Have you ever wondered why plastic melts in a bonfire, but a cast iron pan doesn’t? A bonfire can reach temperatures as hot as 2,012 °F (1,100 °C). Most PET plastic melts at a measly 491 °F (255 °C), so it doesn’t stand a chance! Cast iron prevails with an average melting point of 2,100 °F (1,150 °C), depending on the iron-carbon alloy proportions.
Continue reading The Melting Points of 80 Elements, Substances, and Metal AlloysCategory Archives: Physics
Timelapse of the future: an amazing video
Melodysheep published an amazing video titled “Timelapse of the future: a journey to the end of time”. This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet, our sun, and our universe may ultimately be.
If this video won’t give you goosebumps, I don’t know what will.
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Is Evolution “just a theory”?
I recently saw a question on Quora and it was like that: “why is it called the ‘theory of evolution’ but the ‘law of gravity’?” This question is strongly related to a common misconception about evolution: “it is just a theory” – creationists always say “evolution is just a theory”.
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How many great minds does it take to invent a telescope?
On 11 January 1672, the Fellows of the British Royal Society were treated to a demonstration of Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope, which formed images with mirrors rather than with the lenses that had been used since the time of Galileo. Afterward, the fellows hailed Newton as the inventor of this marvelous new instrument, an attribution that sticks to the present. However, this linear historical account obscures a far more interesting, convoluted story. Newton’s claim was immediately challenged on behalf of two other contenders, James Gregory,
Solar Panels work by absorbing LIGHT from the sun, not heat
Ignorance is a very, very bad thing. Last week, as North America suffering from extreme cold weather because of a phenomenon called “polar vortex“, Jim Hoft, founder of the American far-right news and opinion website The Gateway Pundit has tweeted that: “It’s a bit cold outside this morning in middle America… Aren’t you glad you aren’t heating your home with a solar panel like nitwit socialist @AOC is demanding?” (@AOC is the American politician and activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez here.) What Jim Hoft says is flat-out wrong. Solar panels DO work in the cold. They work by absorbing LIGHT from the sun, not heat.
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Speed of Light – See how torturously slow it is
The speed of light is the Universal speed limit – nothing can travel faster than light. In the vacuum (commonly denoted c), its exact value is 299,792,458 meters per second (around 186,000 miles per second). In other words, if you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.
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Astronauts demonstrate Newton’s second and third laws of motion
A microgravity environment is a perfect place to demonstrate basic physics, i.e. Newton’s laws of motion. In the videos published by the NASA Johnson channel, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) just do that.
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10 Amazing Facts about Space
The endless depths of the sky intrigue almost all humans alike. Space is like an abstract dream coming to life when it unfolds into a number of unseen horizons. The enormous nebulas, staggering hypernovae and the smattering of countless planets and stars make it a canvas of muse.
We are but a speck of dust in a desert full of possibilities when compared to the vastness of space. There are many realities prospering in the skies above us, it is only natural that we are still unaware of the majority of phenomena taking place on and around the stars.
Just like the count of stars, there are unlimited obscure and consternating facts dwelling in the depths of space. Most of them are surprising and are reminders for us that we are just an addition to the universe. Let us take a swim into the sky with these 10 amazing facts which are bound to fascinate you.
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What is the mass of the Earth? Scientists used neutrinos to measure
While scanning the interior of Earth using neutrinos, a team of scientists from Spain also used these subatomic particles to measure the mass of the Earth. Their result is in agreement with the current best estimate, which was measured using the value of the gravitational constant (G).
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The coldest place in the Universe is now on the ISS
As soon as NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) began producing ultra-cold atoms, the International Space Station (ISS) became the coldest place in the known universe. The formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, a fifth state of matter occurred in NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) at a temperature of 130 nanoKelvin, or less than 10 billionth of a degree above Absolute Zero. Absolute zero, or zero Kelvin, is equal to minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 273 Celsius. Previously, the record-cold was achieved in Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle’s laboratory at M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero.
