Light
[Excerpted from Spectrums, by David Blatner] Red light—that is, light that our human eyes perceive as red—has a frequency of about 420 THz (terahertz). That means electric fields and magnetic fields are flipping back and forth about 420 trillion times … Read more 
Sound
Weather conditions can also make sound travel farther or shorter distances—but not for the reason you think. A strong wind won’t carry a sound wave along faster or push it backward like it would a material object. After all, the … Read more
Heat
The science-fiction author Ray Bradbury called his 1953 classic, about a man who burned books for a living, Fahrenheit 451. Of course, he could have named it the metric equivalent: Celsius 233. This is the temperature at which paper made … Read more
Heat
Heat up solid and you get liquid, then gas, then plasma, then — when you reach trillions of degrees — the atoms start to shake themselves apart. Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York had set a temperature record … Read more
Numbers
Placing “nano” before a measurement indicates “billionths” — that is there are billion per unit. For example, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. The prefix “nano” comes from the Latin nanus (“dwarf”). … Read more
Time
[Excerpted from Spectrums, by David Blatner] When the U.S government shot the first global positioning satellite (GPS) into space in the 1970s, no one knew for sure if Einstein’s theories were right, but millions of dollars were at stake: If … Read more
Heat
There’s some terrific science-based music out there, but some of the best comes from They Might Be Giants. They did a cover of a song by Hy Zaret called “The Sun Is A Mass of Incandescent Gas,” and made a … Read more
Quotes
“The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” –Andre Malraux
Size
How much larger is a mountain than an atom? How much smaller is Earth than the Milky Way? All these answers and more in one of the most mind-boggling interactive animations we’ve ever seen: Copyright 2012. Magnifying the Universe by … Read more
