What’s the Deepest Canyon?

It all depends on where you’re looking, on Earth or in the entire solar system.

If you’re scouting for the deepest scar on Earth, it might not be where you think. Though the Grand Canyon is known for its majestic landscape, the deepest gorge on the planet is found where the Pacific Plate sinks underneath the Philippine Plate. Called the Mariana Trench, the underwater canyon descends 35,827 feet (10,920 meters) — the Grand Canyon only averages about 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) in depth.

But if you’re looking for the biggest known canyon in the solar system, that’s Mars’ Valles Marineris. It is the widest known canyon — in some places the space between its walls would span the width of the entire continental United States — and keep reach up to 10 times as deep as the Grand Canyon.

What is the Longest-Living Animal?

The animal with the most birthdays to date goes to a quahog clam plucked from the cold Icelandic waters in 2007. The tiny mollusk would need quite a lung capacity to extinguish the possible 400 candles on its cake.

 

Some life-span chart toppers include:

• American box turtle — 120 years
• Bowhead whale — 60 to 70 years (though bowheads exceeding 200 years have been reported)
• Elephant — 70 years
• Human — 70 to 80 years

Some animals are born and die in the seeming blink of the eye, including:

• Adult housefly — 4 weeks
• Worker bee — 5 weeks
• Ant (Worker) — ½ year
• Opossum — 1 year
• Ant (Queen) — 3 years
• Rat — 2 to 3 years

Is a Dog’s Mouth Cleaner Than a Human’s?

Well, sadly, no. In short, a dog’s mouth is besieged by its own legions of germs, roughly as huge in population as those living in the human mouth and causing a similar array of dental illnesses.

10 Supertechnologies of the future

10 – DIGITAL LIBRARIES

You might want to check out Google Book Search, its a very good example. There will come a point in time when any factual based question can be answered online.

9 – GENE THERAPY AND / OR STEM CELLS

A lot of deseases involve inherited conditions – as they are pass through your genes. Good news, scientists are working to change those genes and trick defective cells into growing correctly.

8 – PERVASIVE WIRELESS INTERNET

That implies the possibility of full connectivity between any two random devices. Want to check your burglar alarm from your cell phone? It’ll be easy.

7 – MOBILE ROBOTS

 We may see convoys of robot trucks on the highways. Admittedly, they’ll probably have more initial acceptance in warehouses, handling pick-and-pull chores.

6 – BETTER CHEAPER SOLAR CELLS

In less than ten years the cost of solar energy could be at parity with the cost of electricity from the grid, and solar cells could be standard features in new residential construction. 

5 – LOCATION BASED COMPUTING

Instead of clicking an icon on a browser screen, you can walk outside, point your cell phone at an actual three-dimensional thing (presumably, a building that houses a business), click the phone, and get information about (or jump to the Web site of) whatever you were pointing at. As well as servers with Internet address, there will be servers with geographic coordinates.

4 – DESKTOP 3-D PRINTING

Instead of going to the store for your next gadget, you might download a design of your choosing and generate it in your desktop 3-D printer. The next step will be to design your own gadgets, post the designs, and sell them, etc. Toys, kitchenware, and decorative household items should be fair game, at least. Cottage industry, here we come!

3 – MOORE’S LAW UPHELD

The law, stated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, implies that available computer power can be expected to double every other year. For at least two decades pundits have been pointing out barriers to the law’s fulfillment, and the chip industry has been smashing those barriers. Currently they can’t agree if the law has a couple of more decades of life left, or 600 years. Either way, in terms of available computing power, it’s clear that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

2 – THERAPEUTIC CLONING

Forget the stories about generating identical copies of a particular sheep or person. The whole idea behind cloning all along has been to grow replacement organs or tissue in a vat, which the body would see no reason to reject. Cancerous or damaged organs could be replaced by new, disease-free clones of themselves.

1 – THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY

Instead of guzzling imported oil (and being at the mercy of oil suppliers) we could turn water into hydrogen and burn that (or use to charge fuel cells.) Meanwhile, the only byproduct of the combustion of hydrogen is … more water! However, hydrogen storage remains a thorny issue, due to its low density, and hydrogen may end up being only one of many interlocking components that replace the current oil economy.