Earth May Be a 1-in-700-Quintillion Kind of Place

A new study suggests that there are around 700 quintillion planets in the universe, but only one like Earth. It’s a revelation that’s both beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden arrived at this staggering figure — a 7 followed by 20 zeros  — with the aid of a computer model that simulated the universe’s evolution following the Big Bang. Zackrisson’s model combined information about known exoplanets with our understanding of the early universe and the laws of physics to recreate the past 13.8 billion years.

Zackrisson found that Earth appears to have been dealt a fairly lucky hand. In a galaxy like the Milky Way, for example, most of the planets Zackrisson’s model generated looked very different than Earth — they were larger, older and very unlikely to support life. The study can be found on the preprint server arXiv, and has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

Rethinking Copernicus

Zackrisson’s work suggests an alternative to the commonly held assumption that planets similar to Earth must exist, based on the sheer number of planets out there. Ever since Copernicus put forth the theory that Earth is not the center of the universe, scientists have expanded the map of the cosmos and diminished our planet’s relative uniqueness. Current estimates hold that there are some 100 billion galaxies in the universe containing about 10^18 stars, or a billion trillion.

One of the most fundamental requirements for a planet to sustain life is to orbit in the “habitable zone” of a star — the “Goldilocks” region where the temperature is just right and liquid water can exist. Astronomers have, to this point, discovered around 30 exoplanets in the habitable zones of stars. Simply extrapolating that figure based on the known number of stars suggests that there should be about 50 billion such planets in the Milky Way alone. Probability seems to dictate that Earth-twins are out there somewhere.

But according to Zackrisson, most planets in the universe shouldn’t look like Earth. His model indicates that Earth’s existence presents a mild statistical anomaly in the multiplicity of planets. Most of the worlds predicted by his model exist in galaxies larger than the Milky Way and orbit stars with different compositions — an important factor in determining a planet’s characteristics. His research indicates that, from a purely statistical standpoint, Earth perhaps shouldn’t exist.

culture of South Africa

The culture of South Africa is known for its ethnic and cultural diversity. The South African majority still has a substantial number of rural inhabitants who lead largely impoverished lives. It is among these people, however, that cultural traditions survive most strongly; as Africans have become increasingly urbanized and Westernised, aspects of traditional culture have declined. Urban Africans usually speak English or Afrikaans in addition to their native tongue. There are smaller but still significant groups of speakers of Khoisan languages, not included in the eleven official languages, but are one of the eight other officially recognised languages. There are small groups of speakers of endangered languages, most of which are from the Khoisan family, that receive no official status; however, some groups within South Africa are attempting to promote their use and revival.

Members of middle class, who are predominantly white but whose ranks include growing numbers of people of colour, have lifestyles similar in many respects to that of people found in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Members of the middle class often study and work abroad for greater exposure to the markets of the world.

Indian South Africans preserve their cultural heritage, languages and religious beliefs, being either Christian, Hindu or Muslim and speaking English, with Indian languages like Hindi, Telugu, Tamil or Gujarati being spoken less frequently as second languages. The first Indians arrived on the Truro ship as indentured labourers in Natal to work the Sugar Cane Fields, while the rest arrived as traders. A post-apartheid wave of South Asian (including Pakistani) immigration has also influenced South African Indian culture. There is a much smaller Chinese South African community, made up of early immigrants, apartheid-era immigrants from Taiwan, and post-apartheid immigrants from mainland China.

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The Odds of Dying

Everyone dies of something, but after slogging through the daily news, you'd think most people die from terrorism, shark attacks and gas explosions. But are these tragedies — not to mention deaths from lightning strikes, plane crashes and tsunamis — actually top killers in the United States? Not really. Even combined, these incidents killed far fewer people than the most deadly illness — heart disease, which took the lives of more than 614,000 people in the United States in 2014, accounting for about 23 percent of all deaths in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To separate the deaths that make headlines from those that are far more common, Live Science investigated the odds of dying from various causes. We used the CDC's Wonder database for 2014 data and other sources, and found that you're more likely to die of Alzheimer's disease (about 29 deaths per 100,000 people in the U.S.) than you are from contact with a venomous snake or lizard (there were just five such deaths in 2014). In total, about 2.6 million people died in the United States in 2014, according to the CDC. To put this number into perspective, that means about 824 people died for every 100,000 people in the country. (Keep this statistic in mind, as we'll be giving death rates per 100,000 people throughout this article.) Worldwide, an estimated 56 million people died in 2012, the most recent year for which numbers on worldwide deaths are available from the World Health Organization (WHO). Although Hollywood advised us (in no fewer than five of its blockbusters) to "Die Hard," there are a ton of ways to die. Here's a look at how many people die from common, unexpected and even theoretical events, and the science behind those numbers.

Smartphones Could Generate Own Power with New Coating

A transparent material that can be attached to a smartphone's touch screen could help the device generate electricity whenever anyone taps it, researchers in China say. Touch screens are now found on most cell phones and tablet computers. Using a touch screen typically involves finger taps, and scientists at Lanzhou University in China reasoned that the mechanical energy from these motions could be converted into electricity to charge the phone's batteries, which could significantly extend the working time of these portable devices. The researchers developed a new material based on a transparent silicone rubber known as PDMS. Scientists embedded wires in this rubber that were made of lead zirconate titanate that were only 700 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide. For perspective, this is about 140 times thinner than the average width of a human hair.

The Human Brain's Memory Could Store the Entire Internet

The human brain may be able to hold as much information in its memory as is contained on the entire Internet, new research suggests. Researchers discovered that, unlike a classical computer that codes information as 0s and 1s, a brain cell uses 26 different ways to code its "bits." They calculated that the brain could store 1 petabyte (or a quadrillion bytes) of information. "This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," Terry Sejnowski, a biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, said in a statement. "Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10."

British Culture

The typical Briton is introspective, patriotic, insular, xenophobic, brave, small-minded, polite, insecure, arrogant, a compulsive gambler, humorous, reserved, conservative, reticent, hypocritical, a racist, boring, a royalist, condescending, depressed, a keen gardener, semi-literate, hard-working, unambitious, ironic, passionless, cosmopolitan, a whinger, hard-headed, liberal, a traditionalist, a couch potato, obsequious, a masochist, complacent, homely, pragmatic, cynical, decent, melancholic, unhealthy, a poor cook, pompous, eccentric, inebriated, proud, self-deprecating, tolerant, inhibited, a shopaholic, conceited, courageous, idiosyncratic, mean (a bad tipper), courteous, jingoistic, stuffy, overweight, well-mannered, pessimistic, disciplined, a habitual queuer, stoic, modest, gloomy, shy, serious, apathetic, honest, wimpish, fair, snobbish, friendly, quaint, decadent, civilised, dogmatic, scruffy, prejudiced, class conscious and a soccer hooligan. Class Systems One of the things which initially confuses foreigners living in the UK is its class system, which is a curious British affectation. Entry to the upper class echelons is rooted in birthright and ill-bred upstarts with pots of ‘new’ money (particularly foreigners with unpronounceable names), find they’re unable to buy entry to the most exclusive clubs and homes of England (even when they’re seriously rich). Many Britons are obsessed with class and for some, maintaining or improving their position on the social ladder is a full-time occupation (the ultimate aim being to acquire a knighthood or peerage). The rest of us pretend we’re a ‘better’ class than we actually are, with the exception of a few politicians who are busy trying to live down their privileged past in order to court popularity with the underprivileged masses. British Food One thing that would probably cause a strike in any country is British food, particularly in most company canteens and restaurants, where everything is served with chips or ice-cream. Of course, British food isn’t always as bad as it’s painted by foreigners. (What can people who eat anything that crawls, jumps, swims or flies, possibly know about real food?). While it’s true that British food is often bland, may look terrible and can make you sick, for most people it’s just a matter of getting used to it. (What’s wrong with a diet of brown sauce, chips, biscuits and tea, anyway?). After all, it’s usually necessary to become acclimatised to the food in most foreign countries. However, it’s difficult not to have some sympathy with foreigners who think that many British ‘restaurants’ should post health warnings and be equipped with an emergency medical centre. (There’s nothing wrong with British food that a good stomach pump cannot cure). It may come as a surprise to many foreigners to learn that British bookshops are bursting with cookery books and they aren’t all written by foreigners. The UK also has many popular television cookery programmes that usually feature eccentric (and excellent) chefs and scrumptious looking food. The British can console themselves with the knowledge that they (or some of them) at least know how to behave at the table, even if they don’t have much idea what to serve on it.