1 The average American eats 61 pounds of refined sugar each year, including 25 pounds of candy. Halloween accounts for at least two pounds of that.

2 Trick: Sugar may give you wrinkles via a process called glycation, in which excess blood sugar binds to collagen in the skin, making it less elastic.

3 Or treat: Cutting back on sugar may help your skin retain its flexibility. So actually, no treats.

4 People in India have been crystallizing cane sugar for at least 2,000 years. When Alexander the Great’s companions arrived there, they marveled at the production of honey without bees.

5 In 1747 German chemist Andreas Marggraf discovered that the sugar in a sugar beet is identical to that in sugarcane. In 1802 the first beet-sugar refinery began operations, bringing cheap sweets to northern climes.

6 More than half the 8.4 million metric tons of sugar produced annually in the United States comes from beets.

7 Can you imagine eating 16 sugar cubes at one sitting? You probably have. That’s a little less than what is contained in a 20-ounce bottle of cola.

8 Soft drinks with artificial sweeteners may actually help make you fat. In a Purdue University study, rats drinking liquids with artificial sweeteners consumed more calories overall than rats whose drinks were sweetened with sugar.

9 The artificial sweeteners saccharin and aspartame were found accidentally when lab workers doing research that had nothing to do with sweetening put a bit of the test compounds in their mouths and liked what they tasted.

10 What kind of researcher sticks an experiment in his mouth?

11 At least he had an excuse. The scientists who discovered sucralose (now sold as Splenda) were originally trying to create an insecticide. An assistant thought he had been instructed to “taste” a compound he’d only been asked to “test.”

12 A compound called lugduname is the sweetest compound known—more than 200,000 times as sweet as table sugar.

13 Sugars are molecules of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The simplest include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Table sugar is crystallized sucrose, a fusion of one fructose and one glucose molecule.

14 Can’t escape them: Sugars are the building blocks of carbohydrates, the most abundant type of organic molecules in living things.

15 Glycolaldehyde, an eight-atom sugar, has even been found in an interstellar gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way.

16 Glycolaldehyde can react with a three-carbon sugar to form ribose, the basis for both RNA and DNA, so the glycol­aldehyde found in deep space may be a chemical precursor to life on Earth.

17 That cloud also contains ethylene glycol, a sweet relative of glycol­aldehyde and the main ingredient in antifreeze. Either complex sugars can be synthesized between the stars or there is a truck stop at the end of the universe.

18 Sugar can help get you there to find out. Burn sucrose with a dose of corn syrup and saltpeter and you get “sugar propellant,” a popular amateur rocket fuel.

19 How do you spell relief? “Obecalp,” a sugar pill manufactured to FDA standards, is marketed as a treatment for children’s mild complaints. (Try reading the name backward.)

20 It’s not all mind games. The sugar glucosamine works as an immunosuppressant in mice, and xylitol (a sugar alcohol) can prevent ear infections in kids. Sweet!

What Would Happen if I Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

Light Meal A teaspoon of super-dense white dwarf star would rip through your stomach.

“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)

Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”

It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?

15 Stunning Photos of Chandra Space Observatory

A satellite called The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been launched by NASA on July 23, 1999. It was named in honor of Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who is known for determining the mass limit for white dwarf stars to become neutron stars. “Chandra” also means “moon” or “luminous” in Sanskrit. Being one of four Great Observatories, Chandra is X-ray sources 100 times fainter compared to other X-ray telescope. Below are some stunning extraterrestrial photo shots done by Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Eagle Nebula

Crab Nebula

Celestial Fireworks

Light Echo

Ant Nebula

Purple Black Hole

Cosmic Drama

Pinwheel Galaxy

Supernova Explosion

Wild and Mild Galaxy

Pulsar Galaxy

Blackhole Overflows

Tycho Supernova

Cat’s Eye Nebula

Jet Power Assortment

Marine Engineering Marvel Photos

Marine Engineering basically involves the design, construction, installation, operation and support of the systems and equipment which manage marine vehicles, and of the systems which make a vehicle or structure habitable for crew, passengers and cargo. In fact, almost all things in our life ranging from cooking to the warmth in winter are thanks to the work done by people in the marine industry. You are about to see the true marine engineering that we never think of before this and hopefully this will come to appreciation of their works at the sea.

The Underseas Worker was Welding the Structure

Oil Rig and Construction in Malaysia

Floating Gas Refinery. So Huge!

Flare Tower of the Oil Rig

Large LNG Ship

Qatar Gas Processing Plant

Even a Farm will be Used for Storing Crude Oil

One of the Biggest Steel Plant in Egypt

Unimaginable Risk for an Exploration Vessel in a Rough Sea

An Alternative to be Considered…….Nuclear Plant! (in UK)

How Ants Make Their Nest?

Ants are very industrious insects in which many people in the world expressed ants’ attitude and behavior in proverbs and pithy words. In fact, in al-Quran (muslim book) itself there was already a devoted one chapter which is called an ant (an-Naml in arabic). Being a small creature with only 2 stomachs and 3 eyes, they can lift the burden of double of their weight. Let us see why the ants are very heralded by many people and cultures. This experiment has been carried out by the investigation unit at NASA in Florida, USA, in which NASA wants to see how ants make their nests.

First, ants are placed in a closed container seen as an aquarium with only a light illuminated by ultra violet (light purple representing the sun) and the transparent medium gel (having the properties of minerals and nutrients as the soil).

After a few minutes away passed, ants were beginning to work, making the holes of small colonies to help other ants move in the “land”. These ants from my opinion want to escape from the hot sun.

As a result, it forms various types of small alleys connecting roads in the soil which is indeed a very unique arts. If we see the container from afar, oh God! it is very beautiful and creative architecture. Let’s take an example of their diligence and creativity and apply in our day life. Plus, they are also seen to work closely together to achieve their goal of making their nests for comfortable.