Solid carbon dioxide or “dry ice” sublimes into gaseous carbon dioxide at a temperature well below 0° C. Since it takes energy to separate the molecules of carbon dioxide from one another, the dry ice absorbs heat as it sublimes and takes that heat out of any warmer objects nearby. Those nearby objects become colder and colder as the heat leaves them and eventually they begin to freeze.
The Ohio River is carrying water collected by vast areas surrounding the river and this accumulated volume of water is enough to raise the river’s level by many feet. Similarly, if you collected all the rain water that accumulated on your yard and poured that water into a bathtub, the level of water in the bathtub would rise far more than 15 inches.
A typical analog-to-digital converter (ADC) uses a process called “successive approximation” to find a binary number that accurately represents the voltage on an input wire. It samples the voltage on the input wire at one moment in time and then gradually constructs a binary number representing that voltage. The ADC tries various binary numbers and uses a digital-to-analog converter to form a voltage from each number. It compares the two voltages, the original and its approximation, to determine how close its current guess is to the correct value. With each successive approximation, it adds a bit a precision to its measurement so that after 16 approximations, it has a 16 bit number that accurately represents the voltage on the input wire.
For applications requiring even faster measurements, there are flash ADCs. These devices synthesize the entire range of possible voltages and then compare the input voltage directly with the complete collection of possible voltages. Since 8 binary bits can represent 256 possible numbers, an 8 bit flash ADC synthesizes 255 different voltages and makes 255 voltage comparisons simultaneously. It instantly determines where among the various voltages the input voltage falls and it reports this value in billionths of a second.
Biological tissues themselves are relatively transparent. They’re not good conductors of electricity and electric insulators are typically transparent (quartz, diamond, sapphire, salt, sugar). But we also contain some pigment molecules that are highly absorbing of certain wavelengths of light. For example, the hemoglobin molecules in blood absorb green and blue light quite strongly, so that they appear red. When you look at a flashlight through your hand, the light appears red because of this absorption of green and blue light by hemoglobin. If you use a bright enough red light source and are willing to look very carefully, probably with sophisticated light sensing devices, you can probably see a little light coming through a person’s body. But that light will probably have bounced several times during its passage, so that you won’t be able to learn anything about what the person’s internal organs look like. To get a better view of what a person’s insides look like, you need light that penetrates more effectively and that doesn’t bounce very often. Moreover, you must employ techniques to that block this bouncing light as much as possible so that you only see light that travels straight through the person. The light that does this isn’t visible light—it’s X-rays. X-rays are very high frequency, very short wavelength “light” (or rather electromagnetic waves). Tissue doesn’t absorb these X-rays much at all and they can go through people to form images.
I’m afraid that travel at or above light speed is simply impossible and that “warp speed” travel is just a Hollywood fantasy. Einstein’s special relativity forbids objects with mass from reaching or exceeding the speed of light and even if there were some way to travel vast distances in less time than it would take light to cover those distances, but without actually traveling at light speed, such travel would violate some important principles of causality—you would be able to meet your own grandparents as children and that sort of thing.
One of the reasons that Hollywood ignores real physics so often is that real physics is almost wilder than fiction. Suppose that you decided to travel to a star 5 light-years away from the earth and that you have a starship that can almost reach the speed of light (another nearly impossible thing, but let’s ignore that problem). If you travel to the star at almost the speed of light, make one loop around it, and head right back to earth, I will have aged 10 years while waiting for you to return. However, you will only have aged days or weeks, depending on just how close you came to the speed of light. During the trip, we will have disagreed on many physical quantities, particularly the times at which various events occurred and the distances between objects. The mixing of time and space that occur when two people move rapidly relative to one another would be so disorienting to movie or television viewers that Hollywood ignores or simplifies these effects.
I would expect that certain black light sources would cause tanning with only modest burning while other black light sources would cause burning with only modest tanning. Black light—also known as ultraviolet light—consists of very energetic light particles. The particles or photons of ultraviolet light contain enough energy to break chemical bonds and rearrange molecules. When you’re exposed to such energetic light, it causes damage to molecules in your skin cells and your skin may respond by darkening in the process we call “tanning.” But ultraviolet light is a general term that covers a broad range of wavelengths and photon energies. Long wavelength/low energy ultraviolet light tends to cause tanning while short wavelength/high energy ultraviolet light tends to cause burning—it directly kills cells. But these differences aren’t sharp and any ultraviolet light will cause some amount of skin damage.
Because conducting surfaces reflect electromagnetic waves, you can shield a room from electromagnetic waves by enclosing it in conducting surfaces. For example, a room surrounded by metal mirrors will be completely black inside because light won’t be able to enter it. Furthermore, if the electromagnetic waves that you’re trying to exclude have reasonably long wavelengths, you can put holes in the conducting surfaces because electromagnetic waves can’t pass through holes in a conducting surface if those holes are substantially smaller than their wavelengths. So, to shield your room from microwaves, I’d suggest enclosing it in copper screening with holes that are no more than a few millimeters in diameter. Many scientific experiments are performed in such screen rooms, which are generally called Faraday cages.
pH is a measure of the concentration of dissolved hydrogen ions in water. When a hydrogen atom loses an electron and becomes a hydrogen ion—a proton—it can dissolve nicely in water. Actually, this proton sticks itself to the oxygen atom of a water molecule, producing a hydronium ion (H3O+) that is then carried around by shells of water molecules. The higher the concentration of hydrogen (or hydronium) ions in water, the lower the water’s pH. More specifically, pH is negative the log (base 10) of the molar hydrogen ion concentration. That means that water with a pH of 6 has ten times as many hydrogen ions per liter as water with a pH of 7.
Pure water naturally contains some hydrogen ions, formed by water molecules that have spontaneously dissociated into hydrogen ions (H+) and hydroxide ions (OH–). Pure water has enough of these hydrogen ions in it to give it a pH of 7. But if you dissolve acidic materials in the water, materials that tend to produce hydrogen ions, the pH of the water will drop. If you dissolve basic materials in the water, materials that tend to bind with hydrogen ions and reduce their concentration, the pH of the water will rise. Water with too many or too few hydrogen ions tends to be chemically aggressive and we do best in water that has a pH near 7.
The most sensible propulsion system for a magnetically levitated train would be a linear electric motor. This motor would consist of electromagnets on the train and electromagnets on the track. By turning these electromagnets on and off at carefully chosen moments, they can be used to pull or push the train forward for propulsion or backward for breaking. The timing is important because, for propulsion, the magnet on the train must always be attracted toward the track magnet in front of it and repelled by the track magnet behind it. For breaking, this relationship must be reversed.
Cloud to ground lightning is caused by difference in electric charges between the cloud and the ground. Cloud to cloud lightning is caused by difference in electric charges among the clouds themselves. While I’m not at all expert on the subject, I would guess that the various different types of lightning discharges are caused by differences in the distances between charged objects, by variations in the local electric conductivity of the air and clouds during a discharge, and by the sizes and shapes of the clouds and ground.