When one is presented with any type of data, the use of filtering is a common practice for turning their data into information. Data itself is simply a collection of letters and numbers, but when data is manipulated, or in…
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‘Simple Harmonic Motion’ is quite a complicated term for something which is on the surface, relatively simple. You see simple harmonic motion all around you in the world every day. Clock pendulums, children’s swings, roundabouts on parks a bicycle wheel,…
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A capacitor is simply a circuit element used for storing charge. It is generally constructed of two closely spaced metal plates. When we apply a voltage across the plates, a positive charge will develop on one plate, a negative charge…
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Eris, is the “largest dwarf planet known”. It was discovered in 2005 in a survey at California’s Palomar Observatory’s Samuel Oschin telescope by astronomers Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz. Originally named UBU 313, or Xena as it was…
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Balance a pencil on your finger and you will quickly learn that the pencil behaves as if its entire mass were concentrated at the center of the pencil, the center of mass. The center of mass between any number of…
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Nebulae are collections of dust, helium gas, hydrogen gas, and a variety of other ionized gases forming an interstellar cloud. Though the word can also sometimes be used for groups or clusters of stars, it is primarily reserved for dust…
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Everyone typically takes joy from the unexpected sighting of a shooting star; however, not everyone knows exactly what they are seeing. A “shooting” or “falling” star is actually a phenomenon where a meteoroid (a particle or small piece of stony…
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FUNDAMENTAL MECHANICS” “I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple”. – Albert Einstein (1879-1955) In the early 1970’s, Quark Theory was relatively well established but, no quarks or direct evidence of any had…
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When Sir William Herschel first used the word asteroid in 1802 he used it to describe an object with a point like appearance like a star which moved through the heavens like a planet. When this description became popular in…
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What is the universe made of? This is a seemingly simple question, but one might be surprised by the answer a cosmologist would give. We don’t know! We can peer into the spectra of distance galaxies and stars and measure…
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