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The first type of camera ever invented was called a camera obscura , which is Latin for 'dark room.' At first, that's exactly what it was - a dark room with a tiny hole that allowed a narrow beam of light to enter. This beam produced a 'real image' of outside objects on the wall opposite the hole (it didn't take pictures, though - light-sensitive materials like film weren't invented until much later). A pinhole camera is just a portable version of this ancient camera obscura. (It's a bit inconvenient to carry a room with you to take pictures of your family vacation!) In a modern camera, a lens is used to bend light waves into a narrow beam that produces an image on the film. In a pinhole camera, the hole acts like a lens by only allowing a narrow beam of light to enter. It forms the same type of upside-down, reversed image as a regular camera, so you can see how a camera works by making a pinhole viewer. (Read more about how cameras work...

On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed gingerly out of Eagle,  Apollo 11 ’s lunar module, and joined Neil Armstrong on the Sea of Tranquility. Looking up, he said, “Beautiful, beautiful, magnificent desolation.” They were alone; but their presence on the moon’s silent, gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive collective effort. Eight years before, President John F. Kennedy had asked the United States Congress to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” His challenge disturbed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s original plan for a stepped, multi-generational strategy: Wernher von Braun, NASA’s chief of rocketry, had thought the agency would first send men into Earth’s orbit, then build a space station, then fly to the moon, then build a lunar colony. A century hence, perhaps, humans would travel to Mars. Kennedy’s goal was also absurdly ambitious. A f...

Earthquakes are devastating acts of nature. The scientific explanation for this phenomenon is that earthquakes occur due to plate tectonics. There are instruments which measure the earthquakes, which are seismograph and Richter scale. Richter scale denotes every quake by a number with a 1 being very weak and 7 and beyond is regarded as strong. The energy released proportion ratio is 1:30. This means that an earthquake with a 7 rank on the scale is 30 times greater than an earthquake with 6 magnitude. The number system below shows how the magnitude and the intensity of earthquakes are related.     1-2: This tremor is rarely felt by people as the magnitude is very low     2-3: Only people who are not in motion can feel the shaking, particularly if they are on the upper floors of a building     3-4: It is felt by many but most people do not realise it to be an earthquake     4: Most people indoors and some ou...

Your Smartphone Distracts You From Driving, Even When You're Not Using It   (Photo: Getty Images)  It’s been repeatedly drilled into us: Texting and driving don’t mix. But new research has found that texting at a red light and talking to your car’s hands-free technology can be just as distracting. Researchers from the University of Utah conducted two new studies on distracted driving for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and discovered that issuing voice commands to your car’s infotainment system and texting at a red light can distract a driver for up to 27 seconds after using either device. Both studies had more than 300 participants combined drive various cars at 25 miles per hour or less around a 2.7 mile route as they used the car’s voice commands to dial numbers, call people, and change the radio station, or used voice commands to text, choose music, and call contacts on their smartphones. Researchers rode in the cars and tested drivers on th...

In the last few years, large cab companies have popped up across the country. Meeru and Dot cabs were some of the first few to be launched on a large scale. Back then, the cab service was too costly and only a handful of people were using it. But now, with cab companies like Uber and Ola, there’s a slight chance that cab companies will slowly erase the Auto Rickshaw concept from India. Here why. Price One thing stopping people from using cabs so easily was the obscene rates they charged passengers. But today that has changed. With the coming of new cab companies, some cabs have even become cheaper than autos! Now tell me why in the world would you travel in an auto when you can have a comfortable ride at such a cheap price.   Comfort Cabs have air conditioning, proper seats, speed and a smooth ride. Ever since cab companies are offering such low rates, it became hard to justify why one should travel in an auto. When you can have such a smooth an...

Modern cars are morphing into mobile data centres - connected, clever and packed full of sensors. But are they also becoming spies in our drives? As they record almost every aspect of our journeys and driving behaviour, interacting with our smartphone apps and sat-nav systems, who will own all the data they generate, how will it be used, and will our privacy inevitably be compromised? Dashboard nannies Telematics "black boxes" from insurance companies and related smartphone apps can already measure how aggressively we accelerate and the G-forces we generate hurtling too fast round corners. This monitoring technology is even becoming sophisticated enough to recognise different drivers based on their signature driving styles. According to the British Insurance Brokers' Association (Biba), about 300,000 cars are fitted with these dashboard nannies. While that number may seem tiny compared to the 23 million cars on UK roads, there are many in the industry who t...

Astronomer David Asher (from Armagh University) has agreed with Bill Napier and Janaki Wickramasinghe (Cardiff University) that “dark comets” are real and dangerous. The following quotes are from a paper by Napier and Asher published in Astronomy & Geophysics. http://star.arm.ac.uk/preprints/2009/539.pdf We know that about one bright comet (of absolute magnitude as bright as 7, comparable to Halley’s Comet) arrives in the visibility zone (perihelion q<5AU, say) each year from the Oort cloud. It seems to be securely established that ~1–2% of these are captured into Halleytype (HT) orbits. The dynamical lifetime of a body in such an orbit can be estimated, from which the expected number of HT comets is perhaps ~3000. The actual number of active HT comets is ~25. This discrepancy of at least two powers of 10 in the expected impact rate from comets as deduced from this theoretical argument on the one hand, and observations on the other, is an aspect of the well...