I was just thinking about my post a while back about the lightbulb. I was wondering how that actually works though. There are so many different types of lightbulbs these days, but how do they all work? None of them work the same way. For example a halogen lightbulb has a tungsten filament. The difference is that they have a halogen based gas around them. This gas captures the tungsten atoms and brings them back making the bulb last longer. Another example is the fluorescent bulb. This has small mercury atoms in it. The electrons flow through the tube and bump into the mercury atoms creating both seeable and fluorescent light. The white filter around the bulb makes most of the light seeable. To see how the rest of the lightbulbs work click the image below.
With all of this snow from Winter Storm Pax I've been wondering how road salt works. Basically salt makes the freezing temperature of water lower. Usually water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but adding a ten percent salt mixture will make it so water freezes at 20 degrees. This will literally make it so that the ice has to melt and will refreeze when the temperature is 20 degrees. Pretty cool.
My mom and I were just looking for some cool facts and we found one that seems almost impossible. Did you know that a day on Venus is longer than a year. A day lasts 243 Earth days and a year only lasts 224. Basically what this means is that Venus spins really really slowly on its axis, but makes one revolution around the sun very fast. How does it go so fast? it actually doesn't have anything to do with speed, but has more to do with how close it is to the sun. It is the second closest planet and therefore has less of a revolution then say, Earth.
I always think that it's unfair that the West Coast gets the snow before the East Coast. Why does this happen though? Well it all has to do with the Jet Stream. The jet stream is a strong wind about 30,000 feet up which carries weather across the world. In the United States the jet stream flows West to East which causes the storms to move West to East. Occasionally the jet stream will go north to south, but that rarely happens and even more rare is when it flows East to West.
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BenI'm an eighth grader and want to share my love of science with others. Archives
December 2016
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