Bill Bryson - The Mysterious Biped

Chapter 28, The Mysterious Biped Summary.

Biped:  noun

1. an animal that uses two legs for walking.

In 1887 an anatomist Marie Eugene Francois Thomas Dubois set out to Sumatra, In the Dutch East Indies, with the intention of finding the earliest human remains on earth, At this time no one had ever purposefully set out to find ancient human bones and all bones had been found accidentally.

Around the time of Dubois' assignment in Sumatra, Workmen in a quarry found curious looking bones and gave them to a schoolteacher, Johann Karl Fuhlrott, who was interested and he discovered they were some kind of human. Many people refused to believe that they were ancient neanderthal bones, insisting the bones came from wounded soldiers who fought in Germany 1814. Throughout many different years scientists found different evidence of bones from the neanderthal that showed the evolution of apes to humans, and agreed that at that time it was at least 15 million years ago that apes split to humans which is why the ancient bones these scientists found looked different to the modern humans, some looking more apelike and some looking more humanlike. Through time scientists could see various differences in the bones which showed the species evolving as they had once lived in the forests and with the ice age were forced to leave to savannas where they adapted to stand up right like we do know. Scientists also found new species of bones further back than the neanderthal which they called homo erectus they were thought to have dated back at least 7 million years.  

Darwin's Singular Notion - Luke Walker

Summary of Chapter 25 Bill Bryson: The Short History of Nearly Everything

Darwin was born in an ordinary christian family. He was born on the 12th of February 1809 and had both parents for the first few years of his life. His mother was the daughter of a legendary pottery fame but she died when Charles was only eight years old. His father was a physician who introduced him to science and to question the world. Charles did not have good grades in school and never impressed his academic father. When he left school he studied medicine in university but was traumatized by the operations and live experiments. He tried to study divinity after that but, was asked to join a 23 year old man named Robert FitzRoy on the HMS Beagle, a naval survey ship. Darwin was just 24 at the time.

The job of the HMS Beagle was to chart coastal waters but Darwin wanted to pursue his hobby, to find a more understandable interpretation of creationism (how christians believe the world was created). The ship was at sea between 1831 and 1836. In this time Darwin collected many animal samples and saw many great sights. He developed new theory for the creation of coral, that it has not always been the same and that it formed and changed slowly over time. In 1836 Darwin returned home and contrary to popular belief he did not form the theory of evolution while on the ship. It was already a growing theory at the time. After looking at some documents of animals competing for food and fossils of similar looking animals, Darwin found that some animals had adapted to be able to find food better than other animals. He realized that this contributed to the theory of evolution and that these animals had not always been like that, they had changed over time.

He expanded on his research and looked over pictures of finches. He noticed three different types of finches all with similar bodies, but very different heads. Ones who ate nuts and seeds had large tough beaks to crack open the shells. Another had a long thin beak to pull insects out of the soil and bushes. The last had a beak of medium length and width which could eat fruit. Darwin used this example and began to sketch up ideas to grow on the theory of evolution. The small sketches turned into a 230 page “sketch” but then it all stopped. Darwin put away his works for 15 years. He fathered ten children and studied barnacles. After the fifteen years he tried to get back into his work but depression stopped him.

Later on, Darwin met a man named Alfred Wallace, who had done similar studies. They partnered together and through tough times, expanded on Darwin’s previous work. They unveiled their ideas in a “press conference” and not many people thought it was good, but a small few did. Darwin and Wallace continued to conduct experiments and develop theories but soon split up and for fifty years, separated and worked on their own projects. In 1959 Darwin had his book “the origin of species” published and it sold many copies, but it was not all praise. Some said that it was marvellous and provided a good look on the world, others argued it was un-christian and that it was work of satan. Even Darwin’s close family thought it was a bit dodgy. After his book was published another rival book was made called “the descent of man” which was similar. Both books sold very well for their time but as Darwin passed away in 1882, his views faded away and were not brought back and widely accepted until 1930 and 1940. His ideas are now taught in schools and widely accepted as the correct answer for how life has become what it has.

Bill Bryson Chapter 14 The Fire Below - Josh Ogier

In 1971, Mike Voorhies discovered one of the most extraordinary fossil beds in North America. It was a mass grave for scores of rhinos, horses, saber-tooth deer, camels and turtles killed around 12 million years ago. They were killed from breathing abrasive ash spewed by a volcano. Scientists say that they know more about outer space than the core of the earth. In around 1938 Charles richter and Beno Gutenberg created the Richter scale. The Richter scale is often mistaken as a machine when it is actually more of an idea. In the 1960s in an attempt to get a better understanding of the core they tried to drill into the core which was disastrous. Scientists are in a dispute about how the crust was created, some believe it happened fast early in earth's history while others believe it happened slowly over time.

Ice time

In 1815 a volcano erupted on the island of Sumbawa. This eruption through clouds of ash and dust into the air, blocking out the sun. This had the consequence of making a mini ice age for the world. Crops failed to grow and there were outbreaks of disease. Globally the temperature had only fell by one degree. This shows how delicate the temperature of the earth actually is.

Scientist knew there is something strange about the past. For example arctic animals remains in warm climates or boulders stranded in impossible places. Geologist James Hutton was the first to theorize wide spread glaciation, unfortunately his ideas where ignored. Common peasants, not corrupted by science, knew that glaciation was the cause of these strange events.

A naturalist called Louise Agassiz embraced this theory. While at the post of professor of natural history Agassiz friend Karl Schimper first came up with the term ice age and showed that there is good evidence to show that ice covered much of Europe, Asia and North America. Louise and Karl swapped notes which lead to Louise getting much of the credit that Karl felt should be his own. Agassiz then travelled spreading his theory around the world but everywhere he went he found reluctance to accept his theories. It took a while but eventually people accepted wide spread glaciation. But what causes ice ages?

James Croll a janitor at Anderson’s university published a paper in the philosophical magazine in 1864, which was recognized as work of the highest standard. His paper was about how earth’s orbit might have an impact on how ice ages start. Croll was the first to suggest that shape obit of the earth, circular to oval and back, might have an effect on the start and end of ice ages. Thanks to Croll people in Britain started to accept the ideas of ice ages more readily. Sadly the ice age theory fell out of fashion it was ‘to be rejected without hesitation’ in the words of Agassiz’s successor.

One of the difficulties that caused this was that Croll’s calculations meant that the last ice age had to be only 80 thousand years ago whereas geological evidence shows that the last ice age was much more recent than that. The theory was saved by an academic by the name of Milutin Milankovitch. He thought that more complex cycles in the astrological orbit of the earth are responsible for ice ages coming and going. These cycles being tilt, pitch, and wobble which have a profound effect on the earth’s temperature. He spent the next 20 years calculating the angle and duration of incoming solar radiation at every latitude on earth, in every season, for a million years, adjusted for three ever changing variables. Eventually he wrote a book in 1930 called mathematical climatology and the astronomical theory of climate change. He thought that, like most people, it was a gradual increase in harsh winters that result in ice ages. Meteorologist Wladimir Koppen saw that it was more subtle than that.

Koppen found out that the cause of ice ages was because of cool summers and not harsh winters. If all the winters ice wasn’t melted by the summer, he found, more heat from the sun will be reflected back causing overall cooler temperatures globally. ‘It is not the amount of snow that matters’ said Gwen Schultz ‘but that the snow lasts’. This can cause ice ages. In the 1950’s scientist where unable to associate Milankovitch’s cycles to ice ages. Sadly because of this Milankovitch died before he was able to prove his cycles were correct and his calculations fell out of fashion.

We are actually in a small ice age at the moment. Having both poles frozen over is a unique situation for the earth. In fact at the height of the last ice age 30% of the world was covered in ice, 10% still is today. Earth usually has dramatic changes from hot periods with no ice, then plunges into an ice age with glaciers everywhere. There is no reason that this period of fine weather that we live in should continue for any longer, there is every reason that is should tip into freezing cold or much too hot. We live on a knife edge.

Ice ages are not bad things for the planet. They grind up rocks leaving rich soil and scrape out fresh water lakes. They shape the planet into how it is today. Tim Flannery once said ‘there is only one question needed to ask of a continent to determine the fate of its people “did you have a good ice age?”’

Bill Bryson Chapter 21- Life Goes On - Josh Smithson

Fossilisation is an extremely rare occurrence, less than 0.1 percent of all living organisms become fossilised, and Only about one bone in a billion ever becoming fossilised. About 95 percent of all fossils are from animals that once lived in the water, so it is very unlikely for a land animal to become fossilised.

Richard Fortey studies trilobites, an organism with three main body parts - head, tail and thorax. Trilobites first appeared about 540 million years ago in what is known as the Cambrian explosion, a great outburst of complex life. Trilobites were around for 300 million years before dying out.

A paleontologist named Charles Walcott was the first person to discover that trilobites are anthropods, a group that includes insects and crustaceans. Walcott also discovered the Burgess shale, a large array of unturned fossils that no one had seen before containing over 140 species, making it one of the greatest finds in paleontology history.

One of the fossils found in the Burgess Shale was a worm like creature called pikaia gracilens. It had a spinal column making it the earliest known ancestor of all vertebrates, including humans.

Over the years there have been many scientists such as Stephen jay Gould and Reginald Sprigg have been able to overturn the idea of the Cambrian explosion with findings of complex creatures from millions of years before the so called Cambrian explosion. The explosion wasn't an appearance of complex life, but rather a growth in the creatures found.

Bill Bryson - The Stuff of Life

Every living thing is an elaboration on a single blueprint. This blueprint is called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).

DNA was first discovered back in 1869 by Johann Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss scientist working at the University of Tubingen in Germany. While searching microscopically through the pus in surgical bandages he found a substance he didn’t recognize and called it nuclein (because it was found in the nucleus of cells).

As far as anyone could tell DNA didn’t do anything at all. But there were two problems with dismissing it. Firstly there was nearly 2 meters of it in nearly every nucleus and secondly the fact that it kept turning up, like the suspect in a murder mystery. DNA appeared clearly in two particular studies – one involving the Pneumoncoccus bacterium and another involving bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). The evidence found here suggested that DNA was somehow involved in the making of proteins, a process vital to life. Yet it was also clear the proteins were being made outside the nucleus, away from the DNA. No one knew how DNA could possibly be getting messages to the proteins. The answer is RNA (ribonucleic acid) which acts as an interpreter between the two.

DNA is made up of four basic components called nucleotides – adenine, thiamine guanine and cytosine. Every living thing is a variation of these four components but every now and then, about one time in a million, a letter joins in the wrong place. This is called SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) more commonly known as ‘Snip’. These variations or ‘snips’ get passed down through generations and make us different from each other. ‘Snips’ can sometimes leave you vulnerable to diseases, but they could also give you an advantage e.g. increased production of red blood cells for someone living at high altitude.

It was first thought that humans had at least one hundred thousand genes, but that number was drastically reduced by the first results of the Human Genome projects, which suggested a figure more like 35 to 40 thousand genes, about the same number found in grass. Interestingly almost half of human genes, the largest proportion known in any organism, don’t do anything at all, except reproduce themselves.  

In some sense we are all slaves to our genes.

Ainslie

Bill Bryson - Goodbye to All That

This chapter is mainly about life beginning on earth, extinction of certain species and the survival of other species through these extinctions. If the events that Bill Bryson describes in this chapter didn't happen, we most likely wouldn't be here.

Bill Bryson compares 4,500 million years of earth’s history to one day.

4am - simple, single-celled organisms appear

8:30pm - microbes appear

9:04pm - trilobites appear

10pm - plants begin to appear on land

11pm - dinosaurs appear

And we, humans, only come in 1 minute and 17 seconds before midnight. On this scale we can see how recent human existence is compared to all other living organisms.

Scientists have been trying to find our possible ancestors, the first land-dwelling creatures. Plants began land colonization about 450 mya. Larger animals took longer to emerge, but by about 400 mya they were out of the water. Scientists envisioned these first land dwelling creatures to look somewhat like the modern mudskipper, which can jump from puddle to puddle in a drought.

A search began for the first animals to walk the earth. A man called Erik Jarvik held up this research for almost 50 years, after finding a fossil with the help of Scandinavian scholars, thought to be a land dwelling creature old enough to be one of the first creatures on land. The problem was that he took it upon himself to examine it. Nobody knew what he had actually found because he wouldn't show his work to his fellow scholars. Only in 1998, when he died, did the other researchers see his work. It turned out to be a disappointment because the creature found clearly had 8 toes not 5 and had a weak spine which could not be strong enough for walking. Scientists are still looking for a possible ancestor of the human race.

The Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous periods were the five major “extinction episodes” of Earth’s history. The Permian period (in which the dinosaurs lived), 245 mya, ended suddenly and dramatically, wiping out at least 95% of life on Earth at the time. Although scientists don’t know what exactly caused this mass extinction, they have theories of what could have happened. Some of these are solar flares, global warming, global cooling, and extreme volcanic activity. Many scientists believe that the most likely cause of this mass extinction is a solar flare, so big that it penetrated Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere, which literally fried the surface of the earth and most of the life on it.

Leeza :)

Bill Bryson - Small World

The Chapter "Small World" is all about bacteria. Bacteria is everywhere even when you think it's gone. There is no point in trying to hide from bacteria, it's virtually everywhere. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you'll have about one trillion bacteria  on your skin alone. About a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. There are trillions of more bacteria in your gut, noses ect.

We can create antibiotics and disinfectants, it's easy to think to ourselves that we have removed bacteria from existence. But bacteria will never go away, they will be in when the sun explodes are more. We couldn't survive a day without them. They process our wastes and make the usable again, like little natural recycling plants. They purify our water and keep our soils fertilized. Bacteria in our gut convert things we eat into useful sugars and other stuff.

Microbes, supply the greater part of the planet's breathable oxygen. Algae and other tiny organisms under the sea push out 150 billion kilograms of oxygen every year. There is so many of them that they can create a whole new generation in 10 minutes. If the bacteria have enough nutrient supply a single bacteria cell can create 280,000 billion individuals in a single day. About once every million divisions, they make a mutant. These mutations can have advantages, such as the ability to repel an attack of antibiotics. Bacteria share information, If a bacteria cell is immune to antibiotics it can share it to other cells.

They will thrive on almost anything you spill. Just give them a little moisture and they will bloom as if created from nothing. They will eat wood, glue and metals in hardened paints. Scientist in Australia found a microbe know as the Thiobacillus concretivorans which lived in radioactive metal barrels, slowly destroying them.

Fungi, the group that includes mushrooms, moulds, mildews, yeasts where nearly always treated as plants even though they do not photosynthesize. Instead they grow directly on their food source, which could be anything. Fungi will eat anything between your toes, things no plants do.

By Brandon

Into the Troposphere

The Troposphere is why we are alive. It keeps us warm and without it we would have an average temperature of minus fifty degrees Celsius. The atmosphere is equivalent to four point five metres thickness of concrete. Without it invisible visitors from space would destroys us and raindrops would beat us silly. The atmosphere extends up to one hundred and ninety kilometres and is divided into four different layers. The Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere and the Ionosphere which is now more commonly known as the Thermosphere. The Troposphere alone has enough warmth and oxygen to keep us alive. It’s thickest at the equator. 

Beyond the Troposphere is the Stratosphere where an invisible boundary lies in between them and flattens storm clouds into anvil shapes. It is called the Tropopause which was discovered in 1902 by a Frenchmen called Leon-Philippe Teisserene de Boit. The temperature there at 10km is minus fifty seven degrees Celsius. After you leave the Troposphere the temperature warms back up to four degrees Celsius because of the absorptive effects of the ozone then it plunges to a minus ninety degrees Celsius in the Mesosphere before it sky rockets to one thousand five hundred degrees Celsius where in the Thermosphere the temperature can vary over five hundred degrees from day to night.

Temperature is the measurement of active molecules. At sea level air, molecules can only move a tiny distance before they bang into each other due to how thick they are. Molecules are always colliding into each other and when they hit one another heat gets exchanged except at fifty kilometres on the top of the Thermosphere where molecules will barely come in contact with each other which is good for spaceships, satellites because if there was more heat any manmade objects would burst into flames.

Spaceships must take extreme care in the outer atmosphere. If a spacecraft comes in at a steep angle for example 6 degrees it can generate drag of an exceedingly combustible nature. Also it could simply rebound back into space.

In the 1780’s people began to experiment with balloon ascents in Europe and were surprised at how chilly it got above the ground. For each one thousand metres the temperature dropped one point six degrees Celsius. They thought the closer you got to a source of heat the hotter it became. The only problem with that is the sun in ninety three million miles away and if it came another hundred metres closer it would cause bushfires in Australia and the smell of smoke in Ohio. Sunlight energises atoms which increases their activity which leads to them banging into each other and releasing heat into the atmosphere. Whenever you feel the warmth from the sunlight its really excited atoms you are feeling.

Altogether there is about five thousand two hundred million tonnes of air around us. Seven hundred and fifty million tonnes of cold air is pinned under billions of tonnes of warm air. The air above our heads is also a source of energy. One thunder storm has enough power to generate four days’ worth of electricity in U.S.A. The sky is a very lively place. Every second about one hundred lightning bolts hits the surface of the Earth accompanied by about forty thousand thunderstorms per day. Air moves due to the internal engine of the planet namely convection. Warm air rises from the equational area until it hits the Tropopause then it spreads out across the sky cooling down overtime until it sinks looking for an area with low pressure and then it heads back to the equator where it finishes its cycle.

Low pressure areas are made from rising air which follows water molecules into the sky forming clouds and rain. Tropical and summer storms are heavier than other storms because warm air can hold more moisture than cool air. Therefore areas with cloud and rain have a low pressured area and areas with sunshine and a fair weather and a higher air pressure. Air pressures are different due to the uneven heat from the sun. Air can’t avoid this so it travels around trying to keep the air pressure even everywhere.

In Ecole Polytechmique in Paris a scientist named Coriolis worked out the details of the interaction in the wind. He explained that anything moving through a straight line laterally to the Earths spin will to the right towards the Northern Hemisphere or to the left towards the Southern Hemisphere. This effect is called the Coriolis Effect and is the creator of spins that create cyclones and sometimes hurricanes.

Oceans differences in temperatures, salinity, depth and density have a huge effect on how heat is moved around. The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific therefore the water is denser.  Because dense water sinks the Atlantic currents do not reach the North Pole.  If they did it would deprive Europe of its warmth. The main heat transfer is Thermohaline circulation which originates in slow, deep currents far below the ocean’s surface which was discovered in 1779 by Count von Rumford. Thermohaline moves heat around and helps to stir up nutrients as currents rise and fall making the oceans habitable for fish and other marine life.

The oceans are crucial for life because they soak up huge volumes of Carbon Dioxide. The sun now burns twenty five percent brighter which should have had a catastrophic effect on the Earth, but life itself is keeping the Earth cool. Trillions of marine organisms capture atmospheric carbon in the form of carbon dioxide which they trap in their shells keeping the earth’s temperature at a liveable level.  If this did not happen the earth’s temperature would rise.  When these organisms die they fall to the bottom of the ocean and turn into limestone keeping the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Unfortunately humans have a knack for burning things as a total of one hundred billion tonnes of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere in 1850. Nature has saved us from ourselves with the Earth’s oceans and forests soaking up huge volumes of carbon dioxide. The Earths rapid increase of heat would cause many trees and plants to die and they won’t be able to store carbon dioxide for us.  But luckily nature is magnificent and the cycle of the earth cleaning itself allows organisms to live on it.

Bill Bryson - The Bounding Main

Bill Byson - The Bounding Main 

The chapter “The Bounding main” is about water and the oceans. Water is everywhere,  a potato is 80% , a tomato is 95% and a cow is 74% water . Water molecules move around constantly, pairing with other molecules and then moving along with another .This is why water has surface tension. There are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water on earth and there won’t ever be any more because of the water cycle there will be the same amount of water. 97% of water on earth is in the ocean 51.6% of the ocean is the pacific.

The average Depth of the ocean is 3.86 kilometres. In the 1830s British naturalist Edward Forbes surveyed the ocean beds in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and declared there was no life in all the seas below 600 metres. This was proved wrong when one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables were hauled up for repairs from more than 3 kilometres down and was found to be thickly encrusted with corals, clams and other living  things.

In 1930 the first submarine to go 183 metres deep was a cast iron camber with walls 1.5 inches thick (3.81 cm) and had two small portholes containing quartz blocks 3 inches thick. It held only two men . the camber had no manoeuvrability it just hung at the end of a long cable. To neutralize their  own carbon dioxide produced from breathing. they opened cans of soda lime. The men inside were Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton .In 1934 They went down to just  over 900 metres. Barton was confident that the device was safe to a depth of about 900 metres. In 1958 Jacques Piccard designed and made a deal with the navy to build a new bathyscaphe (meaning “deep boat”) that he went down to 10,918 metres it took four hours to fall that far .repeating this today would cost at least $100 million.

It is estimated that about a quarter of every finishing net hauled  up contains “by catch” which is fish that can’t be taken to land because they are too small , are the wrong type or caught in the wrong season. For every kilogram of shrimp harvested, about four kilograms of fish and other marine creatures are destroyed.

Around 1957/8 there was lots of nuclear wastes to get rid of so most countries were just putting their radioactive gunk in metal drums and threw them overboard. It wasn’t very smart because the type of drums they used are the ones you see rusting behind petrol stations. With no protective lining of any type. When they failed to sink the drums where shot at until they did but  this release plutonium , uranium and strontium . before dumping waste was halted in the 1990’s the united states , Russia , china , Japan , New Zealand (The book said NZ but I didn’t think that NZ had ever had any form of nuclear power?) and nearly all the nations of Europe had dumped some form of Nuclear waste into the ocean.

By Ethan Roylance 

Bill Bryson- Dangerous Beauty

Bill Bryson: Dangerous Beauty- Hamish Priest

Dangerous beauty is the 15th chapter of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and its main focus is on a National park in America called Yellowstone Park, and in the 1960s something strange happened. A geologist named Bob Christiansen was studying the volcanic history, the only issue was that he couldn't find the volcano.He was puzzled as he couldn't find a caldera. The reason behind it was the fact that the whole 9,000 square kilometer park was the caldera, the national park was one big volcano.

Yellowstone is known as a super volcano. It sits on a hot spot of molten rock beginning at at least 200 km underground and comes close to the earths surface. This is known as a super plume. The magma chamber is 72km across and 13 km thick. That is the the size of a English country filled with TNT going 13km into the sky and people are walk on top of it! 

The latest 3 eruptions have been massive. The last one was 1000 times more powerful than the VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index)scale of 5 which was the measurement of Mount St Helens eruption. The one before that was 280 times bigger and the one before that was so big that they couldn't even measure how big it was. Some say it was at least 2,500 times as big but 8000 times as monstrous.

The scary thing about Yellowstone park is they average a massive blow to happen once every 600, 000 years, and the last time it erupted was 630,000 years meaning its 30,000 years overdue and people are walking on it. The last time it erupted, nobody was around so nobody knows what the warning signs are, so nobody knows if Yellowstone is about to blow up . It could be giving us a warning right now and nobody wold know and nobody would know.

The park gets 3 million people visiting every year. If they did know the warning signs and know the park is about to blow, they would assess the degree of danger and inform the superintendent, who would then decide whether to evacuate everyone or not. Once you are past the park gates its every man for himself. 

Yellowstone is also on a fault zone and in 1959 at a place called Hebgen Lake, which is located just outside the park a 7.5 magnitude earthquake happened. It wasn't too big but was so abrupt that it made a mountain side collapse. That was 80 million tonnes of rock going at 160kmh. 28 people died but back then not many people went to Yellowstone so if it happened now the numbers would be much larger.  Also Paul Doss (the national park geologist) reckons that a BIG earthquake is going to happen.

South of Yellowstone there is a place called the Tetons which is a jagged mountain range and 9 million years ago, they didn't exist but then a 64km long fault opened  and supposedly every 900 years a big earthquake happens causing them to grow 2 meters. Saying this the last earthquake that happened there was somewhere around 5-7 thousand years ago meaning like the volcano itself, its over due-Big time.

There are at least 10,000 geysers in Yellowstone which is more than every other one in the world combined, and nobody knows when a new vent might open. Paul Doss showed Bill a place called Duck Lake which was a massive geyser that blew in the last 15,000 years. Paul Doss describe the blow as "several tens of millions of tons of earth and rock and super heated water blowing out at hyper(not super)sonic speed", and once again if another was to happen there would be no warning.

By Hamish Priest                                            

Bill Bryson - The Earth Moves

This chapter is about how different scientists throughout the century thought about how continents were formed and how they ended up in the positions that they are now.  The reason that this became a topic of interest was the fact that the same types of rocks and plant fossils were found in countries on opposite sides of the oceans.  Also, some scientists had observed that continents like Africa and South America looked like they fitted together.  one early theory by Austrian Eduard Suess said that the earth had cooled and become weaker in the manner of a baked apple pie, creating ocean basins and mountain ranges.  Another theory was that there used to be land bridges between continents, which allowed animals and plants to travel between these land masses.  Finally, scientists decided that the continents did move, and this was called ‘Continental Drift’.  One theory stated that there were convection currents underneath the earth that moved the continents around.  The continents were found to be sitting on large plates that were first called ‘crustal blocks’ or ‘paving stones’.  Finally they agreed to call them ‘plates’.

Connor McKenzie  

Bill Bryson-BANG

The chapter first talks about Manson, Iowa and the Manson crater. People knew for a long time that there was something odd about the earth beneath Manson, Iowa. In 1912 a man by the name of Manson dug a well drilling for water, when he discovered a strangely deformed rock. (crystalline clast breccia with a melt matrix and overturned ejecta flap). In 1953 geologists agreed that the rocks were formed by a unspecified volcanic eruption. Where Manson now stands has become a hole 3 miles deep and more than 20 miles across. Unfortunately, after 2.5 million years of passing, ice sheets filled the crater of Manson. This is why not many people of heard of the Manson crater. Every June now Manson has a week-long event called Crater Days, to help people forget a unhappy anniversary of a tornado that hit Main street that killed many people.

The chapter then talks about asteroids. Asteroids are rocky objects orbiting in loose formation in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. As of July 2001, 26,000 asteroids had been named and identified. With up to a billion to identify the count has barely begun.

In 1985, two geologists by the names of Anderson and Witzke, went to an annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union where two scientists, Izett and C.L. Pillmore of the US Geological Survey announced that the Manson crater was the right age to have been involved with the dinosaurs extinction. Unfortunately, a more careful examination of the data was revealed that Manson was not only to small but also 9 million years too early. Since this happened Anderson and Witzke no longer had the crater that made the dinosaurs extinct.

If a asteroid or comet travelling at cosmic velocities it would enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, like a bicycle pump. Since compressed air grows swiftly hot and the temperature would rise below it, when it enters the atmosphere everything in the meteor’s path would just crinkle or vanish. People up to 1500 km away would be knocked off their feet or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond 1500 km the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that's just the initial shock wave. The impact would set off earthquakes, cause volcanoes to erupt, tsunamis would rise and within an hour a cloud of blackness would cover the Earth and burning rock and debris would be pelting down everywhere. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead just after the first day. If we managed to get a warhead to the asteroid it would turn into a string of rocks that would slam into us one after the other.

The good news is that it appears to take an awful lot to extinguish a species. The bad news is that the good news can never be counted on. We shouldn't be looking at space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see. Earth can provide plenty of danger of it’s own.

Muster Marks Quarks

in 1911 a british scientist called, C.T.R. Wilson was studying cloud formations by tramping up the same mountain everyday. But he thought that there must have been an easier way instead of the daily tramp. So he built an artificial cloud chamber which could cool and moisten the air. it worked well but gave an after affect of leaving a trail while he accelerated an alpha particle making the particle detector or also known as the atom smasher because the accelerated alpha particle would fly into another particle and they would see what came off. Modern "atom smashers" can move particles at a speed to be able to run 47,000 laps around a 7km tunnel! But it is feared that scientists using these machines will create either a black hole or a thing called "strange quarks" which have the potential to uncontrollably explode. In 1980 production begun, for $8 billion to dig a 84km hole into the ground and create a huge "atom smasher" but they ended up only spending $2 billion on the project and only dug 22km deep and abondoned the project because of expenses. Quarks have the potential to explode the universe and the atom smasher is the only way we could create the quarks.

by Oscar

Bill Bryson- Getting the Lead Out

Bill Bryson- Getting the Lead Out

This chapter is about Thomas Midgley, Clair Patterson, and carbon dating. 

The chapter starts by talking about Thomas Midgley: he was trained as an engineer, and worked for the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio. He was also fascinated by industrial chemistry. One day while working in the late 1940's, he investigated a compound called tetrahedral lead, and discovered that it stopped engine cock, which was a common problem in those days. Lead was widely know as dangerous but was still used in everyday products such as toothpaste holders and food cans, if you get too much lead in your system then in can permanently damage the brain and cause serious health problems, for example kidney failure, delirium and comas. 

When the 3 biggest petrol companies in the USA heard that tetrahedral lead stopped engine cock they formed a company called Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to make as much tetrahedral lead the world could take. They discovered that it was very easy to work and extremely profitable. The company used 'ethyl' instead of 'lead because it sounded less toxic. The problem was when lead was introduced into petrol, it had the massive and long-lasting effect on the amount of lead on the earth.

The chapter then starts to talk about carbon-dating, which is the process of finding the age of rocks through the particles in it. Many people had tried to find a way to accurately do this but it was proving near impossible it seemed. Willard Libby and Arthur Holmes both put forward theories in the early 1940s but they were both proved wrong in one way or another.

When everyone had given up Clair Patterson worked on, even when he lost all funding from his university and didn't even have the funds to afford a calculator he tested and trialled with the most basic and cheapest equipment around.  It took seven years but finally, in 1953, he had samples to take into the National Laboratory for final testing, and it was discovered that he was right, his theory, involving Carbon-14 was correct. During his research Patterson had found unusual amounts of lead in the atmosphere,  he decided to research more into this.

After researching for a while he was astounded to find the amount of lead in the atmosphere and was shocked to see that by trial different things, before the 1900s, and the introduction of leaded petrol and use of lead in household items, there had been almost zero lead in the atmosphere. 50 years later and there was hundreds of thousands of pounds, all because of Thomas Midgley's idea of leaded petrol. 

Patterson was so stunned by the information he found, he started a full scale campaign to ban lead from petrol. It started a war between him and the Ethyl Corporation, Patterson arguing that the lead had devastating affects on the environment and people living there. The war lasted decades, when it finished Clair Patterson had no friends, and hardly any possessions, but he had won, leaded petrol was banned in the early 1990's and began to phase out.

The Ethyl company is still active and as late as 2001 it was still trying to get leaded petrol introduced again.

Bill Bryson - The Mighty Atom

Bill Bryson - The Mighty Atom

The Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one statement it would be: 'All things are made of atoms'. Everything you can touch and see around you is made up of atoms, including the air.

Atoms combine together to form molecules. At sea level, an object the size of a sugar cube will contain 45 billion billion molecules. Half a million atoms lined up side by side could still hide behind a single human hair. This shows how tiny atoms and molecules are and that there are a lot of them.

Atoms are also fantastically durable. They are passed from stars, to people, to plants. It has been suggested that a billion of the atoms that form a part of you, once belonged to William Shakespeare. So in a way, we are all reincarnations. When we die our atoms will be disassembled and reused into something else eg. another person, water, or a leaf. It has also been estimated that atoms can survive as long as 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

In the 1800s scientists such as John Dalton theorized the construction of atoms and molecules but because they are so tiny, it as impossible to prove who's theories were correct. This was the case until Earnest Rutherford conducted a series of experiments at Cambridge University in 1910. Rutherford's experiments proved atoms have a dense nucleus made up of neutrons, protons (positive charge), with electrons (negative charge) orbiting the nucleus. The nucleus only occupies 1 millionth of a billionth of the atom's full volume and atoms are essentially made up of empty space. If you expanded an atom to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would only be the size of a fly in the middle of it, except the fly would be thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.

As all things are made up of atoms and atoms are almost completely empty space, you might wonder why you don't just fall through the floor when standing on it. This doesn't happen because the negative charge the electrons have, repels the negative charge from atoms that it comes in contact with. So while you think you are standing of the floor, you're actually levitating 1 atom above the floor.

Further research that happened after 1905 by Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein gave rise to a theory called Quantum mechanics which describes the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. These theories have been tested and proven to be correct although from our everyday experiences they sound crazy. The current experiments at C.E.R.N using the large Hadron Collider are continuing to explore atoms and the very small world.

- Ella Jackson

Bill Bryson - Einstein's Universe

In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Everything, he writes a chapter about Einsteins Universe, in which he talks about the speed of light and other things. At the start of this chapter Bryson talks about the speed of light and how in the 1800s when physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley accidentally discovered the Ether, A medium that was thought to permeate the earth.This was needed in the 1800s when physicists thought that light and electromagnetism were seen as waves. Skip ahead a couple years and you find yourself Max Planck, a 42 year-old theoretical physicist at the university of Berlin. Planck unveiled a new quantum theory, which posited that energy is not a continuous thing like flowing water but comes in individualized packets, which he called quanta.This becomes relevant when talking about Einstien. Now on to everybody's favorite person, Alert Einstein, born in Ulm in 1879 Ablert wasn't a stand out kid, until later in life when he wrote the scientific paper "On the Electrodynamics of moving bodies". His famous equation "E = McSquared" came months later. In essence what relativity is, is your position relative to the moving object. Bryson goes on to talk about space time, and how gravity is a byproduct of space time. Edwin Hubble, the greatest astronomer of the 20th century, because he tackled these 2 questions. How old is the universe? and how big is it?. Although he did this, he couldn't understand why the universe never stopped expanding, that was discovered by Belgium pries-scholar Goerges Lemaitre who said that, the universe began as a geometric point, a 'primeval atom' , which burst into glory and hasn't stopped ever since.

Bill Bryson- Elemental Matters

The chapter “elemental matters” goes over the history of chemistry, and how it came into existence. it talks about the early stages, being when it was first distinguished as being different to alchemy, and about the famous (or not so famous) scientists and their discoveries. the first person talked about is Hennig Brand who discovered phosphorus in 1675. Then Scheele, with his discoveries of chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen and oxygen, and got credit for none of them. Then Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier who never discovered any elements, but took the discoveries of others and made sense of them. Then Humphry Davy, who discovered potassium, sodium, magnesium,calcium, strontium, and aluminium. It also talks about Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, who came up with the idea of the periodic table. Then it talks about Ernest Rutherford, and his works with radioactive materials.

Bill Bryson - Science Red in Tooth and Claw

Bill Bryson - Science Red in Tooth and Claw

In this chapter I learnt about how scientists analysed and discovered fossilized bones from creatures dated years and years ago.

It all started in 1787 when someone in New Jersey found a thigh bone, which was thought to be from a duckbilled dinosaur, sticking out of a stream bank at Woodbury Creek. At the time they didn't know about dinosaurs so they sent to to an anatomist  call Dr Caspar Wistar. He failed to recognize what the bone was from and missed the chance to be the discoverer of dinosaurs.

In Philadelphia, naturalists started to assemble the bones of a huge elephant-like creature known as 'the great American ingonitum' but was later identified as a mammoth. In their keeness to show the incognitum's ferocity, the naturalists appear to have gotten carried away. They overestimated its size by a scale factor of six and gave it terrifying claws, which actually came from a Megalonyx or a giant ground sloth.

In 1812 at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, a young child named Mary Anning found a starnge fossilized sea monster, 17 feet long and is now known as the ichthyosaurus, embedded in the steep, dangerous cliffs along the English Channel. That was the start of a remarkable career as Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. She is commonly belived to be the source of the famous tongue-twister 'She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore'.

In conclusion, scientists spent years trying to discover bones from dinosaurs and other creatures that were fossilized into stone all over America and England.

Bill Bryson - The Stone Breakers

 As far as I know this chapter of Bill Bryson is telling us about the history of geology. It is also telling us about the people themselves whom discovered new theories and ideas on their dispute.

The first person to discover geology was a man by the name of James Hutton. In his time with no rivalry, he found a question he needed an answer to, it was "how slow the shaping of the earth is". Unfortunately, he himself was not able to set it in a written form that people could understand. In his 1795 masterwork, he created the science of geology almost singlehandedly, changed our perspective on the shaping of the earth.

When James Hutton passed away, a man called Charles Lyell was born.  He became a professor of geology at Kings College in London from 1831 to 1833. Also at this time he produced 'the principles of geology,' which elaborated on the thoughts first voiced by James Hutton.
Between James Hutton's time and Lyells, there was another important idea people pondered about and in the end there became two sides, catastrophists and uniformiterains. Catastrophists thought that the earth was shaped by catastrophic events such as flooding and earthquakes. While the others thought it all happened over massive spans of time.
In the end, not one person in this generation could figure out an equation for how many years the earth had existed.