Jun 30, 2012

This is a cool question that doesn’t have an easy or clear answer. I’m thinking it’s related somehow to the same reason the sky is blue, and the origins of rainbows. In physics there is a phenomena called backscattering, when the white light from the sun hits our atmosphere, most of the light comes through pretty easily, except blue...

Jun 26, 2012

Can you measure the human eye with megapixels, and if so how many megapixels is the human eye? Yes and no. There are about 120 million rods (black and white receptors) and about 5 million cones (colour receptors), so the total resolution of your eye would be about 125 megapixels… But you can’t really stop the comparison there, since about 5% of your...

Jun 18, 2012

Nope, the bulk of destruction from a Nuclear blast comes from the initial shockwave and the cavitation caused by the blast. In a vacuum the energy from the blast would dissipate rapidly as the inverse square law of radiation dictates. So after a kilometer, it would be half as strong. After 2 kilometers it would be 1/4 as strong, after 3 kilometers, it would be...

Jun 14, 2012

Florida, May 22, 2012. On May 31 2012, SpaceX successfully completed the historic mission that made Dragon the first commercial spacecraft in history to visit the International Space Station. Previously only four governments — the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency — had achieved this challenging technical feat. SpaceX has successfully...

Jun 10, 2012

In order to answer that we need a formula that describes the surface area of an object, how much energy it has, and what it’s thermodynamic temperature, or ‘absolute’ temperature. In simpler terms… how big its surface is, and how cool it can get, in how much time. Since coffee is mostly water, we’ll just use plain water in our...

May 9, 2012

We take some questions from Redit’s ‘Ask Science’ section and attempt to answer some questions. Can you catch up on your sleep after you’ve had a few short nights? And how do sleep cycles work?