Exoskeletons

Muscles, the part of bodies which give them the ability to move in certain ways, are soft and flexible. All animals need a rigid structure so their bodies maintain their shape. We mammals (and many invertebrates, too) have endoskeletons, interior structures composed of many dozens or hundreds of bones.

However, insects are too small to have bones – any bones that size would be very weak. Therefore, insects instead have exoskeletons. Exoskeleton is similar to bone in that it is a hard, dense material. Exoskeletons (as the name implies) are on the outside of flies’ bodies, like a suit of armor.

Exoskeletons do serve the function of maintaining a fly’s body’s shape. However, they also act as a protective measure – preventing much harm from coming to a fly after colliding with objects in-flight, as they often do.

Kelvins

There are two primary units of temperature in the world: Fahrenheit, used primarily by the United States, and Celsius, used by pretty much everyone else. Scientists, however, use a third scale: Kelvins. A Kelvin degree is the same “size” as a Celsius degree, but the Kelvin scale defines 0 degrees as Absolute Zero, the lowest temperature possible; the temperature at which all kinetic motion stops and matter is (metaphorically) frozen. Thus, there are no “negative” degrees in the Kelvin scale.

Unlike other temperature systems, temperatures are NOT expressed as “degrees Kelvin”, but rather “Kelvins”, like other kinds of measurements (e.g. “miles” or “kilometers”, not “lengths Mile”), so if it were a warm sunny day, you might say the temperature was “300 Kelvins”.

In the Kelvin scale, the freezing point of water (0 ℃; 32 ℉) is defined as 273.15 K, while the boiling point of water (100℃; 212℉) is defined as 373.15 K; by this system, a warm day (28 ℃, ~80 ℉) would be 300 K, while a cold day (8 ℃, ~45 ℉) would be 280 K.

The Kelvin scale was named after British physicist and engineer William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, who lived in the late 19th Century. He wrote of the need for an “absolute thermometric scale”.

Plasma

“Plasma” (in the scientific, not medical, sense) is a word thrown around a lot these days. Known best for its role in “Plasma” TVs, it is used in several different consumer applications.

Although many would think of plasma as some sort of special substance, it is actually much simpler. Like the three commonly-known “states” of matter (solid, liquid, and gas), plasma is another such state of matter. It occurs at temperatures much higher than gasses, and, like a gas, plasmas are extremely erratic, moving all about at high speeds. The most notable characteristic of plasmas is that they give off a lot of light (the colors depend on the material).

Plasmas may seem exotic, but everyone sees an example every day: the Sun gives off light because its matter is in a plasma state. Similarly, lightning is actually just air excited to a plasma state by stream of electricity. Plasma TVs have many small bubbles of gas which are excited to a plasma state to give off the colorful, brilliant light that makes them so popular.

The Internet vs. The World Wide Web

The Internet is a gigantic computer network linking together smaller networks from across the face of the Earth. Although in theory it is just a large-scale computer network, in practice it is perhaps the most significant invention of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Internet has revolutionized practically all commercial, governmental, and consumer fields; making life more convenient and comfortable, communication extremely efficient, and business more profitable. In this Internet age, there are few schools, businesses, and other institutions that can afford to not incorporate Internet services into their respective functions.

The World Wide Web, more commonly known by its abbreviation, “www”, is a massive decentralized database of interlinking webpages. In essence, it represents all the webpages on the Internet. Though the two are often confused, the World Wide Web (webpages) is just a part of the Internet (a computer network which facilitates information transfer), which encompasses other Internet services, including email, chatting, digital calling (VoIP), online video gaming, peer-to-peer file transferring, and more.

Thou

“Thou” is a Middle English (what English was like from the 10th century until about the 15th) form of “you”. It was primarily used when the user wanted to show respect to whomever he was speaking; hence, it’s considered formal language. For example, a worker would probably have referred to his boss with “thou”, whereas he would refer to his coworkers, friends, and family with “you”.

“Thou” is now officially considered antiquated, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.

Computer Screens

Computer screens these days are capable of producing many millions of colors. Have you ever thought about how they make these colors? It’s quite simple. You can even see it yourself.

Find a computer screen or TV and make it show something white (this works better with a bigger screen). If you move your face very close to the screen, you’ll see each “white” pixel (dot) is composed of three smaller ones – red, green, and blue. By combining different amounts of these three colors, computer screens can trick your eyes into seeing almost any shade or color.

Gamma Radiation

Gamma radiation is an invisible form of light that is extremely energetic – more than 50,000 times more energetic than visible light. It is most commonly associated with the oft-fatal “radiation” given off by nuclear weapons.

Gamma rays are the “cousin” of X-Rays, in that they are invisible to the naked eye, difficult to produce, have numerous legitimate scientific applications, and are harmful (and often lethal) to biological organisms in sufficient (read: small) quantities. Although virtually all light produced in the known universe emanates from nuclear fusion/fission reactions inside stars, this is especially so for gamma rays, for whom the energy required to be produced via electroluminescence (the way a light bulb produces light) is so extreme that atoms tend to give off multiple, lower-energy photons (light) instead.

Although gamma rays typically have negative connotations in everyday life, they actually are proving to be extremely useful to Science, particularly for Astronomy (studying the movements of the stars) and Astrophysics (studying the underlying principles of space & stellar objects). The GLAST Satellite, for example, which was recently launched into space by NASA is designed to take images of the night sky using gamma light instead of visible light. If it is as useful as NASA hopes it will be, it may revolutionize understanding of space-time (the fabric of space and time which we all live in), help us learn more about Dark Matter (matter which doesn’t interact with our “normal” matter, but inhabits the same space as us) and help us find far-away galaxies we’ve never seen before.

Gamma rays are represented by the lowercase greek letter gamma (γ).

Welcome, One and All

Welcome to my new project, Didst Thou Know!

This is merely an attempt to serve up the many pieces of useless information in my head in a nested, easy-to-digest format. I hope to maintain a good level of actual (useless) information in my posts while keeping it readable for the leyman.

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