In the next selection of interesting science news of the week: This story can hardly be called a scientific discovery. Rather, it is the conclusion of a story that began in 1961 when the Soviet Union detonated the most powerful nuclear bomb in history in the atmosphere above the Arctic Circle. It was called the AN602 “Tsar Bomba”. On August 20, the “Rosatom” corporation uploaded the Soviet film “Testing a pure hydrogen bomb with a capacity of 50 million tons” to its official YouTube channel. Within two weeks, it had been viewed more than three million times. No wonder, since it contains previously classified footage.
The detonation took place on October 30, 1961, above the Sukhoi Nos nuclear test site in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, at an altitude of about four kilometers. The nuclear mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 kilometers. The flash lasted more than a minute, and the cloud retained its shape for a long time and was visible from a distance of several hundred kilometers.
The order to create the “Tsar Bomba” was given by Nikita Khrushchev in July 1961, writes Popular Mechanics. He called for the development of a 100-megaton nuclear weapon, but only 50 megatons were achieved. Still, it was much more powerful than the American bomb detonated at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean during the “Castle Bravo” test in March 1954, which had a yield of 15 megatons. At the same time, in October 1961, Khrushchev openly announced the impending test. “We have said that we have a bomb of 100 million tons of TNT. And it’s true. But we will not explode such a bomb,” he said at the opening of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU.
The Soviet “Tsar Bomba” weighed 27 tons, according to Popular Mechanics. It was dropped from a modified Tu-95V strategic bomber using a system of multiple parachutes to slow the bomb’s descent and allow the pilots to get to a safe distance.
Tsar Bomb layout
There were no human casualties, and nothing similar has occurred since. In 1963, a historic treaty banning nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in space and underwater (also known as the Moscow Treaty) was signed by the USSR, the U.S. and Great Britain. Later, dozens of other countries joined the treaty, and although testing continues, it is conducted underground. The USSR tested the “Tsar Bomba” only once, but it was a symbol of its technology and military power demonstrated to the world before an international treaty banned further tests, the publication said. Now “Roscosmos” has reminded us of this symbol.
We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what happens next. The number of offers should remain: Episodes
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If the inhabitants of today’s New York were to travel back in time 170 million years, they would surely be surprised. No, not just by the dinosaurs – that’s what the Jurassic Period is for. They might have been surprised by Africa, which is not far from New York. Because during that time, the supercontinent of Pangaea was slowly splitting into pieces that spread in different directions, eventually forming the familiar sides of the world we know today.
This time travel is possible thanks to an interactive map created by programmer Ian Webster. This map can take you back to 750 million years ago, when the entire planet was covered in glaciers (at least that’s what scientists believe) and inhabited by single-celled organisms like green algae. And from there, you can travel all the way to the present day. The study of plate tectonics, the theory that the Earth’s crust is made up of lithospheric plates that are constantly moving relative to each other, dragging the continents with them, led to the creation of Webster’s Digital Globe.
“I couldn’t digest all the information, and interactive models were a bit outdated,” Webster explains. “That’s when the idea of creating my own map came to me, and I implemented most of the project during one of my long international flights.” Using the map is easy. You enter the name of the city and the time – for example, Paris 600 million years ago. And you see that at that time this point was under the world ocean. You enter 200 million years – and now the future capital of France is next to what is now Canada. As a starting point, one can use such temporal markers as the appearance of the first multicellular organisms (or flowers, or hominids).
“What I like most is the relatively recent, geologically speaking, stretch of time in which complex life forms have evolved,” Webster says. “Think about it: if the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, then the first plants appeared in the last 430 million years. I also like to look at what happened to the Appalachian mountain system. They used to be as high as the Himalayas, but time has eroded them.
Who said satellites don’t come back? Of course, sooner or later they do, and in a literal sense: they don’t end up in space museums, but burn up as bright stars in the dense layers of the atmosphere. This is exactly what happened to NASA’s OGO-1 (or Orbital Geophysical Observatory-1) satellite, which was launched in September 1964, completed its mission in 1971, and has been wandering aimlessly around the Earth ever since. Satellites of this series were launched until 1969 – the last one to be put into orbit was OGO-5. At the same time, its speed gradually slowed down and its orbit was lowered. All this led to an inevitable end. The satellite, weighing about half a ton, entered the dense layers of the atmosphere over the southern part of the Pacific Ocean and burned up safely, causing no harm to anyone. However, there was still some intrigue – the satellite defied NASA’s predictions and ended its existence 25 minutes earlier than planned, and to the east of the area where scientists had calculated it would end. However, the flash in the sky was observed in Tahiti, confirming to NASA that OGO-1 had interrupted its celestial journey.
What does it take to switch bodies with a friend? A good script and favorite actors, you might say, but that’s in the movies – what about in real life? “As a child, I loved to imagine waking up in someone else’s body,” recalls Pavel Tachikovsky, a neurologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “Maybe many children had such fantasies, but I didn’t outgrow it, I made it my profession.” Tachikovsky proposed to 33 pairs of friends to swap bodies using virtual reality helmets, giving them the opportunity to see themselves from a different perspective. Although the experiments lasted only a few minutes, the friends adapted to the foreign bodies so quickly that when one of them was threatened with a knife, the other immediately broke out in a cold sweat. Moreover, judging from the questions asked during the tests, the participants felt more like their own friends than themselves. The experiments revealed another interesting effect. After the tests, the participants’ episodic memory (memory for personal experiences) deteriorated significantly, meaning that their memories became noticeably fuzzier and their sense of self-awareness dulled. “We’ve clearly shown that the sense of self-awareness can change very quickly,” Tachikovsky says. “Why is this important? Take, for example, people who suffer from depression. They often have a very rigid negative view of themselves, and this has disastrous consequences in everyday life. But if we adjust this perception slightly, it has the potential to change their view of themselves for the better and improve their lives significantly.