Little Geek Nat

This cyclist must make better friends with gravity. 9.8 meters per second is the speed of gravity. And that is also the speed that you don't like when falling from a bicycle. Of course, you don't want to try. So DON'T. And don't do anything daredevil like in the animation below.

If you haven’t, read my “Hydrogen bonds” blog first if possible. Like I said, this time we are going adhesion and cohesion. Let’s start with adhesion. Adhesion are 2 materials (example: water and glass) that have different polarities and can stick to each other. One interesting thing about adhesion is the capillary action that makes water climb up a glass tube. Now you need to imagine. Imagine that you have a plastic tub. Then you have a very thin glass rod, about 3 mm thick, and it’s hollow. You put the glass rod in the tub, and something interesting happens. The water will climb up the glass tube. It climbs up the glass tube because it’s more attracted to the glass than to itself. This is also adhesion because it is attracted to each other. They are attracted because water has a polarity and glass also has one. Adhesion happens because there are polarities in some atoms, like water and glass. A positive atom will stick to a negative atom. Same goes for cohesion. But, cohe...

Don't drive daredevil!

I think this isn’t a secret to anyone, but water is essential to life as we know it. When you think of your cells, they have chemical processes that include water, and happen in water. Now it’s a little strange. What gives water all these unique properties? Water, as you probably already know, is made of 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom. That’s why we call it H2O. The bonds between the atoms are called covalent bonds. The good thing about water is that oxygen is extremely electronegative. If you don’t know, electronegative means that the element likes to keep electrons for itself. To be precise, it hogs electrons. Because the electrons keep going around the oxygen, the hydrogen atoms have a positive charge. When you put two water molecules together, they are kind of nice. Oxygen has a positive charge and hydrogen has a negative charge. When you put them together, they will stick. That will form a hydrogen bond. Hydrogen bonds are the reason why water has this fluid, nice...

Auroras are the spectacular dancing lights that mostly happen around the poles. Surprisingly, they are caused by the sun’s solar rays. Probably you already know the magnetosphere that protects us from the sun’s harmful rays. There are cracks in the magnetic fields on the poles that produce auroras.  But how do the auroras get their color? Air is made of nitrogen (79%) and oxygen (20%). Oxygen glows yellow-green when hit low in the atmosphere and orange higher up. Nitrogen glows bright red when hit normally, and bright blue when ionized. A halo of light always exists over each pole. Though, they are too faint to see. They are only seen clearly when extra bursts of energy from the Sun come to Earth. The stronger auroras are only produced when Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) are released by the sun. The nearer you are to the poles, the more aurora displays you see every year. For example, New York and Edinburgh are having an average amount of 10 aurora displays every...

Black Holes are holes in space that absorbs anything in their way, even stars. They are made by a star exploding as supernova and the star must be about 3 times the mass of the sun. This is called the Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit.  Its core will collapse into a neutron star, but its gravity is so strong that it starts sucking in material from outer space and later turns into a black hole.  Once they absorb enough matter to become powerful and massive, they can start creating galaxies. That is why black holes can be found in the heart of galaxies.  Sometimes, black holes will emit the brightest light waves in the universe – quasars.  Now you might be asking, why don’t we see like “blink, blink” from earth? The answer is that they are very far. The furthest quasar from us is about 14 billion light years away. However, we are lucky to be on a planet that isn’t near a black hole. If we were near a black hole, we would get our atmosphere stripped first then ...

Now I want talk about Jupiter. Jupiter is the 5 th planet in the solar system. Jupiter is 143,000 kilometers in diameter, making it 11 times the size of Earth. Jupiter is twice as heavy as all the other planets being put together (Makes sense for its size!). Jupiter’s orbit is between 740.9 and 815.7 million kilometers from the Sun. It takes 11.86 years to orbit the sun and its temperatures can plunge to -150° C. Jupiter is mainly made of Hydrogen and Helium. In the core the pressure is so immense that the hydrogen behaves like a metal. Jupiter spins in less than ten hours, it's the 2nd fastest rotating planet. That means the surface is moving approximately at 50,000 km/h. Jupiter has a strong magnetic field (of course) about ten times stronger than earth. Jupiter has a great red spot that is a hurricane three times bigger than earth. The scientist Robert Hooke first spotted it in 1644. There might be something down there that is causing the hurricanes and I think that...

I want to talk about Vectors and Scalars . This is about physics. Now you might be asking, what is a vector? Vectors have a magnitude and direction. In case you don’t know, magnitude is the size of the movement, but it’s not distance. Since it’s a vector quantity, it’s called displacement .  For example, the displacement of a leaf being blown by the wind is 50 centimeters to the east. This is a vector quantity because it has a magnitude (50 cm) and a direction (east). And there’s more...  If someone asks you the version of speed in a vector quantity, it’s called velocity .  For example, the velocity of a ball being thrown is 5m/s to the east. In other words, five meters per second to the east.  You can find the displacement as long as you have the velocity and time. Multiply them and you will get the displacement. If the velocity is 5m/s and the time is 10 seconds, you need to multiply them ( 5 x 10 ) to get the displacement, which is 50 meters.  A...