It’s easy to look at a piece of technology (like a speaker) and feel like you’re looking at a black box, wondering how they work. What’s hidden inside them? It must be complicated, right? Often times, that holds some truth. But you would be surprised how far you can get if you can nail down
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Center of mass (COM) it’s easy balancing act or a trick to try at home! All you need is 2 forks, a quarter, a cup, and some patience. Why does this look so weird? It all has to do with center of mass. COM is hard to define, but almost everyone has a great intuition
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You’ve probably heard of liquid nitrogen ice cream before. It’s made by mixing together ice cream ingredients with liquid nitrogen, which turns into a gas at -321º F. Learn more about that at https://www.thoughtco.com/cryogenics-definition-4142815. The intense coldness is what turns the ice cream ingredients from a liquid to a tasty solid. So by this logic,
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Galileo once proposed that all objects under gravity, whether they’re really heavy or really light, will fall and accelerate downwards at the same rate. In a famous experiment, he supposedly dropped both from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and proved it. Why is this true? For something with more mass, it does feel a stronger
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September 27th is Crush A Can Day and it’s a day to serve as a reminder that we CAN recycle our aluminum CANS! We love recycling and we’ve got a hot way to do it, with the help of science. This is an experiment we recommend doing at home! All you need is a can,
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NASA has always been about accomplishing crazy. In the 1960s, the idea of people walking around on the moon was ludicrous, but NASA got them there anyways. Now, NASA is performing another crazy feat: sending a probe to an asteroid, collecting rock samples, and returning that probe to Earth. Additionally, the probe has created a
Read moreA common misconception we see at AstroCamp is how gravity and atmospheric pressure work. It makes sense! The two seem interchangeable at a glance, however they both get weaker as altitude increases, and there can’t even be an atmosphere without gravity. Despite their similarities, the two are very different. Gravity is a property of anything
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A homopolar motor is a device that relies on flowing electricity, magnetic fields, and the interaction between the two. It consists of a voltage source, neodymium magnets, and a conductor that allows electricity to flow. And it’s super easy to make yourself! What you’ll need: 1 AA battery 2 neodymium magnets Thick copper wire ————
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Escape Velocity is probably something you’ve heard on a TV show, or maybe you learned about it from NASA talking about their newest spacecraft. It is a commonly discussed term, but it isn’t the easiest thing to understand. Imagine you’re in a strange universe where only the Earth exists. The only gravity comes from its center,
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If you’ve taken our Electricity and Magnetism class, you’ve seen this device before! You press a button and an electric arc rises to the top of two tall wires. This is the Jacob’s Ladder! But what’s happening here? The base of the Ladder is a transformer — a device that changes an incoming voltage. In
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There are countless stars that we can see in our night sky, and all of them are unique. Some are dim, barely visible without a telescope. Others are bright and can be seen even in the most light-polluted areas. We measure the brightness of these stars using the magnitude scale. The magnitude scale seems a
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On January 20, around 8.30 PST, the Earth is going to pass directly between the moon and the sun. This is normally the time when the moon would be full, reflecting the sun’s rays back to us on Earth with all of the side facing towards us. But the Earth’s shadow is going to fall
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