Named for the patron saint of sailors, Saint Elmo’s fire is actually discharges of electricity that occur during storms.
These discharges are seen as blue or bluish white lights at the tips of masts and bowsprits of ships at sea, as well as on church steeples and building spires on land.
According to 1980 figures, the average worker’s one-way trip covered 9.2 miles and took 20.4 minutes. By far the favorite mode of transportation for workers was the private vehicle (car, motorcycle, or truck), accounting for 84.3 percent. Those who took public transportation comprised 6.3 percent, and 5.5 percent walked. The remainder used other means or…
Sometimes likened to the shell that covers an egg, the layer of rock or crust that covers the surface of the earth is, on average, 22 miles thick.
It was brought on by the awarding of the 1932 Nobel Prize in physics to Werner Heisenberg for his uncertainty principle. The principle states that you cannot accurately know both the position and momentum of an atomic particle at the same time. Einstein believed that the principle made a mockery of cause and effect.
German physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) took the temperature of an equal ice-salt mixture as the zero for his scale.
A quasar is another name for a quasi-stellar object. It looks like a star but emits as much radiation as an entire galaxy, with a volume far smaller than that of our Milky Way galaxy. No one knows what a quasar is; recent evidence suggests it might be a galaxy with a big black hole…
The center of the 48 contiguous states is in Smith County, Kansas, near the town of Lebanon. The center of the 50 states is in Butte County, South Dakota, west of the town of Castle Rock.