Did you know that …?

By the beginning of the study of the radio emission of the Moon astronomers had one quite reliable characteristic of the Moon - the temperature of its surface. It was measured back in the 1930s by astrophysicists Petit and Nicholson by a simple, witty and so accurate method that so far no one has been able to exceed this accuracy. Based on the readings of infrared rays, scientists have established an amazing thing. The surface of our satellite heated at noon to plus 120 degrees Celsius at lunar night is bound by frost in minus 150 degrees Celsius...

The problem of the origin of cosmic particles suddenly crossed paths with another very important problem. Having solved the mystery of the birth of cosmic particles - and we are close to it - it will be possible to recreate the processes on Earth that produce such high energy particles. The time has passed when (as it was in the 1930s) physicists who dreamed of bombing nuclei with space particles were considered fantasists. They were said to be similar to those of the scholarly men...

Research carried out on artificial satellites and space rockets helped to find out the geography of the world of space particles and helped to determine where and in what quantity these particles are around the Earth. Soviet scientists S.N. Vernov and A.E. Chudakov and the American scientist Van Allen made a discovery that in many ways changed the previous views on the regularities of changing the composition of cosmic rays with height. First of all it was found out that the magnetic...

Indeed, the impression of Dirac's phenomenal discovery was still fresh, and there were years of silence that were gently bypassed by physicists of the Dirac equation, when the American scientist Anderson first saw the trace of a positively charged electron, born in Wilson's chamber when a space particle passed through it. His path was curved by a magnetic field in the opposite direction to the path of an ordinary electron. All other signs coincided. Undoubtedly, it was the same positron that Dirac brilliantly predicted to exist...

Dirac's equation behaved like a disobedient genie, carelessly released from a bottle. What the scientists read in this equation seemed to them, to put it mildly, a misunderstanding. They did not want to offend the author with a stronger word. On an equal footing with a negatively charged electron, a positive electron took its rightful place in it! "Isn't it a paradox? - thought the involuntary culprit of this strange discovery. Dirac was not looking for this particle at all. He didn't even know it existed...

One day, conducting another experience with the help of Wilson's camera, Skobeltsyn saw a particle that flew hundreds of thousands of times faster than a bullet or shell! Dmitry Vladimirovich found a trace of a charged particle, the path of which, contrary to custom, was not curved by the magnetic field created in the chamber. Wow!" thought the scientist. - So can only behave with a particle with very high energy. Even a magnetic field cannot deflect it from the path! Where could it come...

The most ancient ways of measuring time were known for 2000 years B.C. and their development continued until the first centuries of the new time. Timekeeping instruments of that period are sometimes called the simplest, and their era ends with the first important improvements in mechanical watches with wheeled transmission. This includes many types of sundial, water, fire, sand and other watches, which have played an important role in the history of timekeeping as well. Undoubtedly, the...

It seems that in the previous chapters we have listed all the properties of the auricle. Everything that is studied by students of medical schools. But there is another mysterious property of the ear, which recently gave birth even to a special branch of medical science, called "ear acupuncture". Everyone has heard of acupuncture now. Less and less skeptics, categorically calling charlatanism method of treatment, which came to us from the depths of time. Legend has it that...

Humanity has long paid great attention to water, because it was well known that where there is no water, there is no life. In dry land, grain can lie for many years and grows only in the presence of moisture. Despite the fact that water is the most common substance, it is distributed very unevenly on Earth. On the African continent and in Asia, there are vast areas devoid of water - deserts. The whole country, Algeria, lives on imported water. Water is delivered by ship to some coastal areas and islands in Greece...

Which gives rise to a runny nose, everyone knows from their own experience. If not from influenza or acute respiratory infections, then from a cold - supercooling of the body. And what is the purpose of a person's cold? If it exists soon, it means something is needed for it. Doctors have long noticed that a cold runny nose, not complicated by infection, lasts for some time. That's why they joke that untreated runny nose passes in three weeks, and treated runny nose - in twenty-one days*...