Science

Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes understanding about the natural world. in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

Facts about the natural world have been described since classical antiquity. Aristotle wrote that the truth can be found through observation and induction. This was his scientific method. Socrates' example of applying philosophy to the study of human things, including human knowledge itself was a turning point in the history of early philosophical science.

The School of Athens by Raphael. Aristotle is pictured in blue in the centre arch

Scientific methods have been used since the Middle Ages. The English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, for instance, placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods.

The dawn of modern science is often traced back to the early modern period and in particular to the scientific revolution that took place in 17th-century Europe. During this period centuries scientists began to formulate knowledge in terms of laws of nature such as Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion.

Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Christopher Wren and other leading scientists founded a learned society now known as the Royal Society at London's Gresham College on November 28, 1660.

Not surprisingly, active Christians, with their interest in God's creation, brought the society into existence. In fact, its membership was overwhelmingly Puritan in makeup. It grew out of the meetings of the "Invisible College" who gathered in the late 1640s at the home of the chemist Robert Boyle's favorite sister, Katherine. She supported the Parliamentarians (and Puritans) in the revolt against Charles I. Of deep intelligence herself, Boyle welcomed the group into her house so that she might share the new findings.

When the Royal Society was chartered by King Charles II of England on July 15, 1662, it was the first scientific society in history.

The first joint Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, published the first issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the world's longest-running scientific journal on March 6, 1665.

Title page of 1st edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, by Henry Oldenburg

Over the course of the 19th century, the word "science" became increasingly associated with the scientific method itself, as a way to study the natural world, including physics, chemistry, geology and biology.

The term `biology' was coined around 1800, by, amongst others, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, a professor at Bremen, and the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

The term scientist was first used by theologian, philosopher and historian of science William Whewell in 1840. He meant it to distinguish those who sought knowledge on nature from those who sought other types of knowledge. Previously, people investigating nature called themselves "natural philosophers".

"Zohnerism", the use of true fact(s) to lead a scientifically ignorant public to a false conclusion, was coined in 1997 after 14-yr-old Nathan Zohner gathered petitions to ban the ''dangerous chemical dihydrogen monoxide'' (water) from school as the basis of his science project, titled "How Gullible Are We?"

Modern science is usually divided into separate areas of study, such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics and physics.

Scientists in a laboratory of the University of La Rioja.

The Bible described many scientific truths in the Old Testament, thousands of years before man discovered them. Here are some examples:

Scientific Fact or Principle Bible reference Date of discovery by man

Life originated in the sea Genesis 1 19th Century
Man was the last animal created Genesis 1 15th Century
The Earth is held in place by invisible forces Job 26:7 1650
The Earth is round Isaiah 40:22 15th Century

"The Blue Marble" is a famous photograph of the Earth 

Certain animals carry diseases harmful to man Leviticus 11 16th Century
Quarantine for disease control Leviticus 13 17th Century
Blood is necessary for life Leviticus 17:11 19th Century
Oceans have natural paths in them Psalms 8:8 1854
Mountain ranges on ocean floor Job 2 1950s
Light is a particle and has mass (a photon) Job 38:19 1932
Radio astronomy (stars give off signals) Job 38:7 1945
Infinite number of stars exist Genesis 15:5 1940
Stars move through space Job 38:32 19th Century
Plants use sunlight to manufacture food Job 8:16 1920.

Here is a list of songs about science.

Source Christianity

Sand

Sand is a mixture of loose grains of different rocks or minerals such as granite, quartz and sand stone.

Close-up (1×1 cm) of sand from the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. By Siim Sepp

Sand consists chiefly of quartz but owes its varying color to its mixtures of other minerals.

There are seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand in the world, according to mathematicians at the University of Hawaii.

Beach sand is crucial in the process of mixing concrete and the construction industry uses billions of tons of the granular material every year. Desert sand has the wrong chemical composition for construction.

Sand is the second most used natural resource worldwide, after fresh water.

Sand is a non-renewable resource, and its world supplies are beginning to dwindle. Beach sand suitable for making concrete is in increasingly high demand.

Handprint in beach dand

Saudi Arabia imports sand from Australia.

Sand from the Sahara is blown by the wind all the way to the Amazon, recharging its minerals. The desert literally fertilizes the rain forest.

4% of the sand in Normandy today is made up of metal particles from D-Day.

The most common type of black sand is made of volcanic minerals and lava fragments, like at Punaluu Beach, in Hawaii.

At the southern tip of the island of Hawaii, there is a green sand beach. Most beaches are made of quartz, however, the beaches of Hawaii are made almost entirely from smoothed shells. The green sand comes from the material, olivine.

There are thirty places on Earth where sand dunes can "sing," producing sounds and vibrations when the wind moves their sand particles.

Trains have sandboxes which dispense sand immediately in front of the drive wheels to give the locomotive traction on steep or slippery rails.

The town of Sandwich in South East England took its name from Saxon words meaning 'sandy place'.

Source: Thoughtco

Rock

TYPES OF ROCK

Rock is the constituent of the Earth's crust, either in its unconsolidated form as clay, mud, or sand, or consolidated into a hard mass as igneous rock, sedimentary rock, or metamorphic rocks. (Consolidation is the process which turns the matter into a more or less hard substance.)

Sedimentary rocks are the most common rocks on Earth. They form at or near the Earth's surface.

The approximate amounts of different kinds of sedimentary rock are;
Shale (including mudstone, and siltstone): 60%
Sandstones 20%.
Carbonate rocks (limestone and dolomite): 15%.
All others: 5%.

Bedford shale

Trovants are a type of rock in Romania that can grow and multiply.

Basalt is the most common type of rock on Earth.

More than 90 percent of all volcanic rock on Earth is basalt

California is home to a wider variety of rock types than any other U.S. state.

FUN ROCK FACTS

Petrology is the scientific study of rocks.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented the sport of rock-climbing. On August 5, 1802, Coleridge set off on a tough 9-day walking and climbing tour of the Lake District, which would include Scafell, the second highest peak in England.  Coleridge made the first recorded ascent of Scafell and his descent via the rockface of Broad Stand is hailed as the first ever recreational rock climb.

The current world record for the longest continuous rock climbing route (traverse) is held by the El Capitan Girdle Traverse in Yosemite National Park, USA. According to the Guinness World Records it measures about 14,000 ft (≈ 4,267 m) and was first climbed in April 1998 by Chris McNamara and Mark Melvin.

Mount Augustus in the Australian Outback is the largest rock on Earth. It can be seen from almost 100 miles away and is about 2,352 feet high.

Moiunt Augustus. By Graeme Churchard from Bristol, UK 

The volcanic rock known as pumice is the only rock that can float in water.

When a rock is dropped into water, an hourglass-shaped cavity of air is created, which ejects the air faster than the speed of sound.

The Kailasa temple in India was carved out of a single rock. Also known as 'Cave 16' of the Ellora Caves, the Hindu temple is notable for being the largest monolithic structure in the world carved out of a single piece of rock.

Kailasa Temple, Ellora by Pratheepps 

PET ROCK

In 1975 advertising executive Gary Dahl came up with the idea of pet rocks. The theory was that they a rock would be a perfect pet as it did not need to be fed, walked, bathed, or groomed, and would not die.

Pet rocks were marketed like live pets in custom cardboard boxes. Inside was the instruction manual and a smooth Mexican beach stone on a bed of straw.

Pet Rocks sitting on a couch. By Owner of Pet Rock Net 

Dahl sold 1.5 million Pet Rocks for $4 each, and became a millionaire.

Quicksand

Quicksand is a condition that occurs within any type of soil- but most common in sand. It happens when water in the sand cannot escape, which creates a liquefied soil that loses strength and cannot support weight.

Quicksand and warning sign at a gravel quarry in England, UK.. By Andrew Dunn 

A mule is less likely to sink in quicksand than a donkey. This is because the mule is said to remain calm and relaxed in quicksand while donkeys, due to their fear and anxiety, struggles to escape and thereby get trapped deeper and deeper.

By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand.

Quicksand may be found inland (on riverbanks, near lakes, or in marshes), or near the coast.

One region notorious for its quicksands is Morecambe Bay, Yorkshire in North England. As the bay is very broad and shallow, a person trapped by the quicksand would be exposed to the danger of the fast moving tides.

People falling into (quicksand or a similar substance was once recurrent theme of adventure fiction, notably in movies. According to a study by the University of Southern California, this gimmick had its heyday in the 1960s, when 2.8% of all films showed someone sinking in mud, sand, or clay. The study also found that the number of films featuring these scenes increased steadily throughout the decade, from 1.2% in 1960 to 4.2% in 1969.

The study's authors suggest that the popularity of these scenes may be due to the fact that they are both suspenseful and visually appealing. Quicksand is a particularly dangerous substance, as it can quickly trap and drown people who are unlucky enough to fall into it. This danger makes scenes of people sinking in quicksand particularly suspenseful, as the viewer is left wondering whether or not the person will be able to escape. Additionally, the slow-motion sinking of a person's body into quicksand can be visually quite striking, making it a popular choice for filmmakers.

The southern sand octopus shoot jets of water into the sand below it, creating a pit of quicksand to escape from predators.

Peat

Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation that forms in wetland bogs, moors, mires, and swamps. It is composed mainly of marshland vegetation: trees, grasses, fungi, as well as other types of organic remains, such as insects, and animal remains.

Peat hags at the start of Allt Lagan a' Bhainne tributary on Eilrig. By Sarah McGuire,

The formation of peat is often the first step in the geological formation of other fossil fuels such as coal, particularly low-grade coal such as lignite.

There are about 4 trillion m³ of peat in the world with Canada, Finland, Ireland and Russia all having large deposits. Peatlands between 2-3% of the land surface of Earth, but are thought to contain twice as much carbon as all the world's forests.

Peat gatherers at Westhay, Somerset Levels in 1905

The Congo Basin peatland is a 56,000-square-mile swamp — an area larger than New York State — and is considered to be the world's largest tropical peatland.

The Congo Basin peatland has accumulated around 30 billion metric tons of carbon over the last 11,000 years, , the equivalent of 20 years worth of U.S. fossil fuel emissions.

Most modern peat bogs formed in high latitudes after the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age some 9,000 years ago. They usually grow slowly, at the rate of about a millimetre per year.

Peat is harvested as an important source of fuel in some countries, including Ireland and Scotland, where it is traditionally used for cooking and domestic heating.

Peat fire

Peat fires are used to dry malted barley for use in Scotch whisky distillation. This gives Scotch whisky its distinctive smoky flavour, often called "peatiness".

Ireland has three peat fired power plants. Using peat taken from Irish bogs, it's more polluting than coal and is so inefficient it is subsided by the state.

Although peat has many uses for humans, it also presents problems. When dry, it can be a major fire hazard, as peat fires can burn almost indefinitely (or at least until the fuel is exhausted).

Grand Canyon

Though Native Americans lived in the area as early as the thirteenth century, the first European sighting of the Grand Canyon in Arizona wasn't until 1540 by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.

Because the Grand Canyon was remote and difficult to navigate, centuries passed before it was fully explored by American settlers. In 1869, geologist John Wesley Powell led a group of ten men in the first difficult journey down the rapids of the Colorado River and along the length of the 277-mile gorge in four rowboats.

By the end of the 19th century, the Grand Canyon was attracting thousands of tourists each year. One visitor was President Theodore Roosevelt, a New Yorker with a particular affection for the American West. On January 11, 1908, Roosevelt declared the Grand Canyon a national monument, protecting its 800,000 acres from private development.

Congress did not officially outlaw private development in the Grand Canyon until February 26, 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Grand Canyon National Park Act., establishing most of the Grand Canyon as a United States National Park.

Kenton "Factor" Grua (1950 – 2002) was a Grand Canyon river guide. He was the first person in recorded history to hike through the Grand Canyon's entire length. Grua reached the end of the canyon, Grand Wash Cliffs, on April 4, 1977, exactly five weeks after he had begun.

In 1983, Grua set the speed record for rowing through the canyon in 37 hours, which has yet to be broken.

American daredevil Nik Wallenda became the first man to successfully walk across the Grand Canyon on a tight rope on June 23, 2013. He crossed the Little Colorado River outside Grand Canyon National Park.

The Grand Canyon National Park is home to several Indian tribes, and the Zuni (a Puebloan tribe) still consider the Grand Canyon to be a sacred site.

Thanks to the range of elevations found in the Grand Canyon, it's fertile ground for a wide variety of wildlife, and boasts more than 1,500 types of plant and over 500 types of animal.

The Grand Canyon is about 1800 meters deep. That's more than twice the height of the world's largest skyscraper (the Burj Khalifa in Dubai),

The Grand Canyon can hold around 900 trillion footballs.

People live inside the Grand Canyon. Supai Village, the capital of the Havasupai Indian Reservation, boasts a population of a couple of hundred residents, is considered the most remote community in the continental US, and is the only place where mail is delivered and carried out by mule.

If every human alive today was piled into the Grand Canyon, we wouldn't fill it up — not even close.

There have been more than 600 deaths in the Grand Canyon since the 1870s.

The floor of the Grand Canyon can reach 40 degrees Celsius.

Hollywood movies as diverse as Bride and Prejudice, Thelma and Louise, Transformers and National Lampoon's Vacation have all been set at the Grand Canyon.

Today, the Grand Canyon is visited by more than five million people each year.

Source History.com

Crater

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It was formed by a large asteroid or comet about 11 to 81 kilometres (6.8 to 50.3 miles) in diameter slightly less than 66 million years ago. The event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

Five monks from Canterbury reported to the abbey's chronicler, Gervase, that shortly after sunset on June 18, 1178, they observed "the upper horn [of the moon] split in two.” What they saw was possibly the Giordano Bruno crater being formed.

It is believed that the current oscillations of the Moon's distance from the Earth are a result of the collision that the monks witnessed.

The largest crater on the moon measures 183 miles across.

Korolev crater on Mars is 50 miles wide, contains 530 cubic miles of water ice (as much as the Great Bear Lake in northern Canada), and in the center of the crater the ice is more than a mile thick

Pharos, the largest impact crater on Neptune's moon Proteus, is more than half the diameter of Proteus itself.

Canyon

A canyon is a deep, narrow valley with steep sides, typically carved over millions of years by a river cutting through rock or by tectonic activity shifting the Earth's crust.

The Indus Gorge, which goes through the Himalaya mountain range in northern Pakistan is the deepest canyon in the world.

The Grand Canyon is about 1800 metres deep. That's more than twice the height of the world's largest skyscraper (the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, built in 2010).

Aerial view of The Grand Canyon by Workman - Wikipedia

In August 2013, the discovery of Greenland's Grand Canyon was reported. Located under an ice sheet, based on the analysis of data from Operation IceBridge, it is believed to be the longest canyon in the world.

The deepest river gorge in North America is Idaho's Hells Canyon. At a depth of 7,900 feet, it is even deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Venus has many craters and canyons on its surface. The troughs on the planet are part of a system of canyons that is more than 6,400 km long.

The largest canyon in the solar system is Valles Marineris on Mars. It runs approximately 4,000 km (2,500 miles) in length — roughly the width of the entire United States — and reaches depths of up to 9 km (5.6 miles), making it around six to seven times deeper than the Grand Canyon.

A canyon is typically formed over millions of years, either by a river gradually cutting through rock, or by tectonic activity. Canyons can also form underwater, created by deep-sea currents carving into the ocean floor.

The rock at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is estimated to be around 2 billion years old, while the rock at its rim is only about 230 million years old — meaning the rocks at the top and bottom span nearly two billion years of Earth's history.

Antelope Canyon, located in the desert of Arizona on Navajo Nation land near Page, is one of the most photographed canyons in the world. It is a slot canyon — a narrow, winding canyon formed when water rushes through cracks in the bedrock. It became an official Navajo Tribal Park in 1997, and guided tours are required to enter it.

The Cotahuasi Canyon in Peru is considered by many geographers to be the deepest canyon in the world, reaching depths of over 3,500 metres — roughly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Asphalt

Asphalt, also known as bitumen, is a black, cement-like material varying in consistency at room temperature from solid to semisolid. 

Refined asphalt

It has various other names: pitch, tarmac, blacktop, asphalt concrete, asphalt pavement (US), all mean roughly the same thing. Before the 20th century, the term asphaltum was also used.

Asphalt which is liquid is often called tar. 

Asphalt can be poured when heated to the temperature of boiling water. Its main use is in road construction. Mixed with "aggregate" (sand, gravel, crushed stone, etc.) it makes a good highway surface. 

Asphalt is also used in lining the walls of water-retaining structures such as reservoirs and swimming pools, and in manufacturing floor tiles and roofing felt and for sealing flat roofs.

Natural deposits of asphalt occur in pits or lakes as residue from crude petroleum that has seeped up through fissures in the earth. 

Natural asphalt was used extensively in ancient times. Ancient Babylonians used it as a building material, and it is referred to several times in the Old Testament books of Genesis and Exodus as a caulking material 

Pitch Lake in Trinidad is the world’s largest natural asphalt deposit covering almost 100 acres (0.155 sq ml) 245 feet (75 metres) deep. It is estimated to contain 10 million tons.

Pitch Lake, 2016 By Grueslayer - Own work

The La Brea tar pits (or Rancho La Brea) are a famous cluster of tar pits in central Los Angeles where the remains of prehistoric flora and fauna and complete skeletons of many thousands of large animals have been found. They date mostly from 40,000 to 8,000 years ago.

Almost all of the asphalt used commercially is now derived from petroleum.

In Guam, asphalt is made by mixing ground coral and oil.

Over 3 million tons of asphalt pavement has been recycled and there is over 99% recycling rate for asphalt.

Asphalt is the most recycled material on the planet, with 80% of North American asphalt being recycled annually.