ScienceIQ.com

When Did A Cat Become A Kitty?

It has long been thought that cats were first domesticated in Egypt, about 4000 years ago. Indeed, they were very highly thought of in ancient Egyptian society. It was illegal to kill or harm them, and illegal to export them to other countries. When they died, they were often mummified in the same way as deceased human bodies. In fact, ...

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WhenDidACatBecomeAKitty
Biology

Tea Time!

Did you know that a disease of coffee plantations made the British tea drinkers? In the 1700s Britain had many coffeehouses that served as popular social gathering places to discuss current events and ... Continue reading

TeaTime
Chemistry

What Give Batteries Their Charge?

There is in chemistry only one function that is of fundamental importance: the ability of atoms to share electrons. In any such sharing program, there must be electron donors and electron acceptors. ... Continue reading

WhatGiveBatteriesTheirCharge
Engineering

Infrared Headphones

Infrared headphones use infrared light to carry an information signal from a transmitter to a receiver. Sounds simple enough, but the actual process is very complicated. The human ear gathers sound as ... Continue reading

InfraredHeadphones
Physics

The Coriolis Effect

The Earth, rotating at about 1000 miles per hour (1,609 km/hr), influences the flow of air and water on its surface. We call this the Coriolis Effect, named after French scientist Gaspard Coriolis, ... Continue reading

Coriolis

From Here To There

HereToThereWe all know that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is big -- very big. So big in fact that its size is impossible to grasp. To cope with the astronomical distances of galaxies, since miles or kilometers won't do, scientists have had to resort to using a really big yardstick. That yardstick is the distance light travels in one year, what scientists call a 'light year.' A light year is an obvious choice. It makes use of a concept that we are all familiar with, a year, the time it takes Earth to travel around our Sun. It also makes use of something that eats up a lot of miles, the distance light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, covers in one year, 5 trillion, 880 billion miles or, approximately 6 million million miles.

Now for some of you, the concept of a light year is familiar. But that's the point. It sounds familiar and tame to say that Alpha-Centauri, our nearest star, is 4.3 light years away. But if we add the zeros, we truly see how isolated we are, circling our Sun in our corner of the Milky Way. Alpha-Centauri is 25,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth.

Now consider that the most distant objects that we can see without a telescope are about 1.75 million light years away. There we go again -- big numbers. But that's a big number of something that already is a gigantic number. And that doesn't even take into consideration what the Hubble Space Telescope can see, distances of over 7 billion light years away. We are just now seeing light that left those distance realms in the early days of the universe. The universe is indeed a very, very big place.