Ask The Science Experts

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 electric eel produces electricity is a bit more complex. Basically, the electric eel has three abdominal pairs of organs that produce electricity. They’re called the Sachs organ, the hunter’s organ and the main organ. The eel’s vital organs are contained in the first one fifth  of its body whereas these electricity producing organs are in the remainder four fifths.

These organs are made of electrocytes lined up in series so the current flows through them and produces an electrical charge. When the eel locates its prey, the brain sends a signal through the nervous system to the electric cells. This opens the ion channel, allowing positively-charged sodium to flow through, reversing the charges momentarily. By causing a sudden difference in voltage, it generates a current. The electric eel generates its characteristic electrical pulse in a manner similar to a battery, in which stacked plates produce an electrical charge. [wikipedia]

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 has 2 beads on the upper deck and 5 on the lower deck (henceforth this type abacus is sometimes called a 2/5 abacus.) The 2/5 style survived unchanged until about 1850 at which time the 1/5 (one bead on the top deck and five beads on the bottom deck) abacus appeared.

Around 1600 A.D., use and evolution of the Chinese 1/5 abacus was begun by the Japanese via Korea. In Japanese, the abacus is called soroban. The 1/4 abacus, a style preferred and still manufactured in Japan today, appeared about 1930. The 1/5 models are rare today and 2/5 models are rare outside of China (except in some Chinese communities throughout the world).

It is thought that early Christians brought the abacus to the East (note that both the suan-pan and the Roman hand-abacus have a vertical orientation). Aspects of Roman culture could have been introduced to China as early as 166 A.D, during the Han Dynasty, as Roman emperor Antoninus Pius’ embassies to China spread along the Silk Road.

There have been recent suggestions of a Mesoamerican (the Aztec civilization that existed in present day Mexico) abacus called the Nepohualtzitzin, circa 900-1000 A.D., where the counters were made from kernels of maize threaded through strings mounted on a wooden frame. There is also debate about the Incan Khipu— was it a three-dimensional binary calculator or a form of writing? (q.v. Talking Knots of the Incas).

Source: Ryerson University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Posted by admin for the science and educational best selling toys of 2008.

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 came up with the same idea and is also considered by some to be one of the inventors.

“The coining of the name “microscope” has been credited to Giovanni Faber, who gave that name to Galileo Galilei’s compound microscope in 1625. [wikipedia]

Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) is really considered to be the “father of microscopy” when he worked as an apprentice in a dry goods store where magnifying glasses were used to count the threads in cloth. He taught himself new methods for grinding and polishing lenses of great curvature which gave magnifications up to 270 times, the greatest known in that day. These led to the building of his microscopes and the biological discoveries for which he is famous. He was the first to see and describe bacteria, yeast plants, the teeming life in a drop of water, and the circulation of blood corpuscles in capillaries. During a long life he used his lenses to make pioneer studies on an extraordinary variety of things, both living and non living, and reported his findings in over a hundred letters to the Royal Society of England and the French Academy. [source about.com]

Posted by mo for children’s microscopes and the best selling toys at Atomic Elephant Science & Toy Co.

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), is a species of armadillo from North, Central and South America. It is the most widespread member of the group. Its ancestors evolved in South America, but were able to invade North America during the Great American Interchange after the Isthmus of Panama formed 3 million years ago.

The Nine-banded Long-nosed Armadillo is a solitary, mainly nocturnal animal, found in many kinds of habitats, from mature and secondary rainforests to grassland and dry scrub. It is an insectivorous animal, feeding chiefly on ants, termites and other small invertebrates. This species is the only known animal that is able to inflate its own intestine in order to float across a river. It can also hold its breath for up to 6 minutes in order to walk across the bottom of narrow rivers. Additionally, the nine-banded armadillo always produces four identical offspring. The armadillo can jump three to four feet (90-120 cm) straight in the air if sufficiently frightened, making it a particular danger on roads.

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 1680 and on Reunion Island about 1750. They remained on Rodriguez until 1800.

Source: The Handy Science Answer Book. Posted by admin for the science best selling toys of 2008.

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 AM radio signals, thus enabling AM broadcasts to be received by radios that are a long way from the transmitting station. At night, the ionosphere layers partially dissipate and become an excellent reflector of the short waveband AM radio waves.

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Source: The Handy Science Answer Book.

As the average person’s stomach will hold less than two quarts, it only stays in this stage of the digestive process for three to five hours. The stomach slowly releases this semi-digested food to the intestines where it completes the digestive process. Roughly 15-17 hours after you take the first bite, the food is excreted as feces.

Some foods may pass quicker than this, depending on one’s specific reaction to a specific food. And some foods may stay in your system longer. Other variables affecting digestion time is one’s level of physical activity and even drugs taken subsequently (caffeine, nicotine, prescription drugs, etc.).

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