2020 saw many record-breaking discoveries, including the discovery of the world’s longest animal. Scientists also found the largest species of turtle that ever lived, the world’s oldest material, the record speed of sound, the longest lightning…
A striped-tailed sparrow broke the world record for the longest non-stop flight in the fall of 2020. It flew 12,200km from southwestern Alaska to New Zealand in 11 days.
The previous record was held by a striped-tailed wader when it flew 11,500km over 9 days in 2007. This bird is known for its impressive flights and their journeys are often windy. east support.
While exploring deep canyons off the coast of Australia, researchers discovered a super-long, rope-like creature that could be “the longest animal ever discovered”.
This creature, called a siphonophore, is 45 meters long and is actually made up of many small creatures called “zooids”. Each zooid lives its own life but is always connected to its other zooids and performs a function for the entire siphonophore.
An ancient tortoise that lived 8 million years ago, with a shell measuring nearly 2.4 meters in diameter, could be the largest tortoise that ever existed. This ancient creature belongs to a now-extinct species called Stupendemys geus, which lived in northern South America during the Miocene epoch, which lasted 12 to 5 million years ago.
It weighs about 1,145kg, almost 100 times more than its closest living relative, the Amazon river turtle (Peltocephalus dumerilianus) and twice the size of the largest living turtle, the sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea).
Inside a piece of amber found in a mine in northern Myanmar, scientists discovered the world’s oldest sperm. Amber contains 39 small ostriches, a range of crustaceans, 31 of which belong to a newly discovered species called Myanmarcypris hui.
Inside one of the adult female Myanmarcypris hui animals, scientists discovered four eggs and a spaghetti-like mass, which turned out to be 100-million-year-old sperm. Before this discovery, the oldest sperm confirmed was 50 million years old and came from the worm cocoons in Antarctica. The findings were published September 16 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Academy B.
Stardust was found inside a massive meteorite that hit Earth half a century ago dating back 7 billion years, making it the oldest material found on the planet. This ancient dust made of particles older than our Sun was carried out into space by dying stars.
This stardust eventually reached our planet by hitchhiking the Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969. This is the first time that researchers have discovered particles that predated the Sun in rocks above. Earth.
How fast can sound travel? Scientists have found the fastest possible speed of sound in any medium, which is 36km/s. Sound can travel at different speeds depending on the material it’s traveling through, for example sound travels faster in a warm liquid than in a colder one. It can also travel at different speeds in solids than in gases. Calculations show that sound travels fastest in the atoms with the lowest mass.
So, to find out the maximum speed at which sound can travel, a team of researchers calculated the speed of sound through a solid atom of hydrogen. Hydrogen is the lowest mass atom but is not a solid, unless it is under extreme pressure more than a million times stronger than Earth’s atmosphere.
Under these very specific conditions, the researchers found that sound can travel close to the theoretical limit of 127.460km/h.
On Halloween 2018, a massive lightning bolt cut across the Brazilian sky. This massive flash of lightning was more than 700km long and stretched from the Atlantic coast to the edge of Argentina, making it the longest lightning bolt ever recorded – according to an analysis by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). in June 2020.
Scientists have used new satellite technology to confirm that the flash is more than twice as long as the previous record, a flash that lit up the skies of Oklahoma, USA in 2007.
However, the researchers said in a statement that lightning is not actually getting bigger, but that lightning monitoring technology is getting better. The new analysis also shows that the longest lightning bolt record is the one in Northern Argentina that lasted nearly 17 seconds in March 2019.