Mintaka

Thanks very much for your replies, I understand that the fruit needs to be sugary and feed the seed, but taste and sugary is not the same. Any simple sugars would have been enough for the plant or tree, but all these exotic fruits are producing various tastes designed to please a human palate. :-) They are much more than just "sugary" aren't they? And if being tasty ensures their survival by being eaten, why do other plants and trees produce fruits and berries which are poisonous? If tastiness is the guarantee of survival, shouldn't all berries and fruits be tasty and edible? I know you are going to tell me that nature can use opposite techniques to reach the same purpose? Ok...I give up :-)

I know it sounds like a silly question, but so many fruits seem so delicious, as if they were designed for human pleasure, not just survival. A tree doesn't need to produce a tasty fruit to propagate itself, many species just throw their seeds directly into the wind, and they spread and grow. Also, if we say that trees produce tasty fruit so that certain animals will eat them and spread their seeds, why do some trees do the opposite and produce seeds and fruits which are poisonous to animals and birds? I mean, how, if one way works well, does nature choose an opposite way to do the same thing? It seems that biologists always have an answer for everything, but to me, eating my tasty mango, and feeling it was designed for me, not just to survive, but almost to make me swoon with wonder that nature can create something so delicious for me, I can't help feeling there is more to it than meets the eye. I'm not a creationist, I am an atheist, I am just wondering if there is some kind of intelligent design operating in all this... Cheers for any insights, I haven't been here for a long time,

Wow, I would have thought a 12 and a half kilo meteorite would have obliterated it into dust and made a crater , that just looks like he hit a sheep :)

Thanks for clearing that up for me Turtle :)

Thank you Craig, yes it's going well , but it's not exactly face to face because you might be surprised at how weak Skype is at dealing with video, even between fast connections . It's very unstable. We prefer not to use video anyway as it's distracting, doesn't always offer real-time lip-synch, and is better for grandchildren who want to speak to their grandparemts abroad while sat grinning on their Mum's knee. ;-) Thanks for the code!

We see quite a lot here, most nights. Why do so few meteorites reach the earth? Are they all so small? If so, why? Why does it never happen that a bigger chunk of rock "gets through" and hits a city, for example? It never happens. Why? Is our atmosphere such a formidable defence against these objects, or are we just lucky?

Are most of the stars I see up there similar in size to our sun? Can I see with my naked eye any objects which are in fact outside the Milky Way? Thank you..

I would like to link directly to Hypography via a link on the homepage of my website - My site I'm a friend of this forum, an English teacher and my site attracts quite a lot of students. I know I can just paste a link to here, but do you have a 'widget' , so I can just copy and paste the code into my html?? Thank you Joe

i think it's quite natural for people to want to visualise where they are in the universe....is my question beyond even the great minds in this forum? :-)

very helpful answers, thank you for going to so much trouble to answer , I for one appreciate it.

This galaxy, Andromeda is said to be similar in size to our own. As I look up at the night sky, am I looking up towards the top of a spiral arm of the Mily Way, or towards the centre of our galaxy? When I look at the several thousand stars in the sky above me, approximately how many square millimetres of that photo at that link above, would represent the portion of the night sky that I see? Or would it just be a pixel or so of that photo?

Great site! Thank you!

I came to live in Southern Spain 8 months ago, last November, 7 miles up the coast from Gibraltar, and every night Orion's belt was clearly visible from our balcony. I believe this is when I first saw the faint red glow of Betelgeuse. Winter was cloudy and now the sky is clear again but I cannot see Orion's belt. Does the position of the stars above us shift depending on which month it is? Is there any way of finding our which stars are actually above me now at night?

Thank you both for your detailed answers, I think you are right, we should appreciate what we can see, and make the most of what we have. I was thinking about this yesterday, that really we are very lucky to be able to experience anything at all, and even see what is above our heads and feel what is below our feet, , when most of "space" or the universe, is just silent , unheard and unseen.

If you tipped that bottle open , would the contents pour out of that hole at the top? Are you suggesting the universe might be this shape?