The Largest Organism on Earth Is a Fungus
The blue whale is big, but nowhere near as huge as a sprawling fungus in eastern Oregon.
Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.
The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world's largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.
A team of forestry scientists discovered the giant after setting out to map the population of this pathogenic fungus in eastern Oregon. The team paired fungal samples in petri dishes to see if they fused (see photo below), a sign that they were from the same genetic individual, and used DNA fingerprinting to determine where one individual fungus ended.
This one, A. ostoyae, causes Armillaria root disease, which kills swaths of conifers in many parts of the U.S. and Canada. The fungus primarily grows along tree roots via hyphae, fine filaments that mat together and excrete digestive enzymes. ButArmillaria has the unique ability to extend rhizomorphs, flat shoestringlike structures, that bridge gaps between food sources and expand the fungus's sweeping perimeter ever more.
A combination of good genes and a stable environment has allowed this particularly ginormous fungus to continue its creeping existence over the past millennia. "These are very strange organisms to our anthropocentric way of thinking," says biochemist Myron Smith of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. An Armillaria individual consists of a network of hyphae, he explains. "Collectively, this network is called the mycelium and is of an indefinite shape and size."
All fungi in the Armillaria genus are known as honey mushrooms, for the yellow-capped and sweet fruiting bodies they produce. Some varieties share this penchant for monstrosity but are more benign in nature. In fact the very first massive fungus discovered in 1992—a 37-acre (15-hectare) Armillaria bulbosa, which was later renamed Armillaria gallica—is annually celebrated at a "fungus fest" in the nearby town of Crystal Falls, Mich.
Myron Smith was a PhD candidate in botany at the University of Toronto when he and colleagues discovered this exclusive fungus in the hardwood forests near Crystal Falls. "This was kind of a side project," Smith recalls. "We were looking at the boundaries of [fungal] individuals using genetic tests and the first year we didn't find the edge."
Next, the microbiologists developed a new way to tell an individual apart from a group of closely related siblings using a battery of molecular genetic techniques. The major test compared fungal genes for telltale signs of inbreeding, where heterozygous strips of DNA become homozygous. That's when they realized they had struck it big. The individual Armillaria bulbosa they found weighed over 100 tons (90.7 metric tons) and was roughly 1,500 years old.
"People had ideas that maybe they were big but nobody had any idea they were that big," says Tom Volk, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. "Well it's certainly the biggest publicity that mycology is going to get—maybe ever."
Soon afterward, the discovery of an even bigger fungus in southwestern Washington was announced by Terry Shaw, then in Colorado with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), and Ken Russell, a forest pathologist at Washington State Department of Natural Resources, in 1992. Their fungus, a specimen of Armillaria ostoyae, covered about 1,500 acres (600 hectares) or 2.5 square miles (6.5 square kilometers). And in 2003 Catherine Parks of the USFS in Oregon and her colleagues published their discovery of the current behemoth 2,384-acre Armillaria ostoyae.
Strange but True: Superfluid Helium Can Climb Walls
Researchers have known for decades that if you cool liquid helium just a few degrees below its boiling point of –452 degrees Fahrenheit (–269 degrees Celsius) it will suddenly be able to do things that other fluids can't, like dribble through molecule-thin cracks, climb up and over the sides of a dish, and remain motionless when its container is spun.
No longer a mere liquid, the helium has become a superfluid—a liquid that flows without friction. "If you set [down] a cup with a liquid circulating around and you come back 10 minutes later, of course it's stopped moving," says John Beamish, an experimental physicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Atoms in the liquid will collide with one another and slow down. "But if you did that with helium at low temperature and came back a million years later," he says, "it would still be moving."
Like plenty of other physics experiments that make you go—"Huh?"—superfluidity flows from the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics. But unlike other quantum stuff, superfluid helium's weird behavior is visible to the naked eye.
An early sign of helium's odd behavior was observed back in 1911 by the Dutch physicist and 1913 Nobel physics laureate Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, a master of refrigeration who was the first to liquefy helium. Onnes found that helium (technically, the helium 4 isotope) began to readily conduct heat below –455.67 degrees F (–270.92 degrees C), also known as the lambda point.
It wasn't until 1938 that the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa and, independently, the British duo of John Allen and Don Misener measured the flow rate of helium below that temperature through a pair of glass disks attached to a plunger and a long, thin glass tube, respectively. The viscosity was so low that Kapitsa, who won his own Nobel Prize for the work, coined the term "superfluid" to describe it—after "superconductor," the term for a material that conducts very high electric currents without resistance.
Key to the effect is helium's unique ability to remain liquid down to absolute zero (–459.67 degrees F, or –273.15 degrees C), the temperature at which atoms theoretically stop moving. When most liquids are cooled, the slight attraction between atoms in the fluid finally begins to overcome heat vibrations, and the particles settle into a regular order, namely a solid. But helium atoms are so light and weakly drawn to one another that even when ordinary atomic motions have quieted, the atoms jiggle with zero-point motion, a slight momentum imparted by the quantum uncertainty principle. Hence, they never settle into the solid state.
Helium's liquidity at low temperatures allows it to carry out a transformation calledBose–Einstein condensation, in which individual particles overlap until they behave like one big particle. Atoms acting in unison don't behave like individual atoms. "If you march in unison, you don't collide with each other," says Moses Chan, who studies superfluidity at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
Researchers like to think of superfluid helium as a mixture of two fluids, one normal and one superfluid. Different experiments bring out the contrasting characters of the two fractions. The simplest "experiment" is to watch as a container full of liquid helium suddenly springs a leak as it is cooled below the lambda point and the frictionless superfluid fraction begins to pour through microscopic cracks that the normal liquid fraction cannot enter. ("Super-leaks" have been the bane of scientists working with liquid helium since the early days, Beamish says.) But stir the same helium like coffee and the normal liquid fraction will resist the motion, imparting viscosity to the superfluid mixture, after all.
As the temperature falls, the superfluid fraction takes up a greater share of the mixture. In the field's gold-standard experiment, researchers measure the ratio of the two fractions by placing a sample in a cylindrical metal container suspended by a wire. When they impart a twist to the wire, the cylinder will rotate one way and then the other. But only the normal fraction will rotate with the cylinder, because of friction between it and the cylinder walls; the superfluid portion cuts right through the normal fluid and remains still. As the superfluid fraction increases, the cylinder rotates faster, as if the cylinder were losing weight (technically, inertia).
Superfluid helium's dual nature is at work again when it climbs the walls of a container. (Watch this YouTube video of the effect.) Any liquid will coat the sides of a dish in which it sits—thanks again to the slight attraction between atoms—but the liquid's internal friction limits how far the coating may spread. In superfluid helium, the frictionless film slithers over the whole container, creating a sort of arena through which the superfluid can flow. If the liquid has somewhere to fall after it climbs out of the dish, it will drip from the bottom of the container until it siphons out all the superfluid pooled above it.
The same principle underlies another famous demonstration in which superfluid rapidly shoots out of an open, heated glass tube packed with fine powder at the bottom. Called the superfluid fountain, it occurs because the superfluid outside of the tube rushes in to cool down the superfluid that has been warmed by the inside of the tube. (Allen, the co-discoverer of superfluidity, is said to have discovered the effect after he shined a pocket flashlight onto a glass tube of liquid helium.)
Work on superfluid helium has already netted three Nobel Prizes and may yet garner more. In 2004 Penn State's Chan and Eun-Seong Kim rotated a ring full of solid helium at 26 atmospheres of pressure and found that as they cooled the helium below the critical temperature, the rotational frequency increased, just as it does with liquid helium. Half a dozen laboratories, including Beamish's, are studying the "supersolid" effect, but researchers still aren't sure which elements of the solid would condense into a single Bose–Einstein state.
The trick now is to see if the supersolid can produce the equivalent of super-leaks or other well-known super-effects. "If other unique properties can be convincingly shown," Beamish says, "everyone would agree it's a new phase of matter."
How to "Delete administrator Password" without any software
How to "Delete administrator Password" without any software
Method 1
Boot up with DOS and delete the sam.exe and sam.log files from Windows\system32\config in your hard drive. Now when you boot up in NT the password on your built-in administrator account which will be blank (i.e No password). This solution works only if your hard drive is FAT kind.
Method 2
Step 1. Put your hard disk of your computer in any other pc .Step 2. Boot that computer and use your hard disk as a secondary hard disk (D'nt boot as primary hard disk ).Step 3. Then open that drive in which the victim’s window(or your window) is installed.Step 4. Go to location windows->system32->configStep 5. And delete SAM.exe and SAM.log
Step 6. Now remove hard disk and put in your computer.
Step 7. And boot your computer :-)
Boot up with DOS and delete the sam.exe and sam.log files from Windows\system32\config in your hard drive. Now when you boot up in NT the password on your built-in administrator account which will be blank (i.e No password). This solution works only if your hard drive is FAT kind.
Method 2
Step 1. Put your hard disk of your computer in any other pc .Step 2. Boot that computer and use your hard disk as a secondary hard disk (D'nt boot as primary hard disk ).Step 3. Then open that drive in which the victim’s window(or your window) is installed.Step 4. Go to location windows->system32->configStep 5. And delete SAM.exe and SAM.log
Step 6. Now remove hard disk and put in your computer.
Step 7. And boot your computer :-)
Typing Tricks
Typing Tricks
Delete an entire word Instead of deleting a single letter, pressing CTRL + BKSP will delete the entire word behind the cursor. This makes deleting text quicker if you screw up a whole word.
Move Cursor to beginning of the next or previous word Moving the cursor around manually while typing is a great way to make your work take longer than it needs to. To speed of the process, move the cursor around with keyboard shortcuts. To move it to the beginning of the previous word, use CTRL + Left Arrow. To move it to the beginning of the next word, use CTRL + Right Arrow. In OS X you can accomplish the same using the Option key.
Making sub and superscript text If you need to make sub or superscript text (think exponents for superscript), press CTRL + = for subscript and CTRL + SHIFT + = for superscript.
Paste plain text of what was copied When you copy text from any source, programs will usually copy any formatting that comes with it. To paste this as plain text, press CTRL + Shift + V instead of the standard CTRL + V, and the system will paste unformatted text.
Note that many programs follow this parameter (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) but not all, particularly Microsoft programs like Word or Outlook. For those there's a few alternatives that go beyond copying and pasting in Notepad: 1)CTRL + ALT + V will show a 'paste special' dialog box. 2) CTRL + Spacebar will remove formatting in already pasted text. 3) Download Puretext and choose a hotkey to always paste plain text with it.
Note that many programs follow this parameter (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) but not all, particularly Microsoft programs like Word or Outlook. For those there's a few alternatives that go beyond copying and pasting in Notepad: 1)CTRL + ALT + V will show a 'paste special' dialog box. 2) CTRL + Spacebar will remove formatting in already pasted text. 3) Download Puretext and choose a hotkey to always paste plain text with it.
Windows hidden "god mode" folder
Windows hidden "god mode" folder
Windows hidden "god mode" folder Windows offers a centralized Control Panel for all of the OS settings, which makes it easy for users to tweak everything from desktop background to setting up a VPN. To enter this mode, create a new folder with this exact name (copy and paste it): God Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. The folder icon will change to a Control Panel-style icon, and you will be able to jump in and change all kinds of settings. Note: Don't try this on Windows Vista 64-bit as it's known to cause a reboot loop.
Windows hidden "god mode" folder Windows offers a centralized Control Panel for all of the OS settings, which makes it easy for users to tweak everything from desktop background to setting up a VPN. To enter this mode, create a new folder with this exact name (copy and paste it): God Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. The folder icon will change to a Control Panel-style icon, and you will be able to jump in and change all kinds of settings. Note: Don't try this on Windows Vista 64-bit as it's known to cause a reboot loop.
Remove Write Protection From Pendrive and Memory Card – How to Guide
Remove Write Protection From Pendrive and Memory Card – How to Guide
Before we proceed, what is Write protection exactly? Write Protection is when the manufacturer locks the device down from being written on and prevents unauthorized access to add, change or delete the files on the device. While the uses of write protection is a good thing because it prevent files from being tampered with and the manufacturer can make sure all users are getting the same files, but it’s also very inconvenient. To remove this protection, to you will need to format the drive.
In this guide, I will show you exactly how to do that. Follow each and every step carefully, please. Windows platform is used for the purpose of this guide.
How to Remove Write Protection From Pendrive ?
Step 1: Plug in your pendrive into your USB 2.0 on your computer. In order to make sure the computer has read yourpendrive, you can go down to your bottom left on Windows, you will notice a small USB drive icon. If you click that, it will say “Removable Disk.” This means that the pendrive has been read successfully. You can take a backup of your files from the pendrive or Memory card, Because we here are going to format it Completely.
Step 2: Next we need to open up command prompt. You can do this by simply going to “Start”, then just search for“Command Prompt”, or you can simply just type in “cmd” and command prompt should pop up.
Step 3: In the command prompt, type in the drive letter of your pen drive with a colon at the end, like this: “ F: ” but without the quotation marks.
Step 4: After putting in the previous command, type in “format” without the quotation marks. Here’s how to do it: “format F:” and then press “Enter.”
This should get the process started to remove write protection. Make sure that you are entering the right command with the right drive letter. If you have more than one pen drive plugged in, make sure that you do select the right one as you can accidentally format the wrong drive, causing loss of data.
Step 5: After the process is complete, proceed to closing command prompt.
Congratulations! You’re successfully removed the write protection on your drive.
If you have any questions or concerns, please write them in the comments section below. Let us know how we did and how things went for you.
Surf internet anonymously- How to Guide
Surf internet anonymously- How to Guide
Everyone today surfing on internet is very seriously concerned about their Privacy. As the Cyber crime is increasing day by day, those who are not doing anything to hide their real identity must perform some necessary security actions so that no one can harm them online.
So here in this article, I am going to share with you some internet tips to browse and Surf internet anonymously.
4 Best Ways to Surf internet anonymously
1. Using Softwares :
There are several softwares available for personalizing your network connection and use a middle layer between you and your real network. It creates a virtual environment between the user and their internet connection. These are most popularly known as VPNs (Virtual Private Networks ). A VPN connection across the Internet is similar to a wide area network (WAN) link between the sites. From a user perspective, the extended network resources are accessed in the same way as resources available from the private network.
The high quality VPNs are normally paid which provides privacy to industries and other business organizations. But for normal users there are variety of VPNs available for free.
2.Using Tor Browser :
Tor browser is one of the leading and best known browser for anonymous surfing over the internet. It changes your original ip address to the ip address of some remote location. No one will be able to see your real ip when you surfsites using Tor browser. It looks much similar to Mozilla firefox but it reduces the speed of your internet connection upto some extent because every site which is being opened must be opened through the server of TOR organization.
You can download TOR Browser from their official website.
3. Set proxies in your own browser :
You all might have known the process of Setting proxy in your browser. We commonly do it when we need to access the internet using some public or shared wifi in offices or educational institutes like colleges etc.
They have always secured their network using these proxy setting and if you want to access internet via their network, you must change your browser proxy settings according to their settings. You can make your own home network more secured by doing the same thing.
4. Using proxy sites :
If you don’t want to download and install any softwares or VPNs on your system for privacy, you can simply switch to these proxy sites. All you have to do is simply enter the desired URL in the input box given on the website instead of your browser’s address bar. These sites offer you online privacy for accessing web anonymously. Moreover these sites will provide you access to those sites which are blocked in your office or college. Proxy sites have ability to bypass the filters that restrict the access to several sites.
You can try these sites :
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So I Hope After reading this article there will be no doubt in your mind to Surf internet anonymously, But if you have any doubt leave your comments below.
So I Hope After reading this article there will be no doubt in your mind to Surf internet anonymously, But if you have any doubt leave your comments below.
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