STEM and Politics

     As a Cool as a Cucumber...      Few foods are as good for you than a delicious and crunchy cucumber. "Cucumbers are naturally low in calories, carbohydrates, sodium, fat, and cholesterol," said Megan Ware , a registered dietitian nutritionist in Orlando, Florida. There are just 16 calories in a cup of cucumber with its peel, and 15 calories without. In this cup, you will also get about 4 percent of your daily potassium and vitamin C, and also 3 percent of your daily fiber. It also provides small amounts of vitamins K, C, A and magnesium, potassium, and manganese. Anyways, the point is, cucumbers are good for you. Here is the nutrition facts for 1/2 a cup of cucumber, according to the US Food and Drug Administration: Nutrition Facts Cucumber, with peel, raw Serving size: 1/2 cup, sliced (52 g)   Calories from Fat 0 Calories  8 *Percent Daily Values (%DV) are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Amt per Serving %DV* Amt per Serv...

Space & Science Informant May 2017   By: Daniel Domingos Hey guys! Daniel here. I'll be posting one of these every month. They contain new (or old) and exciting facts that are space and/or science - related. It can take a photon (light particle) 40,000 years to go from the sun's core to it's surface, then only 8 minutes to Earth. The core of a star reaches 16,000,000 degrees Celsius. A grain of sand this hot can kill you from 150 kilometers (93.2 miles) away. Venus rotates around the sun opposite to the direction of the rotation of the other planets. The Earth's rotation is decreasing at approximately 0.17 milliseconds per year. If it continues at this rate, in around 140,000,000 years, the length of a day will be 25 hours. Earth is the most dense planet in the solar system, with around 5.52 grams per cubic centimeter During the 1950s, the US considered exploding a nuclear bomb on the moon The exoplanet PSR-B1620-26b is the oldest planet in the univ...

Here are some fun facts to learn for this month. From now on, there will be one of these every month, which will be published on or before the first day of the month. Happy Reading! 1. Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories a hour. (Just saying, if you are trying to lose weight, this probably isn't the best strategy.) 2. When hippos are upset, their sweat turns red. 3. Bananas are curved because they grow toward the sun. 4. If you consistently fart for 6 years & 9 months, you will produce enough gas to create the energy of an atomic bomb! (UH...) 5. You can not snore and dream at the same time. 6. A baby octopus is about the size of a flea at birth. 7. About 8,000 Americans are injured by musical instruments every year. 8. Nearly 3 percent of the ice in the Antarctic glaciers is penguin urine. 9. Penguins urinate through their nipples. 10. The first alarm clock could only ring at 4am. 11. Slugs have 4 noses. 12. The average person walks an e...

The Electoral College is undemocratic.  The Electoral College is a group of 538 votes that decide who becomes president. These votes are distributed mostly proportional to the 50 states, and since 1964, DC, which receives 3 votes.The amount of Electoral Votes each state gets is 3 plus the amount of representatives, distributed evenly among the states. In this simplified version of the Electoral College, if a group has a majority of votes in that state, it gets all the votes. It's winner take all. But the Electoral Votes aren't actually votes. They're people. And those people, called Electors, can choose to not vote for the promised to vote for when time comes in December. Sure, this has never changed the outcome of an election, though it has happened 87 times in US history. Also, if the USA was a fair democracy, everyone's vote should count evenly. That is, every Elector should represent the population of the USA divided by the amount of Electors, or about 597 t...

General Idea: Collatz’s conjecture was a problem posed by L. Collatz in 1937. Let a 0 be an integer. The Collatz problem asks if iterating: (Wolfram Alpha) always returns to one for any a 0 . Here are a few examples of Hailstone sequences or Collatz’s sequences: a 0 = 17: 17,52,26,13,40,20,10,5,16,8,4,2,1 a 0 = 51: 51,156,78,39,118,59,178,89,268,134,67,202,101,304,152,76,38,19,58,29,88,44,22,11,34,17,52,26,13,40,20,10,5,16,8,4,2,1 a 0 = 23: 23,70,35,106,53,160,80,40,20,10,5,16,8,4,2,1 Collatz’s problem has been tested by computers and the result is that for any a 0 ≤ 19(2 58 ), it always returned to one. Here are two graphs from Wolfram Alpha that show how many steps it takes to reach one for a 0 = n: These graphs are very interesting. We can see that in the first graph almost no numbers exceed 100 steps and in the second graph almost no numbers exceed 200 steps. Most of the 1-200 numbers are in the 0-25 steps section, and the numbers between 1...