| 3221/ Today, mechanical
watches make up only approximately 13% of the world watch
market.
3222/ The Sinclair Executive
was the world's first pocket calculator, launched in August
1972 at a price of £79.95 + VAT. The advert described
it as being "as thick as a cigarette packet", reflecting
Clive Sinclair's stated belief that "One must always
bear a packet of cigarettes in mind as the ideal size";
it was a running joke at Radionics that Sinclair, who smoked
40 cigarettes a day at the time, designed everything to be
the size of a packet of 20.
3223/ Pure titanium is about
as strong as steel yet nearly 50% lighter. When added to various
alloys, its hardness, toughness and tensile strength can be
increased dramatically.
3224/ Titanium was first discovered
in 1791 in Menachan Valley, Cornwall, England, by clergyman
and amateur chemist William Gregor. Gregor analyzed gun powder-like
sand and found a reddish brown calx he could not identify.
Four years later in Berlin, renowned chemist Martin Heinrich
Klaproth independently discovered the element in rutile. Klaproth
named the element Titanium, after the mythological Titans,
first sons of the earth.
3225/ Charcoal pills are used
in medicine in pill or powder form to adsorb toxins or poisons
from the digestive system.
3226/ Tungsten is the strongest
metal known to man at this time. The name "tungsten"
is taken from the Swedish word, tung sten, meaning "heavy
stone," and is a tough, steel-gray to white metal. Tungsten
is known as the metal for making filaments in common incandescent
light bulbs. The application takes advantage of the fact that
tungsten has the highest melting temperature of any metal.
Its temperature can be raised to the point where it glows
with a brilliant white light. Most other metals vaporize before
they can produce much light.
3227/ In the first study to directly
measure when and how quickly rivers outside of growing mountain
ranges cut through rock, geologists at the University of Vermont
have determined that it was about 35,000 years ago that the
Potomac and Susquehanna rivers, respectively, began carving
out the Great Falls of the Potomac and Holtwood Gorge. Great
Falls, located about 15 miles outside of Washington, D.C.,
hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year; Holtwood
Gorge lies along the Susquehanna River, near Harrisburg, Penn.
3228/ Maine had the largest Blueberry
crop in the nation in 2000; 60,000 acres in production producing
74.5 million pounds.
3229/ The two largest diamonds
discovered in the United States came from Arkansas.
3230/ Resonance is the enhancement
of sound caused when the echo, or reflection of a sound wave,
arrives back to its source and is joined by another wave.
The original sound is reinforced and sounds fuller. For example,
this occurs when the sound of a guitar is echoing inside the
guitar's body while the string is producing more sounds at
the same time.
3231/ Sound is likely the most
important sensory medium for fully aquatic marine mammals.
Sound travels approximately 5x as fast in water as in air,
and due to water's high elasticity, can travel further distances
underwater (particularly at low frequencies).
3232/ One out of every 1,000
infants is born totally deaf.
3233/ At birth, the human ear
can hear sounds as low as 20 Hertz (lower than the lowest
note on a piano) and as high as 20,000 (Hertz) (higher than
the highest note on a piccolo).
3234/ Jupiter is the fifth planet
from the Sun and by far the largest. Jupiter is more than
twice as massive as all the other planets combined (318 times
Earth).
3235/ Like Jupiter, Saturn is
about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium with traces of water, methane,
ammonia and "rock", similar to the composition of
the primordial Solar Nebula from which the solar system was
formed.
3236/ Uranus is composed primarily
of rock and various ices, with only about 15% hydrogen and
a little helium (in contrast to Jupiter and Saturn which are
mostly hydrogen). Uranus (and Neptune) are in many ways similar
to the cores of Jupiter and Saturn minus the massive liquid
metallic hydrogen envelope. It appears that Uranus does not
have a rocky core like Jupiter and Saturn but rather that
its material is more or less uniformly distributed.
3237/ Because Pluto's orbit is
so eccentric, it sometimes crosses the orbit of Neptune making
Neptune the most distant planet from the Sun for a few years.
3238/ Neptune's blue color is
largely the result of absorption of red light by methane in
the atmosphere but there is some additional as-yet-unidentified
chromophore which gives the clouds their rich blue tint.
3239/ The nucleus of Comet Halley
is approximately 16x8x8 kilometers. Contrary to prior expectations,
Halley's nucleus is very dark: its albedo is only about 0.03
making it darker than coal and one of the darkest objects
in the solar system.
3240/ There are 17 bodies in
the solar system whose radius is greater than 1000 km.
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