DISCOVER!
edition #1
Are you bored in work? Or you are just bored in general and have no idea what to do? Instead of spending hours scrolling down social medias, here are some interesting articles that will maby teach you something new, explain a curiosity or just make you smile!
This is my first post on Steemit and I hope you enjoy, thank you!
Why are Planets named after Roman Gods?
And why is Earth the only planet not named after a Roman God?
The truth is that the Romans themselves named many the planets, and modern astronomers decided to just follow tradition when new planets were discovered.
The five planets easily visible to the unaided eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) have been observed for all human history as far as we can tell, and they were called different things by different cultures. The Romans named these planets according to their movements and appearance. For example, Venus, the planet that appears the brightest, was named after the Roman goddess of beauty, while the reddish Mars was named after the god of war. These Roman names were adopted by European languages and culture and became standard in science.
Of course, because this is history, there’s also a much longer answer—or, more precisely, a separate but related question: Where did the Romans get the idea of naming the planets after gods in the first place?It turns out that, like modern astronomers, the Romans were following tradition when they assigned divine names to heavenly bodies. As this chart by Robert Little illustrates, planets were identified with particular kinds of gods long before the foundation of Rome:
In the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, and especially the Sumerian and Babylonian ones, religion involved a lot of fortune-telling. There were two preferred methods for prognostication: priests could inspect the livers of sacrificed animals, or they could watch the skies. In order to perform astrological divination, Mesopotamian priests had to become intimately familiar with the normal movements of the stars and planets—and so they developed strikingly sophisticated ways to measure and predict stellar and planetary movement.
When the ancient Greeks first began to study the skies, they chose their names for the planets by identifying the gods in their own pantheon that most closely resembled the Mesopotamian deities already associated with each planet.
For example, the goddess known as Inanna in Sumerian and Ishtar in Babylonian was connected with romantic love and sensuality, and so the Greeks called “her” planet Aphrodite. Once the Romans started developing an interest in astronomy and astrology, renaming the planet Venus after their local goddess of love seemed an obvious move. Similarly, the Greeks interpreted Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, as the equivalent of their Zeus—and so, later, the Romans took to calling that planet Jupiter after their own king of the gods (Jupiter).
Did you know? Sea Otters!
An endangered species, the adult sea otter is the smallest of the marine mammals. It’s a member of the weasel family and the only marine mammal that doesn’t have blubber to keep it warm. Instead, the sea otter relies on its thick fur to keep its body temperature around 100 degrees.Sea otters spend much of their lives in the water and can dive up to 330 feet when foraging for food. They sometimes rest in coastal kelp forests, often draping the kelp over their bodies to keep from drifting away.
But did you know, Southern sea otters have flaps of skin under their forelegs that act as pockets when diving, they use these pouches to store rocks and prey! It also stores favorite rocks that it uses for cracking open mollusks and clams!z
Sea otters are also one of the few mammals other than primates known to use tools. They use small rocks or other objects to pry shellfish from rocks and to hammer them open.
Why do cows kill more people than Sharks?
You must have heard that cows kill more people annually than sharks, it’s a commonly known fact, but not many people know why. Sharks very rarely attack humans; only about “70 attacks are reported worldwide” every year. Shark attack. Of these, many aren’t fatal—in fact, from 1958 to 2014, only about one in five shark attacks were fatal. It seems reasonable to assume that fewer than 20 people per year die from shark attacks.
Now think about cows. Cows are ubiquitous—in 2011, the Economist estimated that there were 1.4 billion of them slouching around. See Counting chickens. Sometimes, cows kick; sometimes, humans get hit by them; sometimes, those humans die as a result of being kicked. Given the huge numbers of cows out there, I’d guess that the annual number of human deaths from cow kicks alone far exceed 20. Moreover, cows (and bulls) often have horns, which I’d guess also account for a significant number of deaths. But besides these inherently dangerous characteristics, think about what happens when a cow escapes its enclosure (which isn’t too rare), wanders onto a road, and is hit by a human driving a car. Cows can weigh 2,000 lbs (~900 kg)—car/cow encounters like these don’t tend to go well for human passengers. Again, I’d guess that the annual number of human deaths from hitting cows with motor vehicles is far higher than 20.
So there you have it; sharks are cuddly and harmless, and cows are coming for your family. Sweet dreams.
Hello, I hope you enjoyed it the first edition of DISCOVER!. Please leave a suggestion or a comment with feedback so I can improve, and if you liked it, please upvote it so I can know that people enjoy this, so l can make more!. Thank you, and have a wonderful day!
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