Daily post on science and medicine from @JohnDCook

Houston
Joined January 2012
Vacuum tubes were first called 'valves' because they act analogously to valves on water pipes.
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Low-frequency radio waves travel better than high-frequency waves through salt water.
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Covalent bonds form when two atoms share one or more pairs of electrons.
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Charles Steinmetz (1865 - 1923) introduced the use of complex numbers in analyzing AC circuits.
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Oddo–Harkins rule: elements with an even atomic number are more common than those with odd atomic number
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Jupiter's Great Red Spot is twice the size of Earth.
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FM radio is analogous to sending messages with a flashlight by varying the color of the light.
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AM radio is analogous to sending messages with a flashlight by varying the brightness of the light.
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Differential equation for LRC circuit has exact same form as a mass-dashpot-spring mechanical system.
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'Water continually dropping will wear hard rocks hollow.' -- Plutarch, c. 100 AD
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Faraday discovered in 1831 that changing magnetic fields generate electric currents.
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Science and Medicine retweeted
A useful way to tell African and Indian elephants apart
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Oersted discovered in 1820 that electric currents generate magnetic fields.
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'It's not so easy to free oneself from the idea that coordinates must have an immediate metrical meaning.' -- Albert Einstein
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There were several competing theories of E&M during Maxwell's lifetime. Maxwell's theory triumphed a decade after he died.
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Kinetic energy = 1/2 mass * velocity²
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Maxwell published the laws of E&M as 20 equations. Now in modern notation they are four equations.
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Technicium is mostly man-made, though traces have been found in nature.
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