STRANGE BUT TRUE- Savage breasts: Music's great therapeutic power















Q. Imagine advanced aliens 65 million light years distant aiming a superpowerful telescope Earthward. What do they see? Dinosaurs as they were 65 million years ago, or just a blue spot? –D. Scott 

A. It is true that the light arriving right now at a planet 65 million light years away left Earth 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs were still around, says Clemson astrophysicist Bradley Meyer. This means a large enough telescope would, in principle, be able to see them.   

However, it is mind boggling to realize how large that telescope would have to be. The resolution of a telescope– how well it can distinguish two points from a given distance– is proportional to the diameter of its mirror.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has fantastic resolution: If it were sitting in New York City, it could see and distinguish two fireflies 1 meter (3.3 feet) apart in San Francisco!

But even with that resolution, HST can't resolve in much detail individual stars in a galaxy 65 million light years away, far less can it see planets, says Meyer. To see the Earth from that distance would require a telescope with a mirror some 13 billion times bigger in diameter than HST (42 times the diameter of the Moon's orbit around the Earth). And to see dinosaurs would require a telescope roughly 40 light-years in diameter!

Q. It's the largest organ of the body, a little over 20 pounds for a 150-pound person. It fends off microbes and functions as a body thermostat as its blood vessels constrict or dilate. A single square centimeter contains some 200 nerve endings, 100 sweat glands, 15 oil glands, 10 hairs, 2 cold receptors and 25 pressure-sensing receptors. What's this busy body part? –S. Burton

A. Skin, says Sandra S. Gottfried in Biology Today. Basically, we're all bags of bones and water, and our skin's the bag.

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