Attrition X - Antonia Bayle

Attritionx is a committed raid guild on the Antonia Bayle server. We raid Monday - Tuesday - Thursday. Our raid times are from 8pm - 11pm EST, with an emphasis on efficiency. We set a high benchmark and require all members to meet it. This sets an auspicious environment where success is expected. If you believe you qualify and would like to apply, please post an application or enquire in game with our fine officers.

Progression

We simply want to be the very best, like no one ever was. To kill everything is our test, to farm it is our cause. We have travelled the servers, searching far and wide, each member, to understand, the power that it's inside. It's you and me. It's our destiny.

While we accept competition, we don't live for it. Whether it's first, third or fifteenth, our goal remains the same. To improve. If you need to showboat, or endlessly demonstrate your narcissism, this is not the place for you. That being said, if you don't have the motivation to improve or perform to a high enough standard, this is not the place either.

Facta non verba.

The classes we are currently recruiting are shown on our website:

Recruitment

All our raid spots are contestable, if you feel you are better and can out perform one of our current members, please feel free contact an officer or submit an application.

Application

Welcome to contact any of our fine folk with general enquiries, though you will presumably be forwarded to these super important people eventually:

Antonia_Bayle.Spencyr

Antonia_Bayle.Pyrroh

Antonia_Bayle.Ebofu

Here is a trolling and fact repository for reference

Fact Repository

Ethylene is the hormone responsible for the ripening of fruit.

A series of related transformations occur. The fruit becomes sweeter as the starches are converted into simple sugars by amylases. The fruit changes from green to colorful as the chlorophyll, green pigment, is broken down by hydrolases revealing anthocyanins, coloured pigments. The fruit becomes less tart as the acids are converted to neutral molecules by kinases. The fruit becomes softer as the amount of pectin is lessened by pectinases.

There are two types of fruit in this regard: climacteric and non-climacteric. Climacteric fruits continue ripening after being picked. These include: apples, apricots, avocados, bananas, cantaloupes, figs, guava, kiwis, mangoes, nectarines, peaches, pears, plums, and tomatoes. Non-climacteric fruits ripen only while still attached to the plant. Non-climacteric fruits will only get worse with time. Non-climacteric fruits include: cherries, grapes, limes, oranges, pineapples, and berries (blue-, black-, rasp-, straw-, etc.).
Simply put, don't mix climacteric and non-climacteric fruits, and if you need to quickly ripen a fruit, gently bruise the skin, this will increase ethylene production.

Bump: Bard, Enchanter, Healer

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Human Hearing:

The common range given is 20Hz to 20,000 Hz, though this varies greatly between individuals. Sensitivity also varies with frequency, shown by equal-loudness contours. Humans are most sensitive between 2,000 Hz and 5,000 Hz.

Sound waves funnel into the ear via the external ear canal and reach the eardrum, Tympanic membrane. Due to the asymmetrical shape of the outer ear, sound is filtered differently depending on where it is coming from, this gives the ability to localise sound vertically.

The compression and rarefaction of these waves activate the membrane, causing vibrations through the middle ear bones, ossicles: malleus, incus and stapes. While the middle ear seems unnecessarily complex, the purpose of its complexity is accommodate the impedance mismatch between air and water.

Also located in the middle ear is the tensor tympani muscles, which helps protect the inner ear by contracting reflexively in reaction to loud sounds.

The inner ear consists of the cochlea, a spiral shaped, fluid filled tube. It is divided lengthwise by the organ of Corti, which is the primary organ in mechanical to neural transduction, neural encoding of sound waves. Inside the organ of Corti is the basilar membrane, which vibrates when waves propagate through the cochlear fluid. Different regions of the basilar membrane vibrate at different sinusoidal frequencies, due to variations in thickness and width. Nerves that transmit information therefore encode frequency tonotopically, the spatial arrangement of where different frequencies are processed.

The most common form of hearing loss, sensorineural hearing loss, is the reduction of function in the organ of Corti, more specifically, the function of the outer hair cells, which are very sensitive to damage from exposure to loud sounds. Once damaged, these hairs do not regenerate naturally, though recent study has shown particular drugs may reactive genes responsible for hair cell development.

Hearing range and the ability to localise sound are reduced underwater, in which the speed of sound is faster than air. Underwater hearing is by bone conduction rather than the organ of Corti. Aquatic animals have a more specialised hearing apparatus, which is effective underwater, and in comparison very little is known about it.

Bone conduction is one reason why your voice sounds different when you hear it played back. The skull conducts lower frequencies better than air, so people perceive their own voices to be lower and fuller.

Bump for Fury or maybe Cleric and Bard/Enchanter

How can you breathe in a submarine/sealed environment?

The air you breathe is primarily made up of four gases:
Nitrogen (78%)
Oxygen (21%)
Argon (0.94%)
Carbon dioxide (0.04%)

When we breathe, our bodies consume the oxygen and convert it to carbon dioxide. Exhaled air contains about 4.5% carbon dioxide. Our bodies don't do anything with the nitrogen or argon.

A submarine, or a space ship, is a sealed container that contains people and a limited supply of air. Three things must occur to keep the air breathable.

Oxygen has to be replenished as it is consumed.
Carbon dioxide needs to be removed from the air.
The moisture we exhale must also be removed.

Oxygen is supplied from either a pressurised tank, an oxygen generator, generally using electrolysis of water, or some form of oxygen canister. The canisters produce oxygen via an extremely hot chemical reaction, a catastrophe in 1997 on the Mir space station, when a fault in a canister triggered a fire, which burning on pure oxygen was hot enough to melt the metal surrounding it, caused a major overhaul in their production and safety requirements.

The carbon dioxide can be removed chemically using soda lime, sodium hydroxide and calcium hydroxide. The carbon dioxide is trapped in the soda lime via a chemical reaction and is removed from the air.

The moisture is removed via a dehumidifier. Condensation on the side of a cold drink is a good example of how dehumidifiers work. In principle, as air loses heat, it also loses its ability to retain moisture. A dehumidifier simply circulates air over a cooled surface, which absorbs the moisture in the air, as condensation, at which point the air is then reheated and exhaust out.

Bump for Sorcerer, and Bard/Enchanter etc

What makes sugar sticky?

Hydrogen bonding.

Unlike some other bonds, hydrogen bonds form between molecules instead of between atoms in a compound. This interaction, in which hydrogen is bound to a highly electronegative atom is referred to as hydrogen bonding. This is a misnomer, as it is not technically a bond but a very strong dipole-dipole attraction and should not be confused with a covalent bond.

Sugar itself is not sticky when it is dry. When it interacts with water, the hydrogen in the sugar has a strong attraction to the oxygen in the water, these bonds are what makes it sticky.

Those same bonds make it stick to your fingers. But water also bonds to your fingers with hydrogen bonds, but doesn’t feel sticky. What is the difference? When your fingers get wet, they do tend to stick to one another a little bit more than when they are dry. Except water does not stick very well to itself, so when you pull your wet fingers apart, a little water remains on each finger. The water sticks to your fingers more than it sticks to itself.

A non-sticky example of this process is sand. When it is dry, it flows freely. If you add just a little water, the sand will clump together, although it still looks like sand, much the way sugar reacts to water.

Bump for Sorcerer, Bard/Enchanter and Healer.

Bruising

A bruise, or contusion, is a collection of blood outside of the blood vessels, referred to as a haematoma.
Bruising can occur at almost all levels of tissue, including the skin, subcutaneous, "beneath the skin", muscle and bone.

It is usually initiated by blunt trauma, which causes the capillaries to break under the skin. Nerve endings within the affected tissue detect the increased pressure, which depending on the area may be perceived as pain. The damaged capillaries release endothelin, a hormone which causes the blood vessel to contract, which minimises further bleeding.

Endothelium is a thin layer cells on the interior of blood vessels, which normally prevents coagulation within the vessel. As these vessels are damaged, this layer is broken, which allows the blood to coagulate, thicken, and clot.

Bruises change colour due to the breakdown of haemoglobin. This process is called Phagocytosis, the sequential degradation of haemoglobin to biliverdin to bilirubin to haemosiderin. Haemoglobin itself produces a red-blue colour, biliverdin produces a green colour, bilirubin produces a yellow colour, and haemosiderin produces a golden-brown colour.

The shape of bruising generally corresponds to the instrument of injury. Bruising which presents in a separate location is called ectopic bruising, and occurs when the tissue is loose and allows the blood to travel away from the location of injury, often due to gravity, such as a black eye.

Bump for Warlock, Bard/Enchanter and other such shenanigans.

Bruising... It sounds like you are hinting at something.

CT and MRI Scans.

A CT, or CAT (Computed Axial Tomography) Scan is best suited for viewing bone injuries and diagnosing lung and chest problems. An MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is suited for examining soft tissue, such as ligaments and tendons, spinal cord, brain tumours etc.

A CT scan uses x-rays, radiation, to generate images of the body. The x-ray tube rotates around the patient, with a x-ray detector on the opposite side. This detector receives the beam which makes it through the patient. Measurements are taken about 1000 times per second. Each measurement is compared to calibration data of air, water and polyethylene. The difference between the measurements taken and the control sample gives a known value for a particular substance in the body, regardless of the patient size and exposure factors.

An MRI uses a very powerful magnet and pulsing radio waves. The detection coils in the scanner read the energy produced by water molecules as they realign themselves after each pulse. The collected data is reconstructed into a two dimensional illustration. Bones are virtually void of water and therefore do not generate any image data, this leaves a black area for imaging of soft tissues.

CT Scans are often preferred as they can be completed within 5 minutes, where as an MRI can take anywhere from 30 minutes, up to 2 hours. They are very good for imaging bone structures. A major advantage is its ability to image bone, soft tissue and blood vessels at the same time.The significant drawback is the radiation exposure which can be hundreds time higher than a conventional x-ray, due to the multiple angles.

MRI excel at distinguishing soft tissues. Altering the magnetic field and radio waves changes the contrast of the image, with different tissues highlighted with specific contrasts. They are also able to image any plane without moving the patient. Due to its magnetic field, it excludes patients with any metallic implants, such as surgical clips or cardiac monitoring devices such as a pacemaker. The scanner is almost entirely enclosed, an issue for any patients suffering claustrophobia.

Bump for Illusionist, Sorcerer and other such shenanigans.

No facts for today but looking for..

Conj / Templar / Bard / Enchanter

First post by Master Recruiter Salbain and it is a complete flop. I blame #Obama

With the exception of Earth, all the planets in our solar system have names from Greek or Roman mythology.
Mercury is the Roman god of commerce, travel and thievery.
Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty.
Mars is the Roman god of war.
Jupiter was the king of the gods in Roman mythology.
Saturn is the Roman god of agriculture.
Uranus is the Greek deity of the heavens, or sky. The only name derived from Greek mythology.
Neptune was the Roman god of the sea.
Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld.

Bump for Assassin / Ranger / Templar / Enchanter / Stuff

A calorie is a unit of heat, the energy required to heat one gram of water by one degree.

Bump Ranger, Tank, Templar

A car traveling at 80km/h (50m/h) uses half it's fuel to overcome wind resistance.

Air resistance,drag, increases with the square of speed, and therefore the power needed to push an object through air increases with the cube of the velocity. If a car cruising on the highway at 80 km/h requires 30 kilowatts to overcome air drag, that same car will require 240 kilowatts at a speed of 160 km/h. Thus, a vehicle needs 8 times the engine power to reach twice the speed. In principle, this means that fuel consumption will increase fourfold.

Bump for Tank, Templar, Stuff

Bump for Troubador, Tank and some stuff.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a famous king from history.

Spades: King David
Hearts: Charlemagne
Clubs: Alexander the Great
Diamonds: Julius Caesar

Bump for Tank and Troubador

Superconductivity is a remarkable phenomenon: superconductors can transport electric current without any resistance and thus without any losses whatsoever. It is already in use in some niche areas, for example as magnets for nuclear spin tomography or particle accelerators. However, the materials must be cooled to very low temperatures for this purpose. But during the past year, an experiment has provided some surprises.

With the aid of short infrared laser pulses, researchers have succeeded for the first time in making a ceramic superconducting at room temperature – albeit for only a few millionths of a microsecond. An international team, in which physicists from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg have made crucial contributions, has now been able to present a possible explanation of the effect in the journal Nature: The scientists believe that laser pulses cause individual atoms in the crystal lattice to shift briefly and thus enhance the superconductivity. The findings could assist in the development of materials which become superconducting at significantly higher temperatures and would thus be of interest for new applications.

In the beginning, superconductivity was known only in a few metals at temperatures just above absolute zero at minus 273 degrees Celsius. Then, in the 1980s, physicists discovered a new class, based on ceramic materials. These already conduct electricity at temperatures of around minus 200 degrees Celsius without losses, and were therefore called high-temperature superconductors. One of these ceramics is the compound yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO). It is one of the most promising materials for technical applications such as superconducting cables, motors and generators

Phys Org Article

Bump for dem Troubadours

Gabriel's Horn is a geometric figure, which has infinite surface area but finite volume. The properties of this figure were first studied by Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli in the 17th century.



Gabriel's horn is formed by taking the graph of , with the domain and rotating it in three dimensions about the x-axis.

Using integration it is possible to find the volume and the surface area :





can be as large as required, but it can be seen from the equation that the volume of the part of the horn between and will never exceed ; however, it will get closer and closer to as becomes larger. Mathematically, the volume approaches as approaches infinity. Using the limits.


The surface area formula above gives the area as times the natural logarithm of . There is no upper bound for the natural logarithm of as it approaches infinity. That means, in this case, that the horn has an infinite surface area. That is to say;



Bump for Sorcerer and Troubadour, Calculus is a requirement for membership. There are tests every Thursday.

Identical twins while sporting identical DNA do not share identical fingerprints, as these affected by various stress events in the womb.

Bump for Sorcerer and Troubadour

What happens to fat during weight loss?

The most common misconception among doctors, dieticians and personal trainers is that the missing mass has been converted into energy or heat. "There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.
"The correct answer is that most of the mass is breathed out as carbon dioxide. It goes into thin air," says the study's lead author, Ruben Meerman.

In their paper, published in the British Medical Journal today, the authors show that losing 10 kilograms of fat requires 29 kilograms of oxygen to be inhaled and that this metabolic process produces 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide and 11 kilograms of water.

If you follow the atoms in 10 kilograms of fat as they are 'lost', 8.4 of those kilograms are exhaled as carbon dioxide through the lungs. The remaining 1.6 kilograms becomes water, which may be excreted through bodily fluids, the authors report.

More than 50 per cent of the 150 doctors, dieticians and personal trainers who were surveyed thought the fat was converted to energy or heat. "This violates the Law of Conservation of Mass. We suspect this misconception is caused by the energy in/energy out mantra surrounding weight loss," says Mr Meerman.

Bump for Sorcerer and Troubadour

June 30 will be a second longer than any other day this year.

A "leap second" needs to be added in 2015 to make sure the time on atomic clocks stays in sync with Earth's rotational time, but some Internet companies are dreading the day.
Earth's rotation has been slowing down by about two thousandths of a second every day. But atomic clocks, which are now accurate up to quadrillionths of a second, don't change pace. While this situation isn't an immediate problem, it would eventually cause clocks to become so out of sync with Earth's rotation that they would read noon during the dead of night

"Earth is slowing down over geological time, and that can lead to a problem when you've got a ton of clocks," Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist for Time Service at the U.S. Naval Observatory, told Live Science. "What do you do when the day gets longer?"

The solution that the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) came up with is to add a second every now and then to keep the standard atomic time in sync with Earth's time. This year, the extra second is scheduled for the midway point in the year, at 11:59.59 p.m. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on June 30.

This will be the 26th leap second added to a calendar year since the practice began in 1972. In the past, the extra second has messed with computer systems. The last leap second was added in 2012, and it caused problems for big companies like Reddit, LinkedIn, Gizmodo and FourSquare.

The problem is that during the leap second, the computer clock shows 60 seconds instead of simply rolling over to the next minute, or shows the 59th second twice. The computer sees a leap second as time going backward, Matsakis said. The machine registers this as a system error, and the CPU can overload.

Google, to skirt the problem, will add a millisecond to its servers every once in a while throughout the year. This way, the slowed-down servers don't notice when an extra second is slipped in. Another good way to avoid any trouble is to simply shut down a computer system for an hour or two around the leap second, Matsakis said.

But the leap second could put more than just computer systems at risk. It's a little over-cautious, Matsakis admits, but he said he would not want to be on board a plane during a leap second. The extra second has been known to interrupt GPS receivers, which could be a problem for pilots.

The leap second is a more subtle correction than a leap year. The leap year rule (adding an extra day every four years in February) keeps the Gregorian calendar pretty close to the actual astronomical record of the passage of time. It does so by correcting for the 365.2422 days it takes for the Earth to travel around the sun, compared with 365 days, the human rounded down number.

But Earth's rotation isn't perfect, and there are irregularities from year to year on the millisecond level. Every few years some fine-tuning is needed, and a leap second is added in June or December. This is why June 30 this year will have 86,401 seconds instead of 86,400.

Bump for Sorcerer