Has Science Gone Too Far

Long before plants overtook the planet, the Earth was covered in giant, tree-sized mushrooms.

the image is fake. but:

currently, the world’s largest single organism IS a mushroom. it’s a massive growth of honey mushrooms, growing under a forest in oregon. it takes up about 4 square miles, stretched out over 60 miles.

we don’t know exactly how old it is, but based on it’s growth rate, it’s anywhere between 2000-8650 years old. (!!! *excitement*)

the caption is also true, although also completely unrelated to the (fake) picture. here are real pictures of them:

(lol)

the fossils found are called prototaxites, and there’s actually still some debate about what exactly they are- mostly because a lot of scientists simply can’t wrap their heads around the idea of giant mushrooms covering the earth. the alternate theories of what they were are lichen or rolled-up formations of moss, but giant mushrooms seems to be the leading theory.

whatever they were, they were everywhere, and at aprox. 20 feet tall, they were the tallest organisms on land from approximately 420 million to 350 million years ago.

fan art!!!

conclusion: ANCIENT EARTH HAD GIANT DONGS GROWING OUT OF IT. ALL OVER THE PLACE.

     omg. okay, so basically, I was a “gifted kid” which was code for fucken nerd ass bitch, so i would constantly just stare off into space during class while everyone else was tryna figure out what the fuck our teacher was tryna say. Anyway, I was learning about chemistry and biology outside of school(i know what a fucking nerd amirite ladies), and my dad got me a book that talked about all these famous psychological experiments.

    So chapter one was, would you have guessed it, Pavlov’s dog. I thought it my be fun to try something to that extent with my classmates. Now, keep in mind, being a nerdy ass brown kid in a school full of white ppl meant that I wasn’t exactly popular, and no one really talked to me in class or cared what I was doing.

   Everyday, at 9:45 am, our teacher would announce that it was snacktime, and everyone would fucking sprint to their cubbies to grab their lunchboxes like it was the goddamn hunger games. Kindergarten kids didn’t really have a concept of time, so i used this to my advantage. At 9:45 as my teacher would walk up to announce snacktime, I would knock on my desk really quickly three times. It was rly subtle, and I wasn’t sure that it would work.

   So after two or three weeks, I decided to have some fun. Thirty minutes after school began at like 8:30 or something, I tapped knocked on the desk. Half the class turned their heads and looked straight at the cubbies. 3 boys got up and were about to run to get their lunchbox. One girls stomach started growling REALLY loudly. The teacher had to take 5 minutes to get everyone to calm down and one kid started crying because he thought it was snacktime and he was so shocked and destroyed.

   Realizing that I had basically dog trained the whole class, I burst out laughing so hard I fell out of my chair and cut my head on the tile floor and got sent home early because I was laughing so hard they thought I had a concussion or something. When I explained what happened to my dad he left the room, but I could hear him losing it in the hallway. 

There were 20-something of us in the classroom, all dying of sleep deprivation since it was the first day back to school, first class of the day. Mr. Moses was that teacher you weren’t sure how to deal with. I mean, the man’s name was Noah Eugene Moses, for starters. He drove a Harley to school, but also drove the bus. He had giant cokebottle glasses and a doofy mustache with shaggy ex-Beatles hair. He always wore suspenders and a grease-stained t-shirt because he had a potbelly and taught the shop/electrical classes. He wasn’t even really lecturing; he was throwing in tidbits of the syllabus in the midst of bad jokes and fun stories. We were all a bit nervous, because none of us had taken a class from him before, but his tests were legendary—nobody had ever made it out with an A (until I did, but that’s another story for another time and involves a really awesome bet and some hair cutting scissors).

Well, as we were fighting to stay awake, and attempting to take notes of whatever he was talking about, he was pacing around the room from here to there, straightening things and moving stuff. He was very scatterbrained, and it was easy to tell from how he kept forgetting where he put his coke. Turns out, that was just a ruse. He had the can filled with just a tiny bit of water, and the things he was moving around were stacks of papers and books hiding the hot plate and water basin. So he set his coke can down onto the hot plate, continued talking loudly enough so we wouldn’t hear the water boiling, and then knocked it over really fast into the water basin.

BANG!!!!!!!!

Three girls fell out of their seats, one dude swore so violently I’m pretty sure the devil himself cringed, everyone at least jumped and screamed, and I actually broke my pen in half.

See, with rapid decompression comes a vacuum, and with a vacuum comes a rushing of air that creates a massive sound. Think “thunder”. That’s the same principle behind it. His little tiny coke can of steam into a bucket of ice water, and we had a bang so loud the band teacher came in from across the hall to see “what was exploding today.” To which Mr. Moses responded, “Nothing, it imploded. Explosions are chapter 3.”

photos by paul nicklen, who explains, “i have been traveling to northern baffin island for more than twelve years to try and get one underwater picture of a male narwhal. narwhals are very shy. they have a sensitive nature and excellent echolocation. you can see hundreds passing by the ice edge, but when you slip into the water, you may never see one.”

“but late one afternoon, i had been in the waterfor a couple of hours, and i was freezing so badly that my legs and arms were cramping up. i couldn’t feel my lips around my snorkel, so i just stared into the black 2,000 foot abyss trying not to think about how cold i was.

“then, out of the corner of my eye, i noticed something bright traveling through the murky water. i turned my head, and there they were: several male narwhals, swimming in beautiful formation. as i put my frozen finger on the shutter and …the narwhal closest to me let out a stream of bubbles. (seen in the middle photo)." 

The multiverse also known as meta-universe or parallel universe is the hypothetical set of infinite universes. This states that the universe we live in may in fact not be the only one. There are five possible theories that explain multiverse. These theories are: infinite universes, bubble universes, parallel universes, daughter universes and finally the mathematical universes. Physicist used math to get to these conclusions. 

The infinite universe states that space-time is flat, stretching continuously, provoking the universe to repeat itself at certain points because there are only finite ways particles can be arranged in space. The repeated universes hypothetically has an exact version of yourself but with different life choices.

The bubble universes arise from the inflation that occurred during the Big Bang. When the Big Bang exploded the universe expanded like a balloon, some areas stopped expanding allowing stars and planets to form while other parts continued to inflate creating bubbled shaped universes. The difference between this theory and the first is that each bubble universe may have different laws of physics making each universe differently. 

Parallel universes says that our universe is formed by other dimensions in higher space time other than the three dimensions that we all ready know off. These other dimensions creates infinite universes. This theory adds the possibilities that the universes in each dimension can crash into each other initiating big bangs,  resetting the universe. 

Daughter universes is based on quantum mechanics. The difference between this theory versus the others is that instead of basing on actual outcomes it focuses probabilities. For example in this universe who have the choice to choose a burger or burrito, in that instant two daughter universes arises where you witness each universe by thinking. 

The complete ‘Women Who Changed Science - And The World" collection in honor of the 95th Women’s Equality Day.