thegreatbeyond

pencils used to be lead?
the sky is blue because the atmosphere extracts the blue from the light, if you noticed, on a cloudy day, the ocean is greyish

Okay, please people, let Chromus, or sometimes Vorpy, answer these questions. Phred, I seriously suggest you stop trying to answer them. "The ocean is gray" is hardly a full answer.

Why can't a brain transplant work?

Before you can know why the sky is blue, you need to understand the nature of light and the atmosphere. White light, like the kind that comes from the sun, is a combination of red, green, and blue light. Red has the longest wavelength, and blue has the shortest. The atmosphere is made up of particles of air which scatter the different frequencies of light, blue more than the rest, which is why the sky looks blue. Source: http://www.why-is-the-sky-blue.org/why- ... -blue.html

Well, after looking it up online, it seems that a simple way to make a microphone is to plug a set of headphones into the microphone jack. After reading about that, it makes some sense to me as both devices make use of magnets and vibrations. The basics behind a speaker is to send an electrical signal through wires that cause a magnet to vibrate, which creates sound. It makes sense that this system works in reverse, where your voice would cause the magnet inside to vibrate, causing an electrical signal to flow. This probably wouldn't work as well as an actual microphone, as they are usually designed for it.

A long time ago, pencils used to be made with lead inside. It worked well, and was very easy to produce, until it was discovered that some people were getting poisoned from it. They found that graphite works just as well, is even cheaper to get, and started to make pencils with it. However, lead has stuck around as the name.

The mechanics of the brain aren't fully understood. We know how the heart works because of the low number of nerves that are part of it. The same goes for most of the other organs. However, the insane number of nerves and processing components of the brain prevent us from understanding it fully, and thus, we don't know how to move one from one person to another.

While I don't mind other people answering the questions that appear here, it might not hurt to check your answers and provide more information than just a one line summary.

how did NES make music?

The NES has the following ways to produce sound: two square wave channels, a triangle wave channel, a noise channel, and a delta modulation channel. The square waves and triangle wave work by having the program specify the frequency and volume of the sounds, and they produce their specific wave form at the given frequency and volume. The noise channel plays random noise, so just the volume is specified. The delta modulation channel is more complicated. It allows a program to specify sound just like an ordinary sound file would, as an encoded wave form. The quality tends to be low though. All these sound generation capabilities are carefully combined together for a game to generate music. The square waves, triangle wave, and noise channel are used most frequently, I don't think Super Mario Brothers uses the delta modulation channel but some other games do. The square waves and triangle wave make the crude sounding music notes, and the noise channel is used for percussion.

Well, it seems that Vorpy handled this one quite nicely.

Is Jello really made of horse hooves?


What is Adipic Acid?

The main ingredients of Jello are gelatin, sugar, and water. It's true that gelatin comes from hooves of animals, but that's not the only place we get it. The primary ingredient of gelatin is collagen, the protein building block of animals, equivalent to cellulose in plants. This also means that there is no plant source of collagen. The main manufacturing source of collagen is from the ground up bones of farm animals, plus some from the skins of cows and pigs. Each of these goes under a different process to extract the collagen and refine it. Gelatin is also used in many other applications besides food, like medicine and new technology. Source: http://www.gmap-gelatin.com/what.html

Adipic acid is one of the minor chemicals in Jello, which Dither showed me before he asked the question. Since most of the information about adipic acid is classified, I can't say too much, except that it's used in the production of certain kinds of nylon and also in foods as a settling agent which also provides a tart taste. There many more general uses for it, which you can find at my source. Source: http://www.solutia.com/pages/corporate/ ... roduct=164

Is it possible for batteries to have a recharge feature built it? Because I can play my cd player until the batteries ran out, and played it the next day, and the batteries had like 1/4 power.

No battery has a "built-in" recharge feature, though there is a way to recharge them without plugging them in. It's a principle called magnetic induction, which creates electricity by passing a device through magnetic fields. This is the same principle which charges electric toothbrushes, and some hand-held devices. While magnetic induction is contact-less, it is also very slow, so I doubt you got a full 1/4 of a charge out of it, unless your batteries are very weak to begin with.

Well, what about rechargeble batteries, then? How do they work?

In a normal alkaline battery, the chemical reaction inside that produces electricity is permanent; the chemicals can never be changed back into alkalines. This is different from rechargable batteries, the most common of which are nickel-cadmium or lithium ion. The chemical reaction in these batteries can be reversed by flooding the system with electricity. It's a two way reaction: the chemicals react to produce electricity, and electricity restores the chemicals. Since not all the chemicals are restored, consecutive charges of the battery will become weaker and weaker.

and thats why every time i recharge a battery, it seems to last less...
so, what causes a sonic boom? i know it occurs when one goes faster than the speed of sound, but why?

The principle behind a sonic boom is that the sound you hear is the sound of air moving extremely fast. When you travel faster than the speed of sound in air, a buffer of air begins to compress at the tip of the vehicle (a jet, let's say). When the jet finally passes the speed of sound, the air can't compress anymore and "breaks" away, making a sonic boom. This happens normally whenever anything moves, for instance, when someone walks, the air compresses and shifts around the person. A sonic boom is just this same thing except happening at high speeds.

are alkaline batteries named that way because they're made of alkaline earth elements, or is it something different?

And I heard of a type of sunglasses called 'blue-blocker' sunglasses. Do these really block all shades of blue, and if so, how?