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In the Fact File section we bring you a new collection of quick facts each week. (Click on the links below for more facts)

 
 

3681/ The manufacture of a single 2 gram computer chip consumes thirty-six times its weight in chemicals, 800 times its weight in fuel, and 1600 times its weight in water.

3682/ 'Cyber' was introduced into the English language back in the 1950's by Norbert Wiener's word 'cybernetics' which referred to the science of control over systems. He derived it from the kybernetes for helmsman or guide.

3683/ Two of the towering figures of physics received their nobel prizes simultaneously. The 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics was delayed for a year, and then awarded to Einstein in the same ceremony at which Niels Bohr received the 1922 prize.

3684/ In 1857, Jules Lissajous showed that a tuning fork can be kept vibrating indefinitely with an electric current. A tuning fork sounds a single note with a fixed number of cycles or pulses per second. If the sound has a frequency of 10 kilohertz, then every 10,000 pulses equals precisely one second.

3685/ IBM was founded as the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. They made mechanical calculating devices based on punch cards which could process data much faster than manual methods.

3686/ A ruby laser has an efficiency of something like 20 per cent, which means that only one-fifth of the energy input comes out in the laser beam.

3687/ A laser pointer is the simplest laser device. One of the useful features of lasers is that the beam consists of almost parrallel rays and does not spread out like the beam from a torch. The spot from the pointer is practically the same size and brightness at one metre or ten.

3688/ The storage dimples on a cd are 830 nanometres across, whilst those on a dvd are 400 nanometres across (a million nanometres equals one millimetre). The total track length on current 4.7gb dvds adds up to about 12km.

3689/ The first transatlantic fibre-optic cable was laid in 1988. Fibre-optic cables now criss-cross the developed world.

3690/ LASIK stands for Laser Assisted In Situ Keratomileusis. A excimer laser is used to re-shape the cornea. Dr Sato in Japan proposed the prinviple of reshaping the eye to correct short-sightedness in the 1930s; but it was not until Dr Svyatoslav Fyodorov carried out extensive work in Russia in the 1960s and 1970s that a viable surgical procedure was established to treat short-sightedness.

3691/ Einstein showed in 1908 that a small amount of matter could be converted into a huge amount of energy. His famous equation E = MC² indicates just how much energy can be released from matter. Put into English, this equation says that the energy contained in an object is equal to its mass multimplied by the speed of light (C), then multiplied by the speed of light again. 'C' is a huge number - light travels at 186,000 miles per second - and the energy in one kilogram of matter is equal to the energy released by burning over 10 million tons of coal. Or to put it another way, it is equal to 10 million tons of explosive.

3692/ On the 6th August 1945 the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb caused total devestation over a wide area. According to a 1946 estimate, 45,000 people were killed on the first day, with another 21,000 dying of their injuries over the following four months.

3693/ The flash of heat from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb was so intense that people within a few hundred metres of the explosion were vaporized, leaving nothing but shadows etched on to walls and pavements.

3694/ Despite this Japan wavered, but did not surrender. Three days later a second atomic strike was ordered. The primary target, the city of Kokura, was obscured by cloud, so the B29 bomber went on to its secondary target, Nagasaki. Over 40,000 people were killed.

3695/ The first nuclear electricity was generated in the US in 1951, lighting four bulbs. But it was the Russians who achieved the first Nuclear Power Plant at Obinisk in 1954, generating five megawatts of power. The US and Britain were close behind though, with their own reactors starting up in the following two years.

3696/ The mastermind behind the Soviet hydrogen bomb was the physicist Andrei Sakharov, later known as a human rights campaigner and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

3697/ "The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives" - Admiral Leahy on the eve of the first atomic bomb test in 1945.

3698/ "CS Gas" a type of tear gas is not actually a gas. It is spread as a fine dust or liquid droplets in the air. CS was first isolated by Carson and Soughton, two American chemists who gave their initials to the discovery, but it was converted into an effective riot control agent by the British Porton Down Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment in 1956.

3699/ CS gas causes pain, burning and irritation of exposed mucous membranes and skin, and will incapacitate an individual in agony for up to ten minutes. After being gassed by riot police in South Korea, the writer PJ O'Rourke described the effects as being like 'trying to breathe fish bones'.

3700/ In April 1960 the US launched its first weather satellite. This was TIROS I, the Television Infrared Observation Satellite. It was a joint venture between Nasa, the US Army, US Navy and the Weather Bureau, and it was seen as having strategic importance.

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