Charging a cellphone on an induction pad seems like magic, and in a way it is. Induction is a feature of electromagnetism that Michael Faraday stated in 1831, now known as Faraday’s law. It is the basis for much of modern electrical and electronic technology.
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From the earliest days of sports announcing, on muggy nights baseball announcers have remarked about how baseballs do not travel as far due to the heavy, humid air.
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By strict definition, a catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. Being such a utilitarian concept, the word takes on other applications outside the world of chemistry from which it evolved.
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Just about everyone knows that the moon orbits Earth once every month, which is the time required for one orbit. What we do not commonly know is that the moon’s orbit is not circular; it is elliptical.
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Among the many similar but very different mistakes that I see in media is the distinction between silicon and silicone. That “e” on the end looks benign, but it makes a big difference in the material.
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The second most abundant particle in the universe after the photon is the neutrino. It is a shifty little thing. It has no electric charge, very little mass, travels very near the speed of light, interacts only with the weak nuclear force and passes through Earth as though it were not there.
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Proteins are the most important of all biochemicals. They are involved in nearly all bodily processes in one way or another.
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Equinox derives from Latin for “equal night,” actually referring to equal length of day and night. It is not true that day and night are exactly the same length everywhere around the globe, but they are nearly.
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To humans, the sense of smell has a direct link to emotions. Who among us has not, at one time or another, had a memory and its associated feelings come rushing at us when catching a whiff of perfume, theater popcorn or one of thousands of smells that we associate with events from our past?
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Although detailed climate records exist for only 150 years or so, several Earth sensors keep records that allow us to infer past climate information. These “proxy climate data sources” substitute for actual weather instruments.
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Touch screens are everywhere: smartphones, laptop screens, supermarket checkouts, restaurant tills, ATMs, airport check-in kiosks, museum information booths and GPS devices, to name a few.
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The landscape is something we see every day. It is as familiar as a member of the family, yet we seldom think about how it got to be that way.
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Homo sapiens are fascinated to watch ourselves in mirrors, but we must watch others for models of how to behave.
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The Pineapple Express, a local name for the atmospheric disturbance that drenches the U.S. West Coast, is one of several atmospheric rivers, a relatively narrow region in the atmosphere that is responsible for most of the horizontal transport of water vapor outside the tropics.
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Everybody knows what “greasy” means, even if only from that coating on your hands after downing a bucket of the colonel’s finest. But rendered animal fat is a different kind of grease from that used for lubrication.
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Sunlight is the primary illuminator. Its spectrum is a familiar rainbow with maximum emittance in a color that most of us would call yellow-green.
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Stars have an average lifetime of 5 billion years, so we obviously cannot study one from birth to death.
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There is a universe in a grain of sand. Three of the four known forces of nature combine to hold together the nuclei of atoms and their electron clouds. Contained within the atomic and crystal structure of the sand and all atoms are all of the forces that exist in the universe.
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