The Yin/Yang Relationship Between Plant and Animal Respiration

Plants are made of air, humans breath in the oxygen they release and expel the carbon they need to grow.


Folksonomies: biology relationships

Richard Feynman on Science

The World looks so different after learning science.

For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.

These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.

Notes:

This is why science can fulfill us spiritually.

Folksonomies: spiritual naturalism enlightenment

Cause and Effect

Why You Lose Weight While You Sleep

Here's a simple question: Why do you weigh more when you go to sleep than when you wake up? Because you do... You can check this yourself. Somehow, while doing absolutely nothing all night but sleep, you will wake up lighter.

[...]

All night long, every time you breathe out, a bunch of carbon atoms, formerly inside your body, leave your insides and take off into the night air. You breathe in oxygen, O2. You breathe out carbon dioxide, (two oxygen atoms with a carbon atom attached), so there's an extra carbon atom leaving in every round trip.

Each of those carbon atoms weighs almost nothing, a fraction of a fraction of a gram. But every breath expels roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or ten billion trillion atoms, so add up all the atoms coming from all the breaths you take all night long ... and — could it be this simple? — you wake up carbon-depleted, more than a pound lighter.

Notes:

Over the course of the night, through respiration, you lose a pound of weight to the carbon atoms in Carbon Dioxide.

Folksonomies: biology respiration metabolism