ScienceIQ.com

Classifying Organisms

Have you ever noticed that when you see an insect or a bird, there is real satisfaction in giving it a name, and an uncomfortable uncertainty when you can't? Along these same lines, consider the bewildering number and variety of organisms that live, or have lived, on this earth. If we did not know what to call these organisms, how could we ...

Continue reading...

ClassifyingOrganisms
Astronomy

Two Face? Absolutely!

During the Viking missions to Mars in the mid 1970s, the planet was imaged from orbit by the Viking 1 and 2 Orbiters. These spacecraft returned images of regions of the planet that, while similar to ... Continue reading

TwoFaceAbsolutely
Chemistry

Your Nose Knows!

Would you like spearmint or caraway flavor? That's a strange choice, but believe it or not, they are the same thing. Well, almost. Spearmint and caraway both contain a molecule called carvone with the ... Continue reading

YourNoseKnows
Medicine

What Is High Blood Pressure?

High blood pressure is a blood pressure reading of 140/90 mmHg or higher. Both numbers are important. About one in every four American adults has high blood pressure. Once high blood pressure ... Continue reading

WhatIsHighBloodPressure
Physics

The Weakest Force

Did you know that gravity is the weakest force in the universe? Well, it's true! There are four fundamental forces (that we know of) in our universe: Strong Nuclear, Electromagnetic, Weak Nuclear ... Continue reading

WeakForce

Lightning Striking Again

LightningStrikeWhat's hotter than the surface of the sun, moves with incredible speed, lasts a few seconds and goes out with a bang? If you said lightning, you're right. Lightning strikes cause thousands of forest fires every year and occasionally cause the death of people. Few who have been hit by lightning live to tell the tale. Yet the process that causes lightning is not really any different than what makes static electricity jump when we walk on a carpet and touch a metal doorknob.

Within thunder clouds, air and water vapor, snow and ice crystals are in constant motion. This motion causes the accumulation of positive and negative charges within the particles of snow and ice. As the cloud continues to churn, the areas of charged particles become larger and separate, with the positively-charged particles moving upward, and heavier negatively-charged particles falling downward. This imbalance, in turn, causes the ground below the thunderstorm to become positively charged. Once this process is set in motion, it isn't long before the areas of positive and negative particles attempt to balance each other out. What we call lightning is nothing more than the process of reconciling the positive and negative charges back to a neutral state.

A common misconception is that lightning moves from the sky to the ground. Actually, the process is much more interesting. In the seconds before a lightning strike, negatively-charged air rapidly moves towards the ground. In reaction, positively-charged particles in tall objects on the ground (church steeples, trees, electrical towers) begin to flow upward toward the descending air. When the two connect, a giant rush of visible electrical energy leaps from the ground. This is what we see as lightning. And the thunderclap we hear soon after is the shockwave caused by the sudden heating of the air near the lightning bolt.