Chemistry

[- Air -]The Air around us is not weightless. In fact, it can be weighed almost as accurately as iron or lead. A column of Air 1 inch square and 600 miles high, for instance, weighs approximately 15 pounds, about twice as much as an average newborn baby. This weight is what creates the phenomenon known as "atmospheric pressure." [- Elements -]Ten of the 105 known Elements had been discovered and were in use in prehistoric times: gold, silver, lead, iron, copper, zinc, tin, sulfur, carbon, and mercury. The largest individual contribution to the table of Elements was that of the nineteenth century English chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, who identified boron, barium, calcium, potassium, sodium, and strontium in 1807 and 1808. He also demonstrated that diamonds are composed of pure carbon and discovered the hilarious properties of nitrous oxide -"laughing gas." [- Sodium -]If the chemical Sodium is dropped in water and a match is taken to the mixture, it will immediately and violently ignite. If Sodium is immersed in a pot of kerosene, however, it will not burn at all. Physics [- Sound -]Sound travels fifteen times more swiftly through steel than through air. [- Theory of Relativity -]According to the Theory of Relativity, the mass of an object increases with its velocity. In nonscientific terms, this means that things get bigger as they move faster. The process has been demonstrated in laboratories. In several experiments, objects accelerated to 86 percent of the speed of light have doubled in weight. The theory also postulates the rather incomprehensible notion that given enough speed, an object will become as large as the universe itself. [- Volume -]A pipe 2 feet in diameter will allow four times more fluid to pass through it than a pipe 1 foot in diameter-the Volume of a pipe varies as the square of its diameter. [- Water Pressure -]If you punch a series of holes in a paper cup filled with Water, the Water will squirt out farthest and fastest from the lowest holes. The reason is that Water Pressure is greatest at the bottom of the cup. For the same reason, dams are made thicker at the bottom than at the top.

Interesting Facts - Biology

[- Genetics -]In a single human cell there are between 10,000 and 100,000 coded messages known as genes. If all the directions contained in all these genes were written down, the words would fill the equivalent of 10,000 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. [- Genetics -]Scientists at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia have bred mice that have more than one set of parents. Known as "multimice," these creatures are spawned by taking two embryos created by two sets of parent mice, placing them together in such a way that the embryos grow together, then transplanting the entire organism into the womb of a third female mouse. The result is a baby mouse born with genetic characteristics of both set of parents. [- Memory -]During experiments conducted in 1962 at the University of Michigan, scientists successfully extracted memory from one animal and transferred it to another. The experiment was conducted in the following manner. Over a period of time planarian worms were trained to behave in a particular way when exposed to light. These worms were then cut into pieces and fed to untrained planarians, and the untrained worms were put through the same learning paces as their predecessors. The second batch of worms, those that had dined on the first, learned many times faster than the originals, indicating that knowledge had somehow been transferred through body tissue. Similar experiments were later conducted at Baylor University: mice were trained to run through a maze, and an extract was then made of their brains. This extract was fed to untrained mice, which then learned the same maze twice as fast as their predecessors. If placed in a different maze, the untrained mice showed no particular aptitude for learning the layout. The implication of these experiments is that memory can be transferred from one being to another somatically as well as experientially. [- Population -] 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

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