I learned this today. The Milky Way Galaxy orbits the barycenter of the Local Group. The barycenter is the center of mass of two bodies that orbit each other. It is the point that they orbit around. The word comes from Ancient Greek and means “heavy center”. When two objects orbit each other, there is […]
#106 What does the Milky Way Galaxy orbit? Read More »
I learned this today. Light can’t escape from a black hole because of the curvature of space caused by gravity. In physics, gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces. The forces are gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak forces that exist in atoms. Isaac Newton described gravity as a force
#101 Why can’t light escape from a black hole? Read More »
I learned this today. Flight or fight, the stress response, was first described by Walter Bradford Cannon in 1915. In 1915, Cannon published Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage. He noticed that when cats were threatened, their bodies released the hormone adrenaline / epinephrine, which lead to a series of other bodily changes.
#100 Who came up with the phrase “flight or fight”? Read More »
I learned this today. Cold fusion is not possible because atoms repel each other and thermo energy on the scale of millions of degrees is necessary to overcome this repelling force and drive them together. Nuclear fusion is the reaction that takes place in stars. It is the process by which they burn their fuel,
#98 Why is cold fusion not possible? Read More »
I learned this today. Absolute zero is zero Kelvin, which is -273.15℃, but it is impossible to reach. Absolute zero is considered to be the lowest temperature possible. At this point, there is no energy left in a solid. In any object, the molecules are moving. In my fingers. In the keyboard I am typing
#93 Is it possible to get absolute zero? Read More »
I learned this today. The Large Hadron Collider accelerates particles to close to the speed of light by using electric fields and radio waves. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built between 1998 and 2008 for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. I know you are thinking that should be EONR, but CERN comes
#89 How does the Large Hadron Collider work? Read More »
I learned this today. Quartz watches are far more precise than mechanical clocks because they make quartz crystals oscillate at a very precise frequency. A mechanical watch has an accuracy of ±5 seconds a day. Quartz watches have an accuracy of about ±5 seconds a month. For comparison, an atomic clock has an accuracy of
#83 How does a quartz watch work? Read More »
I learned this today. Our skin can allow sweat out, but it doesn’t let water in thanks to a thin layer of fat between the outermost layers of skin cells. The skin is said to be the largest organ in the human body. Actually, by surface area, it is the second largest because the inside
#82 Why is skin waterproof? Read More »
I learned this today. Dogs can probably smell cancer in people. Dogs have a phenomenal sense of smell. They have 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses. We have about 6 million. On top of this, the part of their brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is about 40 times larger than ours. It
#79 Can dogs smell cancer? Read More »
I learned this today. There are two ways of making electricity from solar panels. Directly, by using sunlight to make electricity, or indirectly, by using the sunlight to make heat. The sun releases energy in the form of photons. Photons are massless so they travel at the speed of light, 299,792,458 m/s. They travel from
#73 How do solar panels generate electricity? Read More »
