Now if you think that’s nothing then just imagine how dry the Atacama is when it receives just 0.1mm per year. In fact some parts of the desert have not seen rainfall for over 400 years making it in most estimations the driest place on the planet earth.

Looks Like Mars

Located west of the Andes and sprawling across a stretch of almost 600 miles a small region of the Atacama is so unlike anything else on the planet that it’s been compared to Mars. In fact due to it’s strange appearance not only have movies been filmed there e.g. Space Odyssey but NASA have continued to use it as their testing grounds for equipment, projects and instruments when preparing for Mars space missions.

Do People Live There ?

For an extremely harsh environment you’d be surprised if anything could survive there, however there are small communities located near the various natural oases that exist within the desert. In fact some of these settlements have been populated for thousands of years going back as far as the earliest of ancient civilisations.

Sodium Nitrate

As well as being extremely rich in copper it also carries the largest natural supply of sodium nitrate. This was mined heavily in the early 20th century for use in fertilizers and gun powder. However after the discovery of the Haber process (early-mid 20th century) sodium nitrate could now be synthetically produced and most of these mines were closed.

According to estimates the desert is still littered with up to 170 of these old mining towns which lie completely abandoned like ghost towns.

Astronomy, Astronomy, Astronomy

The Atacama is also one of the best places in the world for astronomy. Thanks to its location (i.e. high altitude), dry weather (i.e. very little cloud cover) and non existant light pollution it’s home to two of the worlds top observatories. Namely the La Silla and Paranal observatories owned and operated by the European Southern Observatory.

In addition to these on the 3rd October 2011 it also officially became home to the most expensive ground telescope in the world, otherwise known as ALMA. The telescope consists of an array of 66 radio telescopes all using radio waves to peer deep into space helping us learn more about star formations especially during the early years of the universe.

So there you go, that’s the Atacama desert for you. Hope you enjoyed the facts.

The truth however is that like most talking birds they’re not really talking but mimicking the sounds they hear around them. They certainly don’t have any real understanding of the words they repeat and what’s more interesting is that parrots as a species are not the best of the bird mimickers.

Mynah Bird

Yes that’s right the top word mimic is actually the Mynah bird. Their ability to create amazingly realistic human and non human sounds such as words, coughs, sneezes and even cell phone ring tones is well documented.

Other birds that are extremely intelligent and known to mimic human words are crows, ravens and jackdaws. Although their abilities are less publicized.

Like all hummingbirds they can fly not only forwards but also backwards, up, down and even just hover. Their small size and amazing flying skills mean they’re experts at moving from flower to flower collecting nectar and even small insects. In fact they’re so good at flying (some visiting as many as 1500 flowers a day) that they don’t even walk anymore and only use their feet for perching.

Now in order to maintain such flying control there’s one skill we haven’t touched upon yet, and that’s their ability to beat their wings at up to 80 times per second. That’s so fast that humans can only see the wings moving as a faint blur. Now that’s quick!

For those that don’t know much about the virus or its severity then imagine chicken pox or the measles but much worse. The picture above is of a young Bangladeshi girl taken in 1973 and demonstrates how severe the outbreak on the body was.

Not something you’d want to pick up, and with death from infection being as high as 80% in children it wasn’t a surprise why this virus was so feared.

The Cowpox Connection

Going back to Dr Jenner’s original observations he quickly came to the conclusion that some how the workers were picking up the less dangerous cowpox virus which in turn left them completely immune to the far more dangerous smallpox.

After some experimentation he injected an 8 year old boy with a small amount of cowpox and confirmed his original hypothesis.

Smallpox Eradicated

Within 3 years 100,000 British people were vaccinated and saved from the potentially fatal virus. By 1979 the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared smallpox to be the first infectious disease to have been eradicated from the face of the earth.

Now a days this killer virus exists only in a few select laboratories throughout the world!

To put things into perspective the lake is so big that if all the rivers in the world flowed into its basin it would take almost 1 year to fill. We all know Siberia isn’t the warmest of places so you can imagine what a phenomenal site it is when in the winter months the lake freezes over holding ice up to 115 meters thick. Now that’s a lot of ice!

It’s only in recent years that the image of robots has been upgraded to sentient beings with minds of their own e.g. transformers and even IRobot.

Anyway the word was first introduced by playwright Karel Capek in his play ‘RUR – Rossum’s Universal Robots‘ and it’s from there that the word and idea became popular. The first robot to be developed was by Joseph Engelberger and George Devol back in 1961 and if you’re imagining a metallic being with 2 arms, 2 legs and a head you can forget it. The first robot was basically a clawed arm that dropped hot steel car parts into water for cooling.

90% of robots today are used in factories, working on production lines and often handling dangerous materials that humans would find difficult or even impossible to handle. Other uses include exploration such as deep sea exploration and mining.

Obviously the speed of light passing through liquids and solids is slower but even then the speed of light is phenomenal. Many of you may also have heard of the concept of a light year, which represents the distance light would travel in a complete year.

This extraordinary number comes out to around 9,460,000 million kilometres. The term is used extensively in astronomy to measure distances between planets, stars and other celestial bodies. The simple fact of the matter is that distances involved when it comes to discussing the universe are so huge that you need a better unit of measure to make it more understandable.

Lastly those of you who watch too many space movies e.g. star wars, star trek etc and are familiar with concepts like warp speed or hyperspace then you’re probably wondering when we’ll be able to travel at speeds like those shown in the movies. Well the simple answer is it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see anything like that in our lifetime however tolearn more about the research going on in this area you can check out NASA’s section on breakthrough propulsion physics.

Well for starters spiders have 8 legs whilst insects have just 6. Insects have 3 distinct body parts, a head, thorax and abdomen whilst spiders have just 2, a combined head and thorax known as the cephalothorax and an abdomen.

As well as the above, other interesting differences include the eyes. Spiders have simple eyes whilst insects have compound eyes. Spiders have piercing jaws whilst insects have jaws which are more suitable for chewing. All spiders can make silk thread (although not all spiders spin webs) whilst most insects cannot. Spiders can’t fly where as many insects have wings allowing them to do so.

So yes to the untrained eye there is indeed very little visual difference but if you look really hard then they’re actually worlds apart.