You inch up the 200 foot ramp until you reach the peak. Suddenly you feel a drop and plummet towards the earth within seconds. The thrills of roller coasters have often caused people to question the safety of such contraptions. What if I stop moving at the middle of the loop? How come I don’t fly off while doing a corkscrew? Why do I feel like I’m weightless? All of these questions can be answered by the wonders of physics.
You’ve heard it before: oil is not a reliable source of energy; it’s costly; it’s a major cause of political unrest; it’s enormously damaging to the environment.
One of the most popular alternatives are plant-derived liquid fuels, such as bio-diesel and ethanol; however, their manufacture significantly contributes to carbon emissions and diverts food sources away from human consumption, generating unrest especially in the impoverished sectors of the world.
Dappled butterflies silently glide by, their vibrant orange and red coloring glistening in the air. In Mexico, the trees appear to be coated with living, flapping leaves; in fact, this phenomena is just the migration of the monarch butterflies, winging their way to their winter homes.
If you would not drink poison, why would you drink aspartame? Aspartame, a chemical substitute of sugar, is scientifically proven to cause many disorders, but is still used in many common foods and drinks like the ever-popular Diet Coke.
The possibility of having a lightweight battery composed of simple materials and exclusive of oil seems to be yet another revelation for our curious minds to solve in the future. The recent discovery of a group of Swedish researchers allows us to use such a battery to expand on other scientific and technological advances.
As you walk through your local grocery store, you might have noticed that many of the product labels have begun touting something new.
Although it has become more widely known since the release of Angels and Demons, antimatter is still relatively unknown.
Health is an important aspect of everyone’s lives that is often taken for granted. It is a well known fact that many unsaturated fats may include health benefits as opposed to the saturated fats common in many foods today. But the question of which of these specific types of fats is beneficial is a commonly asked question with an answer that needs to be properly addressed.
When people lose a body part in an accident, illness, etc., they often receive artificial limbs to take place of the lost ones. Before, these were solid, stiff contraptions that barely moved. If they did move, it was jerkily, and used signals to perform tasks like the pulling up of an arm. Nowadays, we find limbs that are controlled by the body, sometimes even by the brain itself. “How?” we wonder. “How does the brain control something that isn’t even living, that’s not even made up of cells?”
After years of being a derogatory term, copy cat should be making a comeback. Emulation, specifically the imitation of biological life forms, is proving to be a very important science, formally known as biomimicry or biomimetics. Biomimicry recreates natural structures to produce better, greener inventions, a new way to solve age-old engineering problems and promote environmental conservation at the same time.
