Peter Van Inwagen.
Presented a famous challenge to free will. If we assume that evrything has a cause (that is, we accept Determinism), it means our current actions also has causes in the past - and these causes has other causes that occurred prior to them. We can easily see that this goes ad nauseam until we reach causes which occured before we were born. This means that our current actions are dictated by factors beyond our control, meaning we have no free will to act.
1975
Researchers have Observed that the Rotation axes of central supermassive black holes in a sample, are parallel to each other over distances of billions of light-years..
The rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web.
The Chicken Gun, a compressed-air cannon used to fire dead chickens at aircraft components.
It simulates high-speed bird strikes during the aircraft's flight.
2020
Phosphate (P) is an essential macronutrient for plant growth. Roots employ adaptive mechanisms to forage for P in soil. Root hair elongation is particularly important since P is immobile. Here we report that auxin plays a critical role promoting root hair growth in Arabidopsis in response to low external P.
More Phosphate less root hairs
The international law states that it is legal to kill any enemy soldier regardless of function or rank.
Even if that soldier is not a combatant or is on leave. Killing civilians is forbidden even if they are actively involve in the military effort.
2010
Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story has actually been to outer space.
Buzz Lightyear spent 15 months on board the International Space Station, and returned to Earth on the 11th September, 2009
2008
Any free-moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere.
This is because of surface tension, which is an imbalance of intermolecular attractive forces.
2013
Clockwork Orange was so controversial in the UK that Kubrick requested Warner Brothers withdraw the movie.
up until Kubrick's death in 1999 it was very difficult to watch the movie legally in Britain.
2020
CrazyPetFood.com was a pet food company based near Colchester & Chemsford in Essex. They provided all types of food & grooming tools.
Sadly, this company no longer exists.
2017
There are approximately 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way.
Out of all the known galaxies, the Milky Way is the one that contains the most stars.
2017
in 1979, it snowed in the Sahara desert for 30 minutes.
Even Chile’s Atacama Desert(the worlds driest) experienced significant snowfall when a cold front from Antarctica made a rare trip over the Andes
2016
In the 16th Century, Turkish women could divorce their husbands if they didn’t provide enough coffee for them.
By the late 15th century coffee had become a common beverage in the Near East, but the Ottoman Turks had mastered the art of it
2017
in 2014, six sealed glass vials of smallpox dated 1954 were discovered in a storage room.
two of the vials had virus which proved to be viable in culture. They were destroyed 7 months later.
2020
In the 1995 Halloween episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson finds a portal to the mysterious Third Dimension behind a bookcase, and desperate to escape his in-laws, he plunges through. He finds himself wandering across a dark surface etched with green gridlines and strewn with geometric shapes, above which hover strange equations. One of these is the deceptively simple assertion that P = NP.
The biggest unsolved mystery in Computer Science explained, the question that will earn 1M dollars to the first person to prove the answer. If answered as yes, this question will change the world of Computer Science as we know it today.
2009
Stairs go counter-clockwise because of castle defenses.
Since most people are right-handed they were able to hold the railing with their left and the sword with their right.
2020
There is a planet half the radius of the Earth with a surface made up of diamonds.
55 Cancri e has a mass eight times that of Earth’s despite having half the radius
2020
