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Unit Of Luminous Intensity (candela)

Originally, each country had its own, and rather poorly reproducible, unit of luminous intensity; it was necessary to wait until 1909 to see a beginning of unification on the international level, when the national laboratories of the United States of America, France, and Great Britain decided to adopt the international candle represented by carbon ...

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Candela
Biology

Heady Success

Hammerhead sharks might strike you as strange: or, they might just strike you. Among the oddest-looking of sharks, all nine types of hammerheads sport heads with sides stretched wide, like the head of ... Continue reading

HeadySuccess
Biology

The Gingerbread Man

Did you know that gingerbread came about because of a smut disease of wheat? ... Continue reading

TheGingerbreadMan
Geology

Why Don't We Try To Destroy Tropical Cyclones?

There have been numerous techniques that we have considered over the years to modify hurricanes: seeding clouds with dry ice or Silver Iodide, cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs, ... Continue reading

TropicalCyclones
Chemistry

Oil Viscosity

Everybody recognizes 'oil' as a word for liquid materials that do not behave like water. They have a 'thickness' and self-cohesive character (autocohesion) that enables them to form a film on a ... Continue reading

OilViscosity

Natural Gas - The Blue Flame

NaturalGasTheBlueFlameIt is colorless, shapeless, and in its pure form, odorless. For many years, it was discarded as worthless. Even today, some countries (although not the United States) still get rid of it by burning it in giant flares, so large they can be seen from the Space Shuttle. Yet, it is one of the most valuable fuels we have. Natural gas is made up mainly of a chemical called methane, a simple, compound that has a carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Methane is highly flammable and burns almost completely. There is no ash and very little air pollution.

Natural gas provides one-fifth of all the energy used in the United States. It is especially important in homes, where it supplies nearly half of all the energy used for cooking, heating, and for fueling other types of home appliances. Because natural gas has no odor, gas companies add a chemical to it that smells a little like rotten eggs. The odor makes it easy to smell if there is a gas leak in your house.

The United States has a lot of natural gas, enough to last for at least another 60 years and probably a lot longer. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, also has a lot of gas, and some gas pipelines that begin in Canada run into the United States. The United States is looking for more ways to use gas, largely because it is easy to pipe from one location to another and because it burns very cleanly. More and more, we are using gas in power plants to generate electricity. Factories are using more gas, both as a fuel and as an ingredient for a variety of chemicals. While natural gas is plentiful, there is still some uncertainty about how much it will cost to get it out of the ground in the future. Like oil, there is 'easy' gas that can be produced from underground formations, and there is gas that is not so easy. If we can find better and cheaper ways to find more of the 'easy' gas and produce some of the more difficult gas, we can rely increasingly on natural gas in the future.