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Fungus Fire Spores With 180,000 G Acceleration
Hugh Pickens writes "Although a variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi, those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include 'squirt guns' that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota. In these fungi, fluid-filled stalks that support single spores or spore-filled sporangia, or cells called asci that contain multiple spores, are pressurized by osmosis. Because spores are discharged at such high speeds, most of the information on launch processes from previous studies has been inferred from mathematical models and is subject to a number of errors, but now Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has recorded the discharges with high-speed cameras at 250,000 frames-a-second and discovered that fungi fire their spores with accelerations up to 180,000 g, calling it 'the fastest flight in nature.' Money and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created a video of the first fungus opera."
This was discussed on Quirks and Quarks, a fantastic science news show on the CBC, a few weeks back (link to the show here, available as an mp3, or ogg).
It was a really interesting segment, have a listen. The show is also available as a weekly podcast, and I can't reccomend it enough.
Hurrah for public radio!
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
That's easily solved by Calculus. An infinite number of additions can result in a finite number.
Example: Consider 1/3 (one third)
Written our it's 0,3333333333333....
You can turn that into a sum namely
0,3 + 0,03 + 0,003 + 0,0003 + .....
You can write that as a sum //Forgive the crappyness of plain-text // Slashdot is many years behind on this one...
Sum from n=1 to n=infinity of 3/10^n
So here it is, a infinite sum making a finite number. Glad to have busted that one.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
For anybody who cares, the correct number is not 180 000 Gs of acceleration. It's really 180 000 meters per second squared, which gives about 18 000 Gs.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.