seconds: 

"We’ve got extremely demanding requirements for this mission," says Maria Hernek, head of flight software systems section at ESA. "Typically, rebooting the platform such as this takes roughly 40 seconds. Here, we’ve had 50 seconds total to find the issue, have it isolated, have the system operational again, and take recovery action.”

To reiterate: this operating system, located far away in space, needs to remotely reboot and recover in 50 seconds. Otherwise, the Solar Orbiter is getting fried.

The criteria by which we judge Windows or macOS are fairly simple. They perform a computation, and if the result of this computation is correct, then a task is considered to be done correctly. Operating systems used in space add at least one more central criterion: a computation needs to be done correctly within a strictly specified deadline. When a deadline is not met, the task is considered failed and terminated. And in spaceflight, a missed deadline quite often means your spacecraft has already turned into a fireball or strayed into an incorrect orbit. There’s no point in processing such tasks any further; things must adhere to a very precise clock.

The time, as measured by the clock, is divided into singular ticks. To simplify it, space operating systems are typically designed in such a way that each task is performed within a set number of allocated ticks. It can take three ticks to upload data from sensors; four further ticks are devoted to fire up engines and so on. Each possible task is assigned a specific priority, so a higher-priority task can take precedence over the lower-priority task. And this way, a software designer knows exactly which task is going to be performed in any given scenario and how much time it is going to take to get it done.

Image via Ars Technica 

With the pandemic forcing us to stay in our houses for our safety, most of us have probably spent their newly-found free time watching movies. Do you have a whole list of movies you like and don’t like? Or are you trying to avoid bad movies so you don’t end up wasting your time? Check out IGN’s worst reviewed movies of 2020. Before you do, read their disclaimer for the list: 

IGN's worst-reviewed movies of 2020 (so far) is an unfortunate list, because nobody sets out to make a bad movie (as far as we know), but sometimes a project just doesn't come together. So let's have a look at the films released (both theatrically and streaming) so far this year that were scored the worst of the worst by IGN's critics.

But first, a few notes: IGN rates its movies on a scale of 0-10. All the films cited in this article were or will be released (theatrically or streaming) between January 1st and May 1st. The "worst reviewed" movies listed here all scored 5.0 or below. The IGN review scale labels any film scored 5.0 as "mediocre," 4.0 as "bad," 3.0 as "awful" and 2.0 as "painful."

Image via IGN 

Graphene is a monolayer of carbon atoms. A team of physicists have successfully created a circuit that generates an electrical current from graphene. The electricity harvested from it can provide clean, limitless, low-voltage power for small devices or sensors, as Phys Org details: 

The findings, published in the journal Physical Review E, are proof of a theory the physicists developed at the U of A three years ago that freestanding graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms—ripples and buckles in a way that holds promise for energy harvesting.

The idea of harvesting energy from graphene is controversial because it refutes physicist Richard Feynman's well-known assertion that the thermal motion of atoms, known as Brownian motion, cannot do work. Thibado's team found that at room temperature the thermal motion of graphene does in fact induce an alternating current (AC) in a circuit, an achievement thought to be impossible.

In the 1950s, physicist Léon Brillouin published a landmark paper refuting the idea that adding a single diode, a one-way electrical gate, to a circuit is the solution to harvesting energy from Brownian motion. Knowing this, Thibado's group built their circuit with two diodes for converting AC into a direct current (DC). With the diodes in opposition allowing the current to flow both ways, they provide separate paths through the circuit, producing a pulsing DC current that performs work on a load resistor.

Image via Phys Org

Here we are in October, when we traditionally manage to dedicate an entire month to Halloween. One thing you'll notice is the prevalence of horror films, both new and old. But what if you aren't really into horror, but still want to celebrate the season? Mental Floss has a list of movies centered around Halloween and its themes that don't fit into the horror genre. Many are comedies, some are adventure, some are even animated! Bonus: the trailers for each are included.

Every book has to end somewhere. Science fiction authors try to make the final lines meaningful, either to leave the reader with a satisfying conclusion, or to give hope for the future, or maybe to set up a possibility of further adventures. Whether or not they mean anything to someone who hasn't read the entire book, you can tell they were meticulously thought out. But maybe they can mean something without the rest of the book.  

“Loose Ends” is a literary supercut composed entirely of last lines from 137 science fiction and fantasy books. After gathering these lines, I found they fell into a number of patterns—some surprising, others obvious—in how writers end their stories. With these patterns in hand, I arranged them into a sequence of interconnected vignettes. In these ways “Loose Ends” doubles as narrative and archive, short story and data analysis. To read a version that reveals the names of the books, click here. —Tom Comitta

The story Comitta constructed makes sense altogether, if you ignore the varying names, and it also makes you wonder what came before. Read "Loose Ends" at Wired. -via Kottke

(Image credit: Elena Lacey)

Whether you are just learning to prepare food or you've been cooking for 50 years, there's always something new to learn. Professional chefs encounter everyday cooks who tend to make the same mistakes across the board, and many of them are willing to help the rest of us create tasty, satisfying dishes for ourselves. Read which mistakes they most want to correct.   

You throw all your ingredients together at once and mix them without thinking about their order. If you see butter (or any fat) and sugar listed first in a recipe, it’s a creaming method — which means you mix together the fat and sugar first, until it’s light and kind of airy. When you add the eggs, add them one by one to make sure they mix in well and so that your batter keeps its light texture.

If the recipe says an ingredient is supposed to be room temperature, make sure it’s room temperature! Eggs are particularly important for this rule — room temperature egg yolks break more easily and incorporate better into whatever you’re mixing. And for something like cheesecake, or anything else with high fat content, cold eggs can actually harden the fat and make your mixture lumpy.

Learn what to do about 30 of most common cooking mistakes in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Flickr user Lucia Sanchez)

Trek B-Sides is a fan-made series of Star Trek: The Next Generation videos produced by re-editing episodes to isolate just the minor side plots we don't recall as well as we should.   

Uncovering the lost stories and forgotten side plots of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sometimes it just takes a little creative editing to change the context of a familiar story.

The results are mini-episodes that run from four to 15 minutes long. See a few select videos at Laughing Squid, and keep up with future episodes at Dailymotion.

In 18th-century France, one would be lucky to receive an education at all if he came from difficult circumstances, much less the education one really craved. Pierre André Latreille spent six years in a seminary to become a priest, when he really wanted to study bugs. Upon graduation, he never sought a parish nor did he preach, but instead learned about entomology and botany from several notable naturalists.   

Meanwhile, a major socio-political storm was brewing in France. People were fed up with the monarchy and the feudal system and rose in revolt. The Estates General took control of the Assembly and the peasants stormed Bastille, the symbol of Royal authority. Many aristocrats and members of the clergy were arrested, including King Louis XVI. A new law was passed that caused the immediate subordination of the Catholic Church to the French government. This law demanded that every priest take an oath of allegiance to the state.

Many Clergy refused to take the oath, because they couldn’t make themselves put their loyalty towards France before their loyalty towards God. Latreille was one of them, and consequently he was arrested and imprisoned. Soon, he would be exiled to a penal colony where death was certain.

So how did a beetle save Latreille's life? Read that story at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Pierre-Yves Beaudouin)

Seeley Lake, Montana — Three years ago, a fire broke out in the state of Montana. This fire would then consume thousands of acres of land. A day after the smoke cleared out in the area, a group of researchers arrived in the town.

Their plan was to chart how long it took for people to recover from living for seven weeks surrounded by relentless smoke.

Unfortunately,

They still don’t know, because most residents haven’t recovered. In fact, they’ve gotten worse.

Forest fires had funneled hazardous air into Seeley Lake, a town of fewer than 2,000 people, for 49 days. The air quality was so bad that on some days the monitoring stations couldn’t measure the extent of the pollution. The intensity of the smoke and the length of time residents had been trapped in it were unprecedented, prompting county officials to issue their first evacuation orders due to smoke, not fire risk.

So how bad does wildfire smoke affect our health? Very bad. Worse, it’s a long-term effect.

More details about this story over at Undark.

(Image Credit: National Park Service/ Wikimedia Commons)

We live very busy lives. We are so busy that most of the time, we unconsciously ignore the weird and funny things that happen around us because our mind is occupied with lots of things. But not for photographer Shin Noguchi, who managed to capture these moments.

Taken around Japan, the photographs appear as objective shots, glimpsing candid moments that are enigmatic and sometimes humorous. “Street photography always projects the “truth”. The “truth” that I talk about isn’t necessarily that I can see, but they also exist in society, in [the] street, in people’s [lives]. and I always try to capture this reality beyond my own values and viewpoint/perspective,” he says in a statement.

One-hundred-thirty of Noguchi’s photographs are compiled in a forthcoming monograph, In Color In Japan, which is currently available for pre-order. The book was printed in two editions, a black and a white, and the former contains an extra, unique image that’s never been shown before and won’t be reproduced in another format. Follow Noguchi on Instagram to see his latest shots from the streets of Japan.

See some of the photos over at Colossal.

(Image Credit: Shin Noguchi/ Colossal)