The purpose of this blog is to lighten and enlighten at the Shabbat table. Please print and share.
Happy Birthday shout-out to Allan in Piedmont!
This week's theme is lightning. The regular kind, flashes of electricity in the sky, that sometimes hit the earth.
First, let's get the facts with five trivia questions for your table:
1. How many times a day would you guess that lightning strikes somewhere on Planet Earth?
2. How hot is a bolt of lightning?
3. How big is a bolt of lightning?
4. How much electricity are we talking about here?
5. What is the chemical symbol and atomic number of nitrogen?
After everyone chimes in, here are the answers:
1. The most common estimate going around is about eight million.
If you have any students at the table, ask them to estimate (in their heads) how many that would be per hour, per minute and per second.
[About 350,000 per hour, 6,000 per minute, 100 per second.]
Let's just pause and think about that for a second. Oop - there's another 100 lightning strikes!
2. Soooooo hot. Like super-duper hot. Like 3-5 times the surface of the sun, which is 10,000°F. We're talking pretty toasty here.
3. About 1 inch in diameter, about 5 miles long (but can be as long as 100 miles).
4. Maybe a billion volts, give or take a few.
5. Nitrogen is N, atomic number 7. (Bonus question - what does that number tell us? [number of protons])
So now we're ready for the big question of the day:
6. What has lightning done for us lately?
The answer is surpisingly interesting.
First of all, lightning is one of the only ways that nitrogen becomes available to plants, and thus to us.
You see, as every schoolchild knows, the air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen. And we need nitrogen, can't live without it. We need nitrogen atoms to be attached to hydrogen and carbon atoms in a specific chain that we call protein.
Plants need it for photosynthesis.
Problem is, we can't simply absorb it from the air. Nitrogen molecules have this super-tight triple atomic bond that just doesn't break apart so easily.
The only way we get it is from our food. But plants can't absorb it from the air either.
But lightning is so hot that it breaks the nitrogen bonds, breaks the oxygen bonds, and causes some of these atoms to recombine as NOx (meaning, various numbers of Os). The rain pulls this NOx down into the soil, where it cools and turns into NO2 and then reacts with water to produce HNO3 which (finally!) is a molecule that plants can use.
In a nutshell, lightning fertilizes the soil.
If that were all that it did for us, we could be grateful for every thunderstorm. (Believe me, every farmer loves thunderstorms.)
But wait, there's more.
Back in 1952, physicist Winfried Schumann theorized that all that lightning, under the shell of the Earth's ionosphere, ought to leave an electrical trace. He was proven right. But the residual electricity is so very small that it is super hard to detect. They call it ELF (extremely low frequency) or ULF (ultra-low frequency).
We're talking about below 100 Hz.
Specifically, these electrical echoes begin with the fundamental wave at 7.83 Hz, and then it resonates at approximately 6 Hz intervals (eg, 14 Hz, then 20 Hz, etc.).
Last week, Prof. Colin Price of Tel Aviv University reported the results of a creative experiment.
They bombarded rat cardiac cells with lightning-level ELFs, and saw what looked like healing effects, including the release of the creatine kinase protein, which promotes muscular healing.
It is scientifically too early to conclude that human muscles would respond the same way, but this is an extremely interesting line of research.
Why? We humans have a resonant frequency of somewhere between 5-10 Hz. That means that we are born pre-tuned into the basic frequency of lightning trails.
Seventh and final question for your table: Do you now feel more in tune with lightning? Has this Table Talk made you astraphobic or an astraphile?
Shabbat Shalom
PS - This wasn't the first time that Tel Aviv University scientists made a breakthrough using rats. Check this out. And this.
PPS - We do not recommend getting struck by lightning, which kills and maims hundreds of people every year. If you ever find yourself in danger of such a storm, you might want to have read this. And know that lightning often travels horizontally, so it can - and does - come out of the blue sky before or after a storm.
Happy Birthday shout-out to Allan in Piedmont!
This week's theme is lightning. The regular kind, flashes of electricity in the sky, that sometimes hit the earth.First, let's get the facts with five trivia questions for your table:
1. How many times a day would you guess that lightning strikes somewhere on Planet Earth?
2. How hot is a bolt of lightning?
3. How big is a bolt of lightning?
4. How much electricity are we talking about here?
5. What is the chemical symbol and atomic number of nitrogen?
After everyone chimes in, here are the answers:
1. The most common estimate going around is about eight million.
If you have any students at the table, ask them to estimate (in their heads) how many that would be per hour, per minute and per second.
[About 350,000 per hour, 6,000 per minute, 100 per second.]
Let's just pause and think about that for a second. Oop - there's another 100 lightning strikes!
2. Soooooo hot. Like super-duper hot. Like 3-5 times the surface of the sun, which is 10,000°F. We're talking pretty toasty here.
3. About 1 inch in diameter, about 5 miles long (but can be as long as 100 miles).
4. Maybe a billion volts, give or take a few.
5. Nitrogen is N, atomic number 7. (Bonus question - what does that number tell us? [number of protons])
So now we're ready for the big question of the day:
6. What has lightning done for us lately?
The answer is surpisingly interesting.
First of all, lightning is one of the only ways that nitrogen becomes available to plants, and thus to us.
You see, as every schoolchild knows, the air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen. And we need nitrogen, can't live without it. We need nitrogen atoms to be attached to hydrogen and carbon atoms in a specific chain that we call protein.
Plants need it for photosynthesis.
Problem is, we can't simply absorb it from the air. Nitrogen molecules have this super-tight triple atomic bond that just doesn't break apart so easily.
The only way we get it is from our food. But plants can't absorb it from the air either.
But lightning is so hot that it breaks the nitrogen bonds, breaks the oxygen bonds, and causes some of these atoms to recombine as NOx (meaning, various numbers of Os). The rain pulls this NOx down into the soil, where it cools and turns into NO2 and then reacts with water to produce HNO3 which (finally!) is a molecule that plants can use.
In a nutshell, lightning fertilizes the soil.
If that were all that it did for us, we could be grateful for every thunderstorm. (Believe me, every farmer loves thunderstorms.)
But wait, there's more.
Back in 1952, physicist Winfried Schumann theorized that all that lightning, under the shell of the Earth's ionosphere, ought to leave an electrical trace. He was proven right. But the residual electricity is so very small that it is super hard to detect. They call it ELF (extremely low frequency) or ULF (ultra-low frequency).
We're talking about below 100 Hz.
Specifically, these electrical echoes begin with the fundamental wave at 7.83 Hz, and then it resonates at approximately 6 Hz intervals (eg, 14 Hz, then 20 Hz, etc.).
Last week, Prof. Colin Price of Tel Aviv University reported the results of a creative experiment.
They bombarded rat cardiac cells with lightning-level ELFs, and saw what looked like healing effects, including the release of the creatine kinase protein, which promotes muscular healing.
It is scientifically too early to conclude that human muscles would respond the same way, but this is an extremely interesting line of research.
Why? We humans have a resonant frequency of somewhere between 5-10 Hz. That means that we are born pre-tuned into the basic frequency of lightning trails.
Seventh and final question for your table: Do you now feel more in tune with lightning? Has this Table Talk made you astraphobic or an astraphile?
Shabbat Shalom
PS - This wasn't the first time that Tel Aviv University scientists made a breakthrough using rats. Check this out. And this.
PPS - We do not recommend getting struck by lightning, which kills and maims hundreds of people every year. If you ever find yourself in danger of such a storm, you might want to have read this. And know that lightning often travels horizontally, so it can - and does - come out of the blue sky before or after a storm.
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