is heated enough, the molecule is broken up into a mixture of carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms, If the vapor is then passed over a sheet of glass, for instance, the loose carbon atoms (which have a strong tendency to hook on to other atoms) will attach themselves to the atoms on the glass surface. There will be an invisible layer of carbon on the glass that would be only one atom thick.If, ...
year to year and we don't know exactly what the direction would have been in 1492 at the different places Columbus passed.Even so, the dead reckoning ends at a point about 15 miles south of San Salvador. That makes San Salvador look pretty good. However, a small island called Samana Cay exists about 40 miles southeast of the calculated endpoint. It remains just possible that it might be the ...
remains. Named Triton, it circles Neptune, the most distant of the large planets. Right now, Voyager 2, having passed Uranus, the planet that lies beyond Saturn, and which has no large satellites, is speeding toward Neptune and will reach it in two more years. What will it discover about Triton? Triton is almost as large as Titan and even colder, since it gets only 1/900 the heart from the ...
rocks, the length of time since those rocks formed and tose bones were encased can be determined. Naturally, as time passed, techniques for such dating improved and usually hominids turned out to be older than previously thought. This past September, scientists from the University of Utah dated rocks in Kenya that contained ancient tools. The rocks had been thought to be 500,000 years old, ...
was seen double. How could that be?The logical answer was that the light from a quasar, as it traveled toward us, passed an ordinary galaxy that existed between it and ourselves. This ordinary galaxy was too dim to see, but its gravitational pull bent the quasar's light a tiny bit. The light was bent inward on either side of the galaxy so part of the light crossed the other part very ...