What is the smallest thing an electron microscope can see? An electron microscope can see atoms that are 0.05 nanometers long. 0.05 nanometers is a very difficult number to imagine. How small is it? Well, a human hair is about 50,000 nanometers across. There are different types of microscopes. The basic type that students use […]
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How does body armor work? By breaking up the bullet and removing its kinetic energy. Armor has been around for a long time, but it has always had to adapt to the technology of weapons. In the Bronze Age, they had bronze armor because it was enough to stop a bronze sword blade. Then the
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Why do mosquito bites itch? Mosquito and insect bites itch because the immune response is triggered after the mosquito finishes biting. There are over 110 trillion mosquitoes from 3,000 different species around the world. I have no idea how they managed to calculate the number of actual mosquitoes. The word “mosquito” comes from Spanish where
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What is chewing gum made of and what happens if you swallow it? These days, chewing gum is just a gum base with sweeteners and a plasticizer. You can swallow it without any harmful effects. Humans have used something to chew on for thousands of years. A 5,000-year-old lunch of birch bark tar with toothmarks
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How do LED lights produce different colors? By using different materials that produce light at different wavelengths. LED stands for Light Emitting Diode and they are very different to regular light bulbs. A lightbulb produces light by passing an electric current through a very thin metal filament. This filament has to have a very high
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When did we start using tarmac on roads? Tarmac (asphalt) only really became popular once the motorcar was invented. Once you know that, it seems obvious, but it never really occurred to me. We have had roads for thousands of years longer than we have had tarmac. The first roads were created when people started
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Why is glass transparent? Glass is transparent because light photons don’t have enough energy to excite the molecules in the glass. There are two things we need to look at here. What is glass and what is light? Glass is a non-crystalline amorphous solid. There’s a bit to unpack there. Non-crystalline refers to the structure
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How quickly are the continents moving apart? Our continents are moving apart at a rate of 2.5 cm every year. The surface of Earth is divided up into 15 tectonic plates. There are seven major plates and eight minor ones. The major plates are named after the continents that are on them: African, Antarctic, Eurasian,
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Can the Mona Lisa ever be sold? The Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, can never be sold because it is owned by the people of France. There was a time when the Mona Lisa was owned by a single person. In fact, the painting was owned by a few single people, and could have
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What is & called and why? The symbol “&” is called the ampersand, which actually means “and, by itself, and”. It is also a shorthand version of the Latin word “et”. These days, we use the ampersand as a symbol for “and”. It is also used in programming language. It is not generally acceptable to
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