Wednesday 10 July 2013

10 NEW THINGS TO LEARN

1. One of the biggest machine in the world is the SMEC earth-mover used in opencast mines in Australia. It weighs 180 tonnes and has wheels 3.5 m high.

2. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was one of the greatest scientist of the 19th century. He started his work as an apprentice bookbinder but became assistant to the great scientist Humphry Davy after taking brilliant notes at one of Davy's lectures.
Faraday is said to be Davy's greatest discovery.
In 1821, Faraday discovered that the magnetism created by an electric current would make a magnet move and so made a very simple version of an electric motor.
In 1831, Faraday showed that when a magnet is moved close to an electric wire, it creates or induces an electric current in the wire.
Michael Faraday was probably the greatest experimenter of all times.

3. The electrical resistance of dry skin is 5,00,000 ohms; wet skin's is just 1000 ohms.

4. Plastics are made by joining carbon and hydrogen atoms. These form ethene molecules which can be joined to make a plastic called "polythene".

5. A force is a push or pull. It can make something start to move, slow down or speed up, change direction or change shape or size. The greater the force, the more effect it has.
The thrust of Saturn V's rocket engines was 33 million newtons.

6. Light takes millions of years to reach us from distant galaxies, so we see them not as they are but as they were a million years ago.

7. Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a brilliant French scientist who is regarded as the founder of modern chemistry.
Lavoisier was the first person to realize that air is essentially a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen.
He discovered that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen.

8. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal present on earth that is 3410°C

9. Pierre and Marie Curie were the husband and wife scientists who discovered the nature of radioactivity. In 1903 they won a Nobel prize.

10. Phone calls across the ocean go one way by satellite and the other by undersea cable to avoid delays.

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