Saturday, 10 May 2014

Eight-year-old Theresa Thompson and her 9-year-old sister Mary were the youngest sisters to receive a U.S. patent. They invented a solar tepee for a science fair project in 1960. They called the device a Wigwarm.


Researchers found high carbon dioxide levels in South African classrooms, suggesting that poor ventilation may contribute to tuberculosis transmission.


There is a common English word that is nine letters long. Each time you remove a letter from it, it still remains an English word - from nine letters right down to a single letter. What is the original word, and what are the words that it becomes after removing one letter at a time?


A hypothetic body that completely absorbs all wavelengths of thermal radiation incident on it. Such bodies do not reflect light, and therefore appear black if their temperatures are low enough so as not to be self-luminous. All blackbodies heated to a given temperature emit thermal radiation with the same spectrum, as required by arguments of classical physics involving thermal equilibrium. However, the distribution of blackbody radiation as a function of wavelength, known as the Planck law, cannot be predicted using classical physics. This fact was the first motivating force behind the development of quantum mechanics.