Does Your Blood Type Reveal Your Personality?

Accord ing to a Japanese institute that does research on blood types, there are certain personality traits that seem to match up with certain blood types. How do you rate?

TYPE O
You want to be a leader, and when you see something you want, you keep striving until you achieve your goal. You are a trend-setter, loyal, p a s s i o n a t e, and self-confident. Your weaknesses include vanity and jealously and a tendency to be too competitive.

TYPE A
You like harmony, peace and organization. You work well with others, and are sensitive, patient and affectionate. Among your weaknesses are stubbornness and an inability to relax.

TYPE B
You're a rugged individualist, who's straightforward and likes to do things your own way. Creative and flexible, you adapt easily to any situation. But your insistence on being independent can sometimes go too far and become a weakness.

TYPE AB
Cool and controlled, you're generally well liked and always put people at ease. You're a natural entertainer who's tactful and fair. But you're standoffish, blunt, and have difficulty making decisions.

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Why Is The Sea Salty?

Everyone who has been to the beach knows that seawater is salty. Everyone also knows that fresh water in rain, rivers, and even ice is not salty. Why are some of Earth’s waters salty and others not? There are two clues that give us the answer. First, “fresh” water is not entirely free of dissolved salt. Even rainwater has traces of substances dissolved in it that were picked up during passage through the atmosphere. Much of this material that “washes out” of the atmosphere today is pollution, but there are also natural substances present.

As rainwater passes through soil and percolates through rocks, it dissolves some of the minerals, a process called weathering. This is the water we drink, and of course, we cannot taste the salt because its concentration is too low. Eventually, this water with its small load of dissolved minerals or salts reaches a stream and flows into lakes and the ocean. The annual addition of dissolved salts by rivers is only a tiny fraction of the total salt in the ocean. The dissolved salts carried by all the world’s rivers would equal the salt in the ocean in about 200 to 300 million years.
A second clue to how the sea became salty is the presence of salt lakes such as the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea. Both are about 10 times saltier than seawater. Why are these lakes salty while most of the world’s lakes are not? Lakes are temporary storage areas for water. Rivers and streams bring water to the lakes, and other rivers carry water out of lakes. Thus, lakes are really only wide depressions in a river channel that have filled with water. Water flows in one end and out the other.
The Great Salt Lake, Dead Sea, and other salt lakes have no outlets. All the water that flows into these lakes escapes only by evaporation. When water evaporates, the dissolved salts are left behind. So a few lakes are salty because rivers carried salts to the lakes, the water in the lakes evaporated and the salts were left behind. After years and years of river inflow and evaporation, the salt content of the lake water built up to the present levels. The same process made the seas salty. Rivers carry dissolved salts to the ocean. Water evaporates from the oceans to fall again as rain and to feed the rivers, but the salts remain in the ocean. Because of the huge volume of the oceans, hundreds of millions of years of river input were required for the salt content to build to its present level.
Rivers are not the only source of dissolved salts. About twenty years ago, features on the crest of oceanic ridges were discovered that modified our view on how the sea became salty. These features, known as hydrothermal vents, represent places on the ocean floor where sea water that has seeped into the rocks of the oceanic crust, has become hotter, and has dissolved some of the minerals from the crust, now flows back into the ocean. With the hot water comes a large complement of dissolved minerals. Estimates of the amount of hydrothermal fluids now flowing from these vents indicate that the entire volume of the oceans could seep through the oceanic crust in about 10 million years. Thus, this process has a very important effect on salinity. The reactions between seawater and oceanic basalt, the rock of ocean crust, are not one-way, however; some of the dissolved salts react with the rock and are removed from the water.
A final process that provides salts to the oceans is submarine volcanism, the eruption of volcanoes under water. This is similar to the previous process in that seawater is reacting with hot rock and dissolving some of the mineral constituents.
Will the oceans continue to become saltier? Not likely. In fact the sea has had about the same salt content for many hundred of millions if not billions of years. The salt content has reached a steady state. Dissolved salts are being removed from seawater to form new minerals at the bottom of the ocean as fast as rivers and hydrothermal processes are providing new salts.
The salt in the sea come from :

• Weathering of continents
• Hydrothermal Vents
• Submarine Volcanoes

We can summarize this discussion. Wherever water comes into contact with the rocks of Earth’s crust, either on land or in the ocean or within the oceanic crust, some of the minerals in the rock dissolve and are carried by the water to the ocean. The salt content of seawater does not change because new minerals are forming on the sea floor at the same rate as salt is added. Thus, the salt content of the sea is at steady state.

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Ozone Facts: What Is Ozone?

Ozone is a gas made up of three oxygen atoms (O3). It occurs naturally in small (trace) amounts in the upper atmosphere (the stratosphere). Ozone protects life on Earth from the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation. In the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) near the Earth’s surface, ozone is created by chemical reactions between air pollutants from vehicle exhaust, gasoline vapors, and other emissions. At ground level, high concentrations of ozone are toxic to people and plants.

Stratospheric “good” ozone

Ninety percent of the ozone in the atmosphere sits in the stratosphere, the layer of atmosphere between about 10 and 50 kilometers altitude. The natural level of ozone in the stratosphere is a result of a balance between sunlight that creates ozone and chemical reactions that destroy it. Ozone is created when the kind of oxygen we breathe—O2—is split apart by sunlight into single oxygen atoms. Single oxygen atoms can re-join to make O2, or they can join with O2 molecules to make ozone (O3). Ozone is destroyed when it reacts with molecules containing nitrogen, hydrogen, chlorine, or bromine. Some of the molecules that destroy ozone occur naturally, but people have created others.
The total mass of ozone in the atmosphere is about 3 billion metric tons. That may seem like a lot, but it is only 0.00006 percent of the atmosphere. The peak concentration of ozone occurs at an altitude of roughly 32 kilometers (20 miles) above the surface of the Earth. At that altitude, ozone concentration can be as high as 15 parts per million (0.0015 percent).

The concentration of ozone varies with altitude. Peak concentrations, an average of 8 molecules of ozone per million molecules in the atmosphere, occur between an altitude of 30 and 35 kilometers.

Ozone in the stratosphere absorbs most of the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Without ozone, the Sun’s intense UV radiation would sterilize the Earth’s surface. Ozone screens all of the most energetic, UV-c, radiation, and most of the UV-b radiation. Ozone only screens about half of the UV-a radiation. Excessive UV-b and UV-a radiation can cause sunburn and can lead to skin cancer and eye damage.

Solar ultraviolet radiation is largely absorbed by the ozone in the atmosphere—especially the harmful, high-energy UV-a and UV-b. The graph shows the flux (amount of energy flowing through an area) of solar ultraviolet radiation at the top of the atmosphere (top line) and at the Earth’s surface (lower line). The flux is shown on a logarithmic scale, so each tick mark on the y-axis indicates 10 times more energy.
Increased levels of human-produced gases such as CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) have led to increased rates of ozone destruction, upsetting the natural balance of ozone and leading to reduced stratospheric ozone levels. These reduced ozone levels have increased the amount of harmful ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. When scientists talk about the ozone hole, they are talking about the destruction of stratospheric, “good,” ozone. Tropospheric “bad” ozone

Although ozone high up in the stratosphere provides a shield to protect life on Earth, direct contact with ozone is harmful to both plants and animals (including humans). Ground-level, “bad,” ozone forms when nitrogen oxide gases from vehicle and industrial emissions react with volatile organic compounds (carbon-containing chemicals that evaporate easily into the air, such as paint thinners). In the troposphere near the Earth’s surface, the natural concentration of ozone is about 10 parts per billion (0.00001 percent). According to the Environmental Protection Agency, exposure to ozone levels of greater than 80 parts per billion for 8 hours or longer is unhealthy. Such concentrations occur in or near cities during periods where the atmosphere is warm and stable. The harmful effects can include throat and lung irritation or aggravation of asthma or emphysema.

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