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1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Science by James Trefil
How did Louis Pasteur disprove spontaneous generation?
Why did moths turn grey during the industrial revolution?
How does one rotten apple spoil the barrel?
Why does selective breeding result in million-dollar bulls?
Why do physicists consider the room temperature superconductor their Holy Grail?
How do cells commit suicide?
How does a computer virus mimic real Virus?
Why was Albert Einstein critical of the Theory of Quantum Mechanics?
What is the Universe expanding into?
The Answers to these and many others questions are to be found in 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Science. From Astronomy to Biology, Evolution to Physics, the author presents his selection of key scientific facts in easy-to-read, bite sized chunks. If there is a black hole where your scientific knowledge should be, you'll be relieved to find that all unneccessary technicalities are deliberately ommitted, so readers will not have trouble with any of the scientific terms.
Extract:
''Science has given us a view of how our Universe works that is unrivaled in its beauty and comprehensiveness - from the explosion of a distant star to the working of every cell in our bodies. The acquisition of this knowledge is surely one of the greatest achievements of the human mind.
Classification of things: The Greatest historical task of biology has been to find a way to order and classify living things. We owe our present scheme of classification to the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). His scheme for organizing living things is a little like giving a house address by specifying country, state, city, zip code, street, and street number! In the same way, living things are located with successive degrees of precision by putting restrictive categories until, at last, you come to a category that the living thing shares with no other.
Evolution: The Central Mechanism of Evolution is Natural Selection. The basic idea of natural selection is this - At any given time there are some biological variations in a population. Some Giraffes have longer necks than others, some human beings can run faster than others, and so on. If certain variations give individuals who possess them a higher probability of survival long enough to have children, then those characteristics are more likely to be passed on to the next generation.
Neanderthal Man: There is a common misconception about Neanderthal, enshrined in the image as a primative cave-man, shambling, hulking, brutish and with very low intelligence. In fact, Neanderthal had a larger brain than modern Homo Sapiens!!! The shambling walk that we ascribe to the Neanderthal comes from the fact that the first Neanderthal skeleton analyzed was that of a man who suffered from advanced arthritis! and was therefore stooped over. Modern reconstructions of Neanderthal show someone who could probably pass unnoticed in the subways of ant major city!
Cell Structure:The Cell is not a blob, but a very complex structure. You can compare a living cell to a refinery or chemical processing plant. Raw materials are brought in and moved around, thousands of chemical reactions are going on, and the products of those reactions are themselves being carried to other places within the cell or sent back out into the greater organism of which the cell is a part. Because of this complexity, the term ''Protoplasm'' is seldom used by modern biologists. Today, the term ''Cytoplasm'' is used to refer to the liquid that exists between the many different structures inside a cell. (''Cyto'' is a prefix that means ''Cell'')
The Atom: The Atom is the smallest unit of matter that retains its identity as a chemical element. The First modern model of the atom was proposed by Niels Bohr, a young Danish Physicist, in 1913. The model is now known to physicists as the Bohr atom. The central feature of the Bohr atom is that electrons can be in orbits at only certain well-defined distances from the nucleus. The orbits at these distances are called ''allowed orbits'' or ''Bohr orbits''. It requires energy for electrons to move from a lower orbit to a higher one, since work must be done to overcome the attractive force exerted on the electron by the nucleus. Thus, energy must be added to the atom to move the electron in this direction. Conversely, if an electron moves from a higher orbit to a lower orbit, there is an excess of energy which must be disposed of.''
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