23 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Why You Lose Weight While You Sleep
Here's a simple question: Why do you weigh more when you go to sleep than when you wake up? Because you do... You can check this yourself. Somehow, while doing absolutely nothing all night but sleep, you will wake up lighter.
[...]
All night long, every time you breathe out, a bunch of carbon atoms, formerly inside your body, leave your insides and take off into the night air. You breathe in oxygen, O2. You breathe out carbon dioxide, (two oxygen atoms with a carbon atom attached), so there...
2 
2 Over the course of the night, through respiration, you lose a pound of weight to the carbon atoms in Carbon Dioxide.
31 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Power of Chemical and Nuclear Energy
New sources of power ... will surely be discovered. Nuclear energy is incomparably greater than the molecular energy we use today. The coal a man can get in a day can easily do five hundred times as much work as himself. Nuclear energy is at least one million times more powerful still. If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand-horsepower engine for a whole year. If the electrons, those tiny planets of t...Folksonomies: energy
Folksonomies: energy
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notes
notesChurchill recognizes the power of coal and predicts the awesome power of nuclear energy.
29 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
More Than Material Goes Into Consumer Products
Suppose, in our imagination, we take this radio apart. Suppose we take all the pieces out of the wooden box we call a cabinet. Now, you could call in a good cabinetmaker and say, "Jim, can you make a cabinet like that for me?" He'd answer you, "Of course I can. For about five dollars." You could say to another fellow, "How much can you make that pin for?" He might say, "Oh, about a dime."
Then you look at all the parts on the table. Someone had to make every piece in the set. If you checked ... 1 notes
notesKettering describes the intangible element that goes into a the construction of a radio, the scientific know-how, the blood, sweat, and tears of invention.
08 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
The Placenta and Toxicity
“During most of pregnancy, the placenta separating mother and fetus is only one cell thick,” Koren tells me. “But it has an array of mechanisms to help it do its job of protecting the fetus.” These subcellular tools, he explains, include tiny pumps that expel toxins before they can do any damage, immune agents that guard the placenta’s perimeter, and placental enzymes that chemically break down intruding molecules.
This armamentarium does an impressive job of blocking bacteria from... 1 notes
notesThe placenta uses chemical and electrical criteria for filtering out molecules, meaning small fat-soluble molecules, even harmful ones, will pass through.
30 NOV -0001 by ideonexus
Should Spelling be Modernized?
The time taken to teach the decimalised system for currency, temperature, weights and distances is far shorter and more certain than when 240 pence equalled a pound, 32 degrees Fahrenheit equalled the temperature of ice and pounds and ounces were taught. Already there is a generation that was spared these ancient measurements.
To improve literacy in the general population, modernisation of the spelling system will bring similar benefits to what decimalisation brought.Folksonomies: phonetics
Folksonomies: phonetics
It takes just one generation to fix spelling and improve literacy for future generations. Just as it took one generation to move to the metric system or change currencies in Europe.
