The quick answer is that a mature electric eel can produce a shock up to 500 volts at 1 amp of current (500 watts). The eel’s organs are capable of producing two types of electric discharge– low voltage and high voltage. Both could be harmful to an adult human.
The longer answer, or exactly how the […]
The abacus that we know of today first appeared around 1200 A.D. in China. No one particular person or group is considered to be the inventor as it likely evolved from various counting boards and bead systems over several centuries. The Chinese call this standard abacus a suan-pan. On each rod, this classic Chinese abacus […]
In the late sixteenth century, two Dutch eyeglass makers discovered that objects appear magnified when viewed through multiple convex lenses in a tube. For this simple discovery, Hans Janssen and his son Zaccharias are considered by some to have invented the microscope around 1590. About this same time, another eyeglass maker from Holland, Hans Lippershey […]
The Dasypus novemcinctus, or nine-banded armadillo female almost always gives birth to four young of the same sex. The offspring are actually quadruplets that come from one fertilized egg splitting into four parts.
The general wikipedia description follows: the Nine-banded Long-nosed Armadillo or just Nine-banded Armadillo, (also known as the poor man’s pig or poverty pig), […]
The dodo bird, or Raphus cucullatus, became completely extinct around 1800. While thousands of these birds were slaughtered for meat, it it generally believed that their demise was primarily due to pigs and monkeys eating their eggs.
The birds were native to the Mascarene Islands in the Central Indian Ocean. They became extince on Mauritius around […]
The short answer is because of the nature of the ionosphere of the Earth. The ionosphere consists of several different layers of gases that have become conductive from the bombardment of the atoms by: solar radiation, by electrons and protons emitted by the sun, and by cosmic rays.
These layers, sometimes called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer, reflect […]