Yearly Archives: 2015

Is the universe expanding?

In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the galaxies are moving apart from each other at high speed. The Universe is expanding like a balloon being inflated. The further apart the galaxies are, the faster they move. For instance, a galaxy 10 million light years away gets 300 km (187 miles) further from us every second. A galaxy …

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Is it possible to conduct electricity without wires?

Wireless electric power transfer is theoretically possible and it’s in the R&D phase of many leading research labs in the world. Nasa hopes to power its Mars Rover wirelessly in future missions. The basic technology is simple: rectify the received microwave signal using a microwave low-pass filter and a diode. This structure is called rectenna (rectifier + antenna). Many Radio …

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Is it possible for all planets in our solar system to align in a straight line?

Theoretically, no, as the plane of orbit of each planet is tilted slightly in relation to other planets. However, if we ignore the intra-orbital plane tilt, then the chance of all planets (eight now excluding Pluto) to be at the right ascension with respect to sun at same time would be once in 180 trillion years. For an exact alignment, …

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Is an octopus dangerous to man?

There are stories of people being attacked by an octopus and frantically tying to detach the suckers of the encircling arms. This may happen very rarely and when it does the octopus is really investigating a new moving shape rather than attacking it. If the person could manage to keep perfectly still the octopus would soon let him go.

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If the density of gold is more than that of iron, why is gold softer than iron?

The softness of a metal is its ability to undergo permanent deformation under applied stress. All metals have specific crystalline structures. Each structure has its own densely packed crystalline planes. There exist line defects and plane defects in a crystal system. Such defects are more in densely packed crystal systems, i.e., metallic crystals with higher density, and result in a …

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