December 2009
5 posts
Microwave auditory effect →
Pulsating microwaves (which are electromagnetic waves with long wavelengths) can generate sounds inside your head. You can hear them, but no one else can. In a paper published in the 1960s, Allan Frey reported being able to induce perception of sounds in people with normal hearing as well as deaf people, “at a distance of inches up to thousands of feet from the transmitter [with appropriate...
What is the speed of thought? →
Discover: The notion that the speed of thought could be measured, just like the density of a rock, was shocking. Yet that is exactly what scientists did. In 1850 German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz attached wires to a frog’s leg muscle so that when the muscle contracted it broke a circuit. He found that it took a tenth of a second for a signal to travel down the nerve to the muscle. In...
Mega-flood filled the Mediterranean in months →
This I didn’t know: almost 6 million years ago, the strait of Gibraltar (or its precursor) closed shut, and the Mediterranean sea evaporated, leaving the entire area a dry basin. About 5.3 million years ago, tectonic activity allowed water from the Atlantic Ocean to trickle down into the Mediterranean basin, slowly carving out a channel. At some point, scientists now believe, the floodgates...
First osmosis power plant goes on stream in Norway →
The world’s first power plant based on osmotic power — a small prototype plant — recently opened in Norway. The plant generates electricity through osmotic pressure: when salt water and fresh water come together, like when a river meets the sea, there’s a difference in water potential. The fresh water and salt water are brought into distinct chambers, separated by a...