The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transferred from one form to another. Energy can exist in different forms, such as thermal (heat), kinetic (movement) and potential (stored). Not all energy is transferred to ‘useful’ forms of energy though – when you run, some of the chemical …
There’s a huge amount still to find out about Mars. Despite its more-or-less uniform colour, Mars is a hugely diverse world, with a variety of different environments and landscape features -we really have only scratched the surface, but as we do so, we are discovering evidence for an increasingly Earth-like past, raising major questions that …
Most touchscreens use capacitive sensing. This uses two glass layers, coated on their inside surfaces with stripes of a transparent conducting material. On one layer the stripes run horizontally; on the other they run vertically. Each intersection acts as a tiny capacitor that stores an electric charge. When you touch the glass, your finger distorts …
Neither of the Wright brothers married throughout their lives. Wilbur is recorded as once saying that he “did not have time for both a wife and an airplane.” Wilbur and Orville were the only members of the Wright family who didn’t attend college. Orville spent the years learning the printing trade, while Wilbur helped at …
This is down to a unique chemical reaction. It starts underground, as a growing onion will absorb sulphur from the earth, causing molecules known as sulphoxides to form. When you cut into an onion, you’re breaking into its cells, which release certain enzymes. These enzymes react with the sulphoxides, converting them into sulphonic acids. This …
Quantum tunnelling is a quantum mechanical process where a particle tunnels through a barrier that it classically (ie, in classical physics) could not pass. As quantum tunnelling lies in the domain of quantum mechanics, it cannot be perceived directly. However, it can be explained basically with a simple analogy of a person throwing a tennis …
The rarest big cat in the world is the Amur leopard (panthera pardus ssp. orientalis). There are less than 30 left in the wild and the population is declining, A which means they are critically endangered. They face various threats including habitat loss, poaching and climate change. The Amur leopard is a subspecies of leopard …
It would be a fairly close battle, which is probably why they almost never clash head to head in the wild. Both animals are highly territorial, but the hippo is much more aggressive. Fights between two male rhinos normally don’t amount to more than some horn clashing and a little urine spraying. Male hippos, on …
Several plants could claim this title, but the world’s worst y water weed is undoubtedly the water hyacinth. Found in 50 countries on five continents, this free-floating South American plant can double in mass every five days. It forms dense mats which rapidly clog waterways, limit boat traffic and stop sunlight and oxygen reaching underwater. …
The stretchiness of rubber is down to its structure, and the law of entropy. Rubber is made from long chains, which in their relaxed state can be twisted and curled around each other in a huge number of different ways. As it is stretched, the chains straighten out and line up, forming an orderly structure. …
The short answer is: pure water does not conduct electricity. Any impurities, like salts, in the water enabled it to conduct electricity. When salts are dissolved in water, they separate into different electrically charged atoms called ions. Salt, or sodium chloride (NaCI), breaks up into positive Na ions and negative CI ions. If you place …
Astronomers talk of a star ‘shining’ only when it is generating energy within itself by nuclear fusion, but stars continue to shine in the normal sense, pumping out huge amounts of light and other radiation, long after their fuel is exhausted and fusion has come to an end. White dwarf stars have super hot surfaces …
Every spring over Antarctica, and like refrigerants and the propellant in to a lesser extent in the Arctic, the aerosol cans. When released into the ozone layer thins so that ‘holes’ appear, atmosphere these CFCs accumulate in While a normal oxygen molecule the stratosphere. Cold temperatures (O2) consists of two oxygen atoms, over Antarctica cause …
Funnily enough, the answer to this question is both yes and no. Yes, a certain amount of the ‘white noise’ you used to see when TV channels mistuned could be attributed to cosmic background radiation (CBR) – taken as some of the best proof we have of the Big Bang theory. However, other factors included …
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According to the Guinness World Records, the fastest aerial circumnavigation (without going into space) still belongs to Concorde. In 1995, the supersonic passenger jet set off from New York, USA, and circled the globe in just 31 hours, 27 minutes and 49 seconds, reaching Mach 2 -twice the speed of sound. The historical flight was …