What causes an avalanche or landslide? The causes of avalanches and landslides do have some similarities, but landslides involve the movement of rock, earth, and debris, while avalanches involve snow and ice. An avalanche starts when an unstable mass of snow and ice breaks loose and slides down the slope. The avalanche picks up speed
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Why did the Spruce Goose only fly once? The Spruce Goose only flew once because the need for it had passed, it was too heavy, and Howard Hughes lost interest. Spruce Goose was the nickname for the Hughes H-4 Hercules, a flying boat that was built to transport troops to Europe during the Second World
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What is a calorie? A calorie is a unit of energy. There are small calories and large Calories. A small calorie is a measurement of the energy required to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius at 1 atmospheric pressure (or sea level). What is a small calorie and a large calorie? A
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What was the Gilded Age? It was the period in American history between 1870 and about 1900 where the country rapidly industrialized and there was a lot of wealth inequality. The wealthy became increasingly richer and the poor became increasingly poorer. The name for the era was taken from a book by Mark Twain and
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How do compound eyes work? Compound eyes work by having a large number of microscopic eyes that each have a lens and see an image, which then gets combined in the brain. Most of the insects that have eyes have compound eyes. The only insects that don’t have compound eyes don’t really have eyes at
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Why did Stalin’s daughter defect to the USA? Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s only daughter, defected to the USA because she was unhappy with life in the Soviet Union, and the government wouldn’t let her marry the person she wanted. Joseph Stalin had three biological children and one child whom he adopted. Svetlana was his youngest child
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Why do dogs pant? Dogs pant to lose heat because they don’t have as many sweat glands as we do. Many animals have different ways of losing heat. We have evolved to be able to lose a lot of heat through our skin. We have roughly 2 to 4 million sweat glands all over our
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How could EMAS save planes? EMAS systems can bring planes that overshoot the runway to a safe and rapid stop. EMAS stands for Engineered Materials Arresting System, and they are being introduced into some airports. Runways around the world come in a variety of lengths, and planes need different lengths depending on a whole variety
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What is a superbug? A superbug are bacteria, viruses, or fungi that have developed resistance to many different types of drugs. We often hear about superbugs on the news. They wreak havoc on places like hospitals. They are very hard to deal with, and the people in the hospital usually have compromised immune systems, which
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How many atoms are there in the vacuum of space? Technically, in a true vacuum, there would be zero atoms, but it is impossible to make a completely true vacuum. There will always be some atoms. In intergalactic space, there are 0.3 atoms per cubic meter, on average. Obviously, some areas of space have an
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