smarTenz

  Some men live and just die, while others gain immortality in people's memory. These men are so well known that sometimes they could be seen as legends, inspiration and guide. However, when telling their stories through generations and languages, some unwanted "alterations" can occur. This article relates ten of the most funny misconceptions about men who truly made history. 1.     Napoleon: Before digging deeper into this myth, I feel obliged to ask you a question, a little one: “Are you short?” Oh, just kidding. Instead, do you know what the Napoleon complex refers to? Whether you do or not, here is a quick refresher: The Napoleon complex describes men who suffer from being short and continuously show inferiority complex syndromes. The thing is, the so-called Napoleon complex doesn’t apply on the man it was called after, quite a surprise, isn’t it? So yes, Napoleon was not short. He is listed as 5 feet 2 inches at the time of his death. You may find...

One day, the universe has to come to an end, and the last star will stop shining and die. It will probably be a red dwarf. Unlike the other celestial bodies that have clear classification standards, red dwarfs fall into a variety of luminosities, masses and fusion activities, making them really interesting to study. They are also considered our best bets to find life forms outside of our solar system. The term “red dwarf” was first coined in 1915, but doesn’t actually hold a clear meaning, astronomically speaking.  The appellation was set only to distinguish them from their cousins, the blue dwarfs. So what do we know about red dwarfs, and what makes them our last hope for survival? 1.     Red dwarfs are little stars To fully understand why red dwarfs are classified as stars, we first need to comprehend what makes any other star a star. With so many bodies out there in the universe, astronomers struggled to trace down a separating line between what could p...

Life forms can survive as long as there is an energy source, take it away and everything will die. Although humans discovered numerous ways to spring out energy and thus life, no mean can ever equal the most ancient, the most powerful and yet the most lasting source of energy ever, Hydrogen fusion. Since the beginning of time, all kinds of stars have been fusing Hydrogen into Helium releasing enormous amounts of thermal and light energies feeding up the entire universe. Unfortunately, the universe will die. It will happen very slowly, over billions of years, but it will happen. At universal time scale, our sun will die in no time at all, and so will do all the stars of all the galaxies in more or less time. Luckily, there will be places that will exist nearly forever, and could be considered humanity last home: the corpses of dead stars; white dwarfs. What are these strange and mysterious things? And why are they our last hope for survival? 1.     Once upon a t...