What do cone shaped stadium roofs and hand held medical devices share in common? Both of them may contain the plastic polymer ethylene terafluoroethylene (abbreviated “ETFE’). A “polymer “is defined as a large molecule composed of many small, repeating…
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The common plastic water or soda bottle is one of the most common uses for the polymer resin, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. Products made from this material are recyclable, however, beginning in 2012, Pepsi will go one step further and…
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Stephen Hawking may be one of the most brilliant men alive, but his books are simple. That is not to say they are “dumb” or “easy” but he strips away all the math and heavy science, turning complicated topics that…
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Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-American inventor born March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was an internationally recognized teacher of visual speech. He taught in Scotland and in Canada, where the family moved in 1870. As a boy,…
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Some industries in this century employ compounds of thallium, a toxic metallic element, for a variety of commercial purposes. However, certain properties of this substance probably restrict its overall usefulness in the marketplace. Thallium often figures amongst the harmful materials…
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More than 14 billion years ago, the universe developed from the Planck epoch, a hot and dense phase in its beginning. Since then, the universe has expanded and has created billions of galaxies, stars and planets. The universe will continue…
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The universe contains within countless objects. Some are big as our own Sun or the planet Jupiter, while others are as little as hydrogen and helium particles composing the nebulas; however, the universe is so vast that the biggest objects…
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The title of “largest moon in the solar system” is held by Ganymede, the icy satellite of Jupiter that was discovered by Galileo in 1610 as one of three moons to orbit the fiery planet. With a diameter of 3273…
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In his 1897 novella, “The Invisible Man” H. G. Wells speculated that it might be possible for a man to become invisible by manipulating his refractive index. Little over a hundred years later science is close to making his dream…
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Quantum computing has been around for a while, but is still in its infancy. It has the potential to be the next big leap in the microprocessor technology. Conventional computers work in binary. Data is encoded and transferred in ‘bits’…
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