Can you live without a spleen? The spleen serves many functions, but you can live without it. Having it removed will affect your life, though. Your spleen is just inside your left rib cage, above your stomach. It is about 12 cm long and weighs approximately 70 g, about the size of an avocado. So, […]
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How does an ejection seat work? In the simplest sense, they remove the canopy to the plane and then launch the pilot on their seat into the sky before a parachute deploys. Ejection seats are a lot more advanced than they were when they were first invented. The first ejection seats were first used during
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What is the upper limit of a speaker? The loudest speaker ever made produced 165 decibels. No speaker could ever go above 194 dB, because sound has an upper limit, just like temperature. There are a few considerations when trying to make a speaker that can produce very loud sounds. The first is that the
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Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seat belt in 1959. There is no way of working out how many people his invention has saved, but it must be over a million, at least. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration thinks that the three-point seatbelt saves about 15,000 lives a year in the US alone. Bohlin
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Why do some birds have red eyes? Birds with red eyes have a lot of tiny blood vessels in their eyes. Human eyes come in one of six colors. Our Eyes can be amber, blue, brown, gray, green, hazel, or pink. Pink eyes are actually a result of albinism. If someone is born albino, they
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What causes the bends? It is caused by the rapid release of nitrogen gas from the bloodstream. You don’t have any risk of the bends if you don’t go very deep. The bends becomes a risk if you dive any deeper than about 9 meters. It is caused because of the water pressure and because
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How does chilling a patient after cardiac arrest work? If the body temperature of a person whose heart has stopped beating is lowered, they can survive for longer without oxygen, which gives the medical staff longer to fix and resuscitate the person. Chilling a patient is an experimental technique that may or may not become
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What is a karat? It is a way to measure the purity of gold. (In the UK, karat is spelled as carat – more on that later). However, a carat is a unit of mass that is 200 mg. It is used for measuring gemstones and pearls. Both Karats and carats are not used to
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What was the Great Stink? It happened in Central London during June and August 1858, when the smell of the River Thames was unbearable. The city of London grew up at the point where the River Thames was narrow enough to bridge. There was a ford across the river before the first bridge was ever
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How does a monorail balance? The single rail of a monorail train is much wider than a rail on a regular railway and there is no worry about balancing. However, they use side wheels for support. There are two types of monorail train. The first type, and probably the most common type, ride on top
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