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Non-Tech : Binary Hodgepodge -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ~digs who wrote (187)	7/20/2001 7:17:15 PM
From: ~digs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6763

-Miscellaneous Facts- ------------- Giant Armadillos How big were the largest known armadillos? Ten thousand years ago, there were 600-pound armadillos in Florida. A recently discovered skeleton found in a limestone quarry came from an animal that would have been six feet long and three feet high at the shoulder. The newly discovered species is called Holmesina septentrionalis. It appeared about 500,000 years ago, evolving from a dog-sized armadillo, and vanished during a wave of North American extinctions about ten thousand years ago. Today's largest North American armadillos weigh only eight pounds or so, and eat ants, beetles, and termites. But that diet probably would not have been enough for the Florida giants. Researchers are studying the fossil's teeth to discover what it might have eaten. More about armadillos: fossilnet.com geocities.com ------------------- Extrasolar Planets Do other stars have their own planets? Thanks to several recent advances in technology, astronomers are now discovering many planets orbiting other stars. It's almost impossible to directly spot an extrasolar planet, because a star's light is millions of times brighter than that of any planet. So usually these planets are detected indirectly. One method is to watch for a wobble in the movement of a nearby star, which can indicate that there's an orbiting planet. (As the planet moves around in its orbit, the star moves in the other direction by a very small amount.) This wobble can be detected by measuring slight changes in the frequencies (colors) of the star's light. More about about extrasolar planets: imsa.edu ----------------- Quicksand When can solid ground become liquid? When sand, clay, and water are mixed in just the right way, they form quicksand, with a surface that may seem quite solid, until you step on it. Then it suddenly becomes liquid. This strange property of liquefying when disturbed is called thixotropy. There are many substances that show it, including various gels. You can see thixotropy at the beach when you step on wet sand. At first it is firm, but when you wiggle your foot around, you start to sink in. Thixotropy also causes water-saturated landfills to suddenly become liquid during earthquakes, greatly increasing the quake's damage. A cool experiment you can do to show thixotropy: fatlion.com ------------------- First Artificial Satellite What was the first man-made object sent into orbit? The first man-made object ever sent into orbit around the Earth was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. It was a small sphere with four long spines, a little bigger than a basketball. Sputnik was also the first active radio transmitter in space. Its internal beepers went silent after 21 days. After 92 days in orbit, the satellite plunged into the atmosphere and burned up. Sputnik's legacy lives on today, in the form of almost 2,500 man-made satellites and uncountable bits of space debris, all hurtling around the planet at thousands of miles per hour. An article about Sputnik 1: sciam.com A Life Magazine article from 1957: pathfinder.com ------------------ Copyright (c) 2001, The Learning Kingdom, Inc. learningkingdom.com