Category: Science

Seti is suspended?

According to Discovery.com, the SETI Institute has suspended using the Allen Telescope Array, due to budget constraints.  The Allen Telescope Array eventually is planned to have 350 telescopes in the array, and was funded by an initial $25 million by Paul Allen (Microsoft’s co-founder).  

How smoke detectors work

[youtube http://www.youtube.com?v=oFUUQcpGR3k] Bill takes apart a smoke detector and shows how it uses a radioactive source to generate a tiny current which is disrupted when smoke flows through the sensor. He describes how a special transistor called a MOSFET can be used to detect the tiny current changes.

Traveling in a straight line? Think Again…

A Mystery: Why Can’t We Walk Straight? from NPR on Vimeo. A Mystery: Why Can’t We Walk Straight? from NPR on Vimeo. Try as you might, you can’t walk in a straight line without a visible guide point, like the Sun or a star. You might think you’re walking straight, but as NPR’s Robert Krulwich […]

How does a Vintage Black Box work?

A flight data recorder is a crashworthy device that records data about an aircraft’s flight, such as airspeed, heading, and the procedures of the pilot. It’s also called a black box. Bill Hammack of the University of Illinios opens up a vintage black box from a Delta airlines jetliner.

Household hints – Cleaner dishes

Here’s a hint for anyone that has a dishwasher, put White Distilled Vingear in the liquid dispenser, in addition to any dish washer powder that you use…  It will help sanitize and seems to work as good as some of the off the shelf products that we have tried.