Americans Throw Away 40 Percent of Their Food Every Day
A new study says that the American food chain is so wasteful that roughly 40 percent of all our food goes uneaten, because we basically just throw it in the garbage.
[Image: Chris Waits/Flickr]
HYDRAULIC FRACTURING or FRACKING is the technique used to release natural gases (shale, tight, coal seam), petroleum or other substances.
A distinction can be made between low-volume hydraulic fracturing used to stimulate high-permeability reservoirs, which may consume typically 20,000 to 80,000 US gallons (76,000 to 300,000 l; 17,000 to 67,000 imp gal) of fluid per well, with high-volume hydraulic fracturing, used in the completion of tight gas and shale gas wells; high-volume hydraulic fracturing can use as much as 2 to 3 million US gallons (7.6 to 11 Ml) of fluid per well.This latter practice has come under scrutiny internationally, with some countries suspending or even banning it. The first use of hydraulic fracturing was in 1947, though the current fracking technique was first used in the late 1990s in the Barnett Shale in Texas.
Detractors point to potential environmental impacts, including contamination of ground water, risks to air quality, the migration of gases and hydraulic fracturing chemicals to the surface, surface contamination from spills and flowback and the health effects of these. State and federal regulatory agencies and the industry are working to address these concerns. The EPA is conducting a study, set to be released for peer review at the end of 2012, of hydraulic fracturing’s impact on drinking water and ground water resources.
Click here to sign the petition to ban fracking in California.
(Source: revolutionarycinema)
On July 29th, 2011, the US Treasury Department showed that the United States had an operating cash balance of $73.3 billion USD.
At the time, Apple’s recent financial results put its reserves at $76.4 billion USD.
Apple has more money than the United States government.
(via BBC)
Astronomers recently discovered a quasar, or feeding black hole, with a reservoir containing 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth’s oceans, which is the largest mass of water that’s been detected in the universe. In a press release from Caltech, Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains:
The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water. It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.
An artist’s rendering of the quasar provides a sense of its scope.
Image: NASA/ESA
(via arielwaldman)
The 1918 flu pandemic, also known as the Spanish influenza, was an unusual and severe pandemic that spread worldwide. Lasting from June 1918 until December 1920, it spread even to the Arctic and remote Pacific Islands. Its place of origin is to this day unknown.
The estimated death toll is between 50-100 million people, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history and has been described as ‘the greatest medical holocaust in history’.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that a monkey pressing keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular finite text, such as the Bible or the works of Shakespeare.
Let’s examine.
Consider a single biblical phrase, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” How long would it take a monkey to type this phrase?
Assume there are 93 symbols on a keyboard, the phrase contains 56 letters (including spaces and the period).
If the probability of hitting the correct key on the typewriter is l/n, where n is the number of possible keys, then the probability of the monkey correctly typing 56 consecutive characters in the target phrase is, on average, (1/93)^56, which means that the monkey would have to try more than 10^100 times, on average, before getting it right.
Mathematical analysis reveals that the monkey, after only 407 trials, would have a 50/50 chance that the correct sentence was typed.
If the monkey (or any abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters ad infinitum), pressed one key per second, it would be typing for well over the current age of the universe, however, mathematically, it is possible the monkey would eventually achieve it.
(via blueplusred)
(via vegeteble)
