How does global warming happen?

Basically the Earths atmosphere (our air) is made up oxygen, nitrogen and a dozen other gases. All of these serve to capture a certain amount of heat and keep the Earth warm. Sunlight hits the Earth and is absorbed as heat. That heat radiates outward back into the air. The molecules in the air absorb and release that heat. Certain molecules that are heavier than others radiate more heat back to earth. Without these molecules from special gases, the Earth would be frozen over at around 14 degrees below zero.

This absorption and reflection of heat is known as the greenhouse effect. For just as in a greenhouse heat is trapped and built up by our atmosphere. So then, if all of this is supposed to happen, what is the problem? The problem is that we keep adding to the special mixture of our air too much of certain ingredients such as Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide or CO2 is essential to nature. Plants use CO2 and sunlight to create sugars and fresh oxygen. Still you might think fine so the plants will grow even better if we have extra CO2. That is what many scientists thought when they first examined global warming. But we only have so many plants, and our oceans, which also absorb CO2, are at maximum capacity. So all this extra Carbon dioxide goes up into the atmosphere where it blocks the release of heat leaving the earth. Gases such as CO2 that absorb heat that otherwise would have expelled to outer space are called greenhouse gases. There are quite a few of them.

Why is snow the color white?

Water in the pure form is colorless. If there are any impurities present, the color of the water changes. Snow also can take the color of other objects. For example, in the case of glaciers deep inside the ice block it appears blue in color. But, snow is slightly different from the ice. Snow is the collection of ice crystals that are tiny and attached to one another. The ice crystal is also clear and colorless while the accumulated crystals combine to form snowflakes. The snow is visible to us due to the presence of light. Snow falls from the above in the atmosphere and reaches the ground. The ice crystals will enable the light falling on them to get reflected on their surface. There are multiple faces for the crystals and hence the light also gets scattered. Visible light

has various wavelengths of light that are visualized by us. When light falls on any object some part of the light will be absorbed and the other part will get reflected. The reflected part of light reaches our eyes and makes us to recognize the colors.

The light fallen on the ice crystals also do not pass through the crystals for long distance but tend to change directions. The light also gets reflected at an angle in the interior of the ice. As snow exists as collection of several snowflakes on the ground, the light that falls on them will not have a particular wavelength that is reflected with some regularity. So, most of the light that falls on the snow will almost completely gets reflected back. The light that gets reflected by the snow will remain white most of the time as the total light and not any one wavelength of it is reflected back. Hence, snow is white in color.

Formation of the Solar System

Where did the Solar System come from? How did we go from space to a star with planets orbiting around it? Before we can look at the formation of the Solar System, we have to see what this region looked like. Throughout the Milky Way, there are clouds of cold gas and dust, just sitting there, doing nothing. At some point in the distant past, this cloud was disturbed; either through the collision of another galaxy, or the explosion of a massive star. The explosion would have sent waves through space that squeezed the gas and dust together. The clumping material was able to attract more material with its gravity, and started to collect into the solar nebula. The mutual movement of all the atoms in the cloud gave the solar nebula a direction to spin.

The Sun formed out of the largest collection of mass at the center of the solar nebula. Because it was spinning quickly, the rest of the nebula collected into a flattened disk around the newborn Sun astronomers call this an accretion disk. Within the accretion disk, additional clumps gathered together; these would eventually form the planets. The planets started out as tiny specks of dust that clumped together. As they continued to gather together, they became pebbles, rocks, boulders and eventually planetoids. These planetoids violently collided together to become the planets we know today. By studying the decay of radioactive elements in meteorites, astronomers have been able to determine that the Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago. When astronomers look out into the Universe, they see other Solar Systems forming at different stages. Some are large clouds of cold dust, others are starting to collapse. Others have accretion disks, and some might even have planets clearing out paths in the dust of the disk. We cant see the

formation of our own Solar System, but we can see it happening everywhere we look, so we assume our Solar System formed in the same way.

Why do hallucinations occur?

Hallucinations are those created by the mind and are not really occurring. The hallucinations that commonly occur have the feeling of bodily sensation, that something is creeping on your skin, and that internal organs are moving. Hallucinations help us in hearing the sounds like music, footsteps, banging of windows or doors and so on. If you hear a voice of someone who did not speak out at all, looking at various patterns, lights, beings and objects and smelling a good or bad odor are some other hallucinations. The subconscious mind is considered as sleeping mind while the conscious mind is considered as awakened mind. People generally relate the conscious mind with reality. When anyone experiences any event in sleep or dream, then we consider the event as part of a dream. This is done, as it has occurred in the subconscious mind. If the event has occurred when anyone is in conscious frame of mind, then it becomes a realistic experience. The mind-sets which are intermediate to conscious and subconscious minds cause hallucinations. Hallucinations will occur when the mind state is inbetween the dream and conscious state. They occur when your mind do not switch back to the conscious state.

Some of the causes of hallucinations are being drunk; cease using the drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, LSD, PCP, amphetamines, alcohol, ketamine and heroin. Dementia is the common disorder that can often lead to hallucinations. Epilepsy is another disorder which can lead to hallucinations. Normal fever in children and adults, narcolepsy, schizophrenia, psychotic depression, blindness, deaf, severe illness, liver failure, kidney failure, AIDS and brain cancer are some of the causes for hallucinations. Hallucinations can lead to gap in perception of things. The human perception is not exactly real. The sensory areas in the brain filter the environment. The cognitive capacity of the brain perceives the stimulus in the world as actual or real. The perception of humans is a way of realizing the reality. When we think about any event through symbols and representations, it is not easy for us to transfer our perceptions into hallucinations. The sensory areas of the brain are dynamically overtaken by the memory area of the brain at the time of hallucination. The memories will generate a hallucination with the help of sensory areas along with the feeling, smell, vision and so on.