ScienceIQ.com

Pass the Iodized Salt Please

Have you ever wondered why common table salt contains iodine? It's because iodine is essential to your health. A diet lacking in sufficient quantities of iodine will lead to the production of a goiter and other serious health problems. Iodine is used by our bodies, and particularly by our thyroid gland, to produce the hormones triiodothyronine and ...

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IodizedSalt
Physics

Torque

A force may be thought of as a push or pull in a specific direction. When a force is applied to an object, the object accelerates in the direction of the force according to Newton's laws of motion. ... Continue reading

Torque
Medicine

What's So Bad About Cholesterol?

Cholesterol has a worse reputation than it deserves. This waxy lipid (a kind of fat) is essential to good health. It builds the membranes that hold cells together. It's used in making certain hormones ... Continue reading

Cholesterol
Geology

Heading For The Badlands

The bizarre landforms called badlands are, despite the uninviting name, a masterpiece of water and wind sculpture. They are near deserts of a special kind, where rain is infrequent, the bare rocks are ... Continue reading

HeadingForTheBadlands
Mathematics

How To Calculate The Area Of A Cylinder

Understanding how to find the area of a cylinder is easy if one first visualizes the cylinder and breaks its surface down into component pieces. To do this, first take a good look at the most common ... Continue reading

AreaOfACylinder

Nursery of Giants Captured in New Spitzer Image

GiantsSpitzerImageTypically, the bigger something is the easier it is to find. Elephants, for example, are not hard to spot. But when it comes to the massive stars making up the stellar nursery called DR21, size does not add up to visibility. These elephant stars are invisible. How can something so big go undetected? The answer is dust. DR21 is shrouded in so much space dust that no visible light escapes it. By seeing in the infrared, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has managed to pull this veil aside. The new observations reveal a firework-like display of massive stars surrounded by a stormy cloud of gas and dust. The biggest star is estimated to be 100,000 times as bright as our own Sun. Located about 10,000 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation of our Milky Way galaxy, DR21 is a dusty and turbulent nest of giant newborn stars.

Previous images taken with radio and near-infrared bands of light reveal a powerful jet emanating from a huge, nebulous cloud. But these views are just the tip of the iceberg. Spitzer's highly sensitive infrared detectors were able to see past the obscuring dust to the hotbed of star birth behind. The new view testifies to the ability of massive newborn stars to destroy the cloud that blankets them. Astronomers plan to use these observations to determine precisely how such a energetic event occurs.

Launched August 25, 2003, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Spitzer Space Telescope is the fourth of NASA's Great Observatories, a program that also includes the Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and Chandra X-ray Observatory.