Clara Cohen, Author at The Orbital

1Mar

By Clara CohenNo Comments

Science & Technology

What’s Up in Space?

If you’re asked the question “What is orbiting the Earth?”, the first answer to come to your mind might be “The Moon”. Another answer could be “The International Space Station” or a number of other television or GPS satellites. If you stop for a moment and think about it, you will realise that for people to be able to have global network coverage, there must be a very large number of satellites surrounding the Earth, careful moving around each other. But these aren’t the only things bouncing around in our exosphere. The current count of trackable “space junk”, the term for assorted space debris, is over 500,000, and this is creating a massive negative impact on the future of space travel. Space junk is mainly artificial, caused by leftover bits of rockets and space stations that have f...

Flat Earthers: Who are they and why do they exist?

Over 2,000 years ago, the ancient civilisations believed the world to be flat. They never had satellite images, planes or even drones to view the world from above, and even the tallest pyramid, the Great Pyramid of Giza stood at a meagre 139m, not anywhere near enough to observe the curvature of the Earth, all they had was the flat lands that spread before them, so they could be forgiven for theorising the two-dimensional shape of our planet. However, even as early as 350 BC, Aristotle disputed the flat earth theory, and by studying the position of the sun in different Egyptian cities at midday, with a little basic trigonometry, he was able to calculate that the Earth, in fact, had a more spherical shape. Once the Church gained power, though, anyone who spoke out against the idea that ...

The Bubonic Apocalypse: a possible resurgence of the Black Death

The Black Death, or bubonic plague, is one of the most infamous epidemics of the western world. The disease spread across most of Europe, killing between 75 and 250 million people in the space of 7 years. The plague was caused by Yersinia Pestis, a bacterium of the enterobacteriaceae family which could kill an infected human in 3 to 7 days. This particular strain of bacterium has reappeared multiple times since the 14th century, but could we expect to see a full resurgence of the bubonic plague in our modern times? The bubonic plague was an illness that ravaged most of Eurasia. It first presented with buboes, blackened and swollen lymph nodes around the armpits and groin which often leaked pus and would bleed when pierced. After that came a high fever and hematemesis, or the vomiting of...