Category Kids Queries

A Swiss team of engineers and pilots has developed the Solar Impulse, a spindly airplane that soars on the power of sunshine. Solar panels line nearly every inch of the plane’s passenger-jet-size wingspan, absorbing energy from the sun and storing it in lightweight batteries that power four electric propellers. The plane completed its first overnight flight in 2010, proving that it could harness enough solar power during the day to keep it aloft through the night. Don’t plan to book a solar flight anytime soon, though – the Solar Impulse is strictly a one-seater aircraft, built to be as lightweight at possible. Even the pilot can’t exceed 187 pounds (85 kg).

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Although more and more cars have electric engines (or hybrid gas electric ones) to save on fuel costs and cut down on exhaust that contributes to climate change, the vast majority of automobiles on the road still rely on gasoline for their old-fashioned combustion engines. Applying pressure to the gas pedal mixes fuel and air in the car’s engine, where a small spark ignites the mixture to create tiny explosions – the combustion process. Combustion makes the engine go vroom, vroom, spinning the tires and putting the car in motion.

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You probably ask this question every time the double A’s Wii remote right when you reach the final level. To get to the bottom of why some batteries earn extra life in a recharging station while others are bound for the recycling bin, you first need to know what a battery is. It’s simply a container filled with special chemicals that generate electricity through a chemical reaction. This reaction starts when you place the battery in your gadget and turn it on, completing a circuit that triggers electricity to flow from the battery’s positive terminal, through the wiring of your gadget, and back to the battery’s negative terminal (these terminals are marked with + and – symbols on your battery).

When all the chemicals in a standard, non-rechargeable battery have under gone the reaction process, the battery is dead. Time to drop it off at a recycling station (usually found in hardware stores). Rechargeable batteries, however, contain different chemicals that can react in the opposite direction, filling with electricity when you place them in a charger. Eventually, the special chemicals wear out and the reaction can no longer be reversed. But until that happens, you can recharge them again and again, giving your batteries more extra lives than you’ll find in any video games.

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Apple II is the first successful mass-produced microcomputer designed in 1976. The size of Apple II is smaller than a suitcase. It offered simplicity, the ability to upgrade, and style (for the time, at least) in a sleek beige box that hooked to your TV. Although primitive by today’s standards the Apple II sold in the millions and ushered in the era of personal computing. It was also one of the first personal computers that could play a decent home version of arcade games.

The most important feature of the Apple II was probably its eight expansion slots. No other computer had this kind of flexibility or expansion possibilities. The top of the computer isn’t even attached; it lifts off with little effort allowing easy access to the system motherboard and expansion slots. Dozens of different expansion cards were made by Apple and other manufacturers to add to the Apple II’s capabilities. 

These include – memory expansion, floppy disk controllers, PASCAL, parallel, serial, and SCSI cards, processor accelerators, video cards. 

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ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is the world’s first general-purpose computer designed in 1943. Although it took days to program, ENIAC could perform thousands of calculations in a second. That power required some serious hardware. ENIAC was large enough to live in, weighed more than 30 tons (27 t), and took up the space of a typical single-family house. Built before smaller and more efficient transistors, ENIAC relied or more than 17,000 soda-can-size vacuum tubes that often malfunctioned when the massive machine was powered up. ENIAC’s operators came up with a simple solution for that problem: They never turned it off. The computer ran continuously for more than seven years. It was even rumored (falsely) that ENIAC’s massive power needs were responsible for occasional power outages in the nearby city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

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A Difference Engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed in 1837. The size of this calculator is about as big as your living room. It is devised but never actually built by English mathematician Charles Babbage, this massive contraption relied on metal tumblers and cranks rather than electricity and transistors, yet it had all the components of a modern computer: a memory for storing numbers, a central processing unit for calculating math problems, an input device (punched cards) for entering information, and an output device in the form of a printer and a bell.

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