How can sunflowers clean up radiation? They take the radioactive isotopes out of the soil and combine them into their stems and flowers. There is radiation all around us, all of the time. Radiation is simply energy that moves from one place to another. The light energy that bounces of a rose and hits our […]
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Why are more plane crashes survivable? Because of technology, training, the way the planes are laid out, and the materials the planes are made of. Many people have a fear of flying and a lot of people have an image that flying is very dangerous. This couldn’t be further from the truth. This fear is
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What are the doldrums? They are an area of windless ocean where sailing ships used to get stuck. The doldrums are not a problem for modern shipping because they don’t rely on wind power. They are a problem for yachts and other types of sailing boats. A Salvadoran fisherman called Jose Salvador Alvarenga spent 14
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Why is a duck-billed platypus so odd? It has a beak, no teeth, lays eggs, sweats milk, has 10 sex chromosomes, has webbed feet, has fur that glows, they have no stomachs, and has venomous spurs. The duck-billed platypus is native to Australia. Its name comes from Greek and means “flat foot”. It is so
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How is a mongoose immune to snake venom? They are not immune to all snake venom, just the snakes they live around. Even then, they have resistance rather than immunity. There are different types of venom for different types of snakes. The mongoose is particularly resistant to the venom of the cobra, which is a
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Why do we get déjà vu? There is a dysfunction in the part of your brain that processes familiarity and a correction by the part that processes memory. Déjà vu comes from French, and it means “already seen”. It is the feeling that you have already seen or experienced something you are seeing or experiencing
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How do planes refuel in the air? Either by using a long hose or a rigid tube to connect the fuel tanker with the plane being refueled. There are two systems of refueling a plane in the air. These are the probe-and-drogue system and the flying boom system. They’ve come a long way from the
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Why are the Secret Service in charge of protecting the president of the USA? They were the only agency capable of doing it at the time. The Secret Service was tasked with protecting the president of the United States in 1901 after the assassination of President McKinley. McKinley had just been elected for his second
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How do rats find landmines? They can sniff them out and the rats are light enough that they don’t set the landmines off. It is estimated that there are 110 million landmines still buried around the world. These landmines are still active and they are buried in over 60 countries. Explosives do deteriorate with age,
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What is Zipf’s Law? It is a statistical distribution in a data set where the first item is twice as big as the second item, three times as big as the third item, four times as big as the fourth item, and so on. Zipf’s Law is called a law, but it is not really
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