Versatile Blogger Award

A long, yet insightful five months later, I can scarcely believe that we are still here every week writing about science. We write about what we find truly stimulating and exciting, and it is something I hope we are able to continue doing as long as we possibly can. What surprises me more is that fact that you people out there bother to click on our posts and read them, let alone appreciate them.

Last week we had a sudden explosion of visitors generated from a certain Editor’s Pick article on the Discover blog. When I say explosion, I mean large-scale supernova black hole-inducing explosion. If I have to be completely honest, at first I thought the boost was caused by a hacker who, I dunno, wanted to steal our scientific knowledge? Yeah, I’m not sure what I was thinking. At least we can now all breathe a sigh of relief.

A few weeks back, the wonderful Jonny from sci.casual nominated us for the Versatile Blogger Award. Go check out his blog – it is full of informative and thought-provoking articles that discuss scientific advancements in the real world. He really catches casual science at its best.

A thanks also to Georgia from Urban Ag. Scientist who nominated us for the same award more recently. I feel like a celebrity with all these awards flying at us left and right! Do go check out her blog. She does a fantastic job at communicating science in an understandable way.

Staying faithful to my procrastinating habits, I have left this post for far too long already… So here goes.

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For the award I am required to do the following:

• Show the award on your blog
• Thank the person that has nominated you
• Share 7 different facts about yourself
• Nominate 15 blogs of your choice
• Link your nominees and let them know of your nomination

Number 1 – I am a human being. I understand that scientists are often perceived to be alien – beings not from this world that have some sort of weird obsession with proofs and equations. However, I can assure you that we are just as human as you are. Well, maybe not the biologists. They’re a strange species…

Number 2 – My body consists of 99.9999999% free space. To the naked eye I might look like I contain quite a bit of mass (ahem), but it’s all simply an illusion. All the atoms that make up my body consist of a central nucleus surrounded by electrons. The area between these two things is… nothing, just empty space.

Number 3 – Speaking of atoms, my body is made up of approximately 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6 octillion) of them. To put this into some perspective, there are only roughly 300,000,000,000 (300 billion) stars in our galaxy.

Number 4 – My lung has a surface area equal approximately to a tennis court. This is so that my body can maximise gas exchange. That’s right, if you rip my lungs out and lay them out completely flat you’ll be able to have a nice game of tennis. Ignoring the fact that I’ll be in immense pain.

Number 5 – I completely replace my outer skin every month. Let me just re-emphasise the fact that I am not an alien. Probably.

Number 6 – I share 50% of my DNA with bananas. You could say that I’m… a bit of a banana. Wow, that was terrible. Fun fact – if you unwound your DNA and stretched it, it would reach the Sun and back about four times!

Number 7 – I am bioluminescent. This means that my body naturally gives off light. You just can’t see it very well because your eyes only detect light 1000 times stronger than the light I emit. Again, I’m pretty sure I’m not an alien.

Number 8 – My body is worth just over £120. This is calculated by considering the amounts of chemical elements in my body and their respective values. Most of my body is made up of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, none of which are particularly valuable. I even have about 0.2 milligrams of gold in my blood. Top tip: if you want to increase your body’s worth, start eating those bananas. The potassium they contain is worth quite a lot.

My nominations for the award are as follows:

https://nothingabouteverythingblog.wordpress.com/

https://mathsbyagirl.wordpress.com/

https://cosmicchemist.wordpress.com/

https://makingsenseofcomplications.com/

https://outlawofphysics.wordpress.com/

https://incubatorium.wordpress.com/

https://soyoungsocurious.wordpress.com/

https://physicswitherica.wordpress.com/

https://moosmosis.wordpress.com/

https://scientificlove.wordpress.com/

https://saniaheba.wordpress.com/

https://dragallur.wordpress.com/

https://olivemegamean.wordpress.com/

https://rationalisingtheuniverse.org/

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and have fun writing your own! Please don’t feel inclined to make it so science-orientated as I did, but I needed to enforce a science-only policy on this blog. Just ignore that post about Latin I did that one time…

Harvey