Episode 6.notebook April 15, 2014 Episode 6: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still The Universe inside a dew-drop. Many single-celled organisms live inside each drop of dew. Tardigrade (waterbear) is an impressive microscopic organism that can survive the most extreme environments on Earth, from volcanoes to Antarctica, including the vacuum of space. Tardigrades have survived all 5 known mass-extinctions. Chloroplasts: small cell-parts in plants that allow them to use sunlight to make sugar. Plants evolved before animals (or sugar eaters). The bio-sphere ,all the plants in the world, produce 6x more energy than humans do. Photosynthesis is incredibly efficient.Episode 6.notebook April 15, 2014 Tonia: small region in Ancient Greece where philosophy and science flourished. Tonia gave rise to great thinkers like Thales & Democritus Thales: challenges superstition and believed that natural occurrences happened because of Natural Laws and NOT angry deities. Democritus: obviously credited a little for Democracy, but in the big picture, he introduced the concept of the Atom. Ionian philosophers introduced Drama, Democracy, Basic Human Rights, Natural Laws, and improved Science. However, Rome came and screwed all that up, setting us back up to 1000 years.Episode 6.notebook April 15, 2014 Organic Chemistry: Chemistry dealing with Carbon atoms. It is called organic because it is the chemistry of life Carbon is really good at making bonds with other atoms. Carbon can make 4 bonds, and those bonds can form chains and stay very stable. You cannot truly touch anything. ON the atomic scale, your atoms never make contact with the floor or anything else. The matter that makes up your atoms is only .1% of it volume. 99.9% of your mass is in the nucleus of your atoms. Those nuclei are an even smaller fraction of the volume. Surrounding the nuclei are electron clouds, these are areas that basically have an electric charge, but almost no mass. If two nuclei were to really touch, we would have fusion.Episode 6.notebook April 15, 2014 When scientists first studied fusion, they realized that matter was somehow lost in the reaction. Wolfgang Pauli theorized that a very small, very elusive particle must exist. This particle would have no charge, very little mass, and move very quickly. It would also have to be very abundant. He called it a Neutrino. Took a long time to find them, because they move so fast and react so little, but we did. Now, we know that they permeate the Universe and have been around since before light made it out of the big bang.