Science & Mathematics Questions & Answers

When comets break up, smaller comets and sungrazers are formed. As these approach the sun, they break into smaller fragments before colliding into it. Sungrazers are classified into families and the largest is the Kreutz family, with over 500 sungrazers. It was discovered by Heinrich Kreutz, a 19thcentury German astronomer who found that some sungrazers came from a larger comet …

A suction excavator is a combination of excavator and a pump for dual function of excavating earth and pumping the soil out. It has an air pump for generating the required flow of air, a nozzle through which air is drawn and a mechanism for separating soil from the air drawn through the nozzle. The excavator is provided with a …

Stimulus shelter is a mechanism that shields us from the barrage of information coming our way every minute. An individual is constantly bombarded by television, mobile phone calls, text messages, emails, social networking messages and the resultant multi-tasking puts a lot of pressure on the brain. In such a situation, concentration and focus is lost and the person has to …

Solid State Drives, or SSDs as they are popularly called, are new age storage drives and are slowly but gradually replacing traditional hard drives. A hard disk has heads, magnetic surfaces and many other complex moving parts, which enable it to function properly but they also make the hard disks fallible. The moving parts also make hard disks slower in …

Many of the most unpleasant aspects of urban life are caused by cars, for both driver and the city itself. Large sweltering expanses of tarmac in cities contribute heavily to the urban heat island effect, whilst cars also become unbearably hot in summer sitting in these urban deserts. Optimizing the heliostatic photovoltaic panels ultimately resulted in their leaf like shape. …

A solar oven or cooker is a device which uses sunlight as its energy source, and costs nothing to run. They are used so as to save wood and end the desertification of the earth. A solar cooker can be used in outdoor cooking, drying and pasteurization, and is one of the many inventions to utilise solar energy, fast becoming …

The solar balloon is designed to trap solar energy using an inflatable plastic thin-film balloon called a solar concentrator. Half the balloon is transparent. When inflated, sunlight falls on it and focuses on a photovoltaic cell placed at its centre. This design reflects sunlight, producing 400 times the electricity that a solar cell would create without the concentrator and has …

A digital device that detects the signs of charisma and measures them in action, the sociometer is about the size of an iPhone. The wearable gadget is equipped with an infrared sensor and a tiny microphone. It tracks patterns of speech and body movement. The sociometer does not, however, record speech. It was created by computer scientist Alex Pentland and …

In fact, shooting stars are not stars at all. We call them meteors, and scientists believe that they are broken fragments of comets, which still move about in space when the comet itself does so no longer. We see them when they enter out atmosphere because they leave a trail of light behind them, caused by the friction of air …

Seed crystals are tiny single crystals made to dissolve in a solution (or melt) from which larger crystals are drawn either by precipitation, centrifuging or drawing up from a melt. Seeds have the same chemical composition and crystalline structure as that of the larger crystal. Large crystals are grown on a preferred geometer (normally the most densely packed) plane of …