The physical and chemical properties of elements are determined by the atomic structure. This, in turn, is determined by electrons and the shells, sub-shells and orbitals they reside in. The rules of placing electrons within shells is known as the Aafbau principle, which originally means ‘building up’.

The encoded cylinder refers to the Cyrillic Projector sculpture by American artist James Sanborn which was created in the early 1990s. The 32-character Cyrillic alphabet has been used on it with the Russian word for ‘shadow’ — TEHb —appearing several times. For long, no one was able to crack the code but it was finally solved in 2003. The sculpture …

A geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a sequence of numbers in which each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed non-zero number called the common ratio. Books VIII and IX of Euclid’s Elements analyse geometric progressions and give several of their properties. A geometric progression gains its geometric character …

Ada Lovelace wrote a rudimentary programme for the analytical machine designed by Charles Babbage in 1827, but the machine never became operational. In 1949, the language short code appeared. It was the first computer language for electronic devices and required the programmer to change its statements into 0s and 1s by hand.

Anyone who has ever hurt this ‘funny-bone’ knows that there is nothing funny about this bone at all! In fact, this ‘bone’ is not really a bone at all. It is actually a nerve located at the back of your elbow above your bone and near the surface of your skin. When you hit that area, you get a painful …

It takes the earth about 365.2422 days to go around the sun, but a normal calendar year is only 365 days. The extra fraction of a day adds up: circling the sun four times takes 1460.9688 days, but four calendar years would only be 1460 days. That .9688 is almost a whole day, so every four years we add an …

Wool has kept us warm since very ancient times when man first domesticated sheep, and even in this age of synthetic fibers wool still remains a firm favorite with most of us. Britain, especially, has a lot of sheep grazing on the hills of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and has a thriving wool industry. Britain was very important when it …

This is something that everyone uses at least once every day! But about a hundred years ago soap was so expensive that only very rich people could afford it. Soap is made from different fats and oils. We import these oils from other countries, as we need coconut and olive oils and whale fats, as well as some other animal …

Everyone needs salt to stay alive: It’s absolutely essential to our system, and found in most of the foods we eat. Britain alone produces ounce is used up! In fact, we need salt so much that when a group of criminals in Sweden were once given the choice to do without salt for a month, as an alternative to capital …

Coal is something which we all need in some way or other. We need coal to produce heat and light for our homes and offices; our industry needs coal to provide many commercial and household goods to export all over the world. Different types of coal are often found in a coalfield. There are ‘coking coal’, for instance which, when …