Even if I knew, I’m sure that I’d get in trouble for telling. The encoding schemes are proprietary information and not available to the general public. To my knowledge, most of the descrambling/decoding in a satellite receiver is done by custom integrated circuits that are extremely difficult to reverse engineer (i.e., to open up, examine, and duplicate) so that pirating satellite signals is nearly impossible without insider information.
Solar cells are made in the same way that semiconductor diodes are made. Two different types of semiconductor, p-type and n-type, are joined together to form a diode—a one-way device for electric current. When light energy is absorbed in the n-type portion of the diode, it can propel an electron across the p-n junction between the materials and into the p-type material. Since the electron can’t return across the p-n junction to its original location, it must flow through an external circuit to get back. Since it obtains energy from the light that sent it across the junction, the electron can provide that energy to the circuit. The solar cell is thus a source of electric power.
As long as the microwave oven hasn’t been damaged and doesn’t leak excessive microwaves, there should be no harm in having children sit near it. I wouldn’t hold my face right up against the door edges because that would be asking for trouble with leakage, but it’s extremely unlikely that even doing that once in a while would cause injury.
As for being injured by microwave radiation after the cycle has stopped, that’s essentially impossible. As soon as the high voltage disappears from the magnetron tube and it stops emitting microwaves, the microwaves in the cooking chamber begin to diminish. Even if they bounce 1000 times off the metal walls of the chamber before they’re absorbed by those walls or the food in the microwave, that will only take about 2 millionths of a second. You can’t open the door fast enough to let them out before they’re already gone.
I think that power of suggestion is at work here. Salt water boils at a higher temperature than pure water. Thus if you set two identical pots of water, one salty and one pure, on burners and heat them at equal rates, the pure water will reach its boiling temperature first.
However, water boils more vigorously when it contains impurities that can nucleate bubbles of water vapor. Just before the water in a pot reaches a full boil, its temperature is often nonuniform and there are some regions that are boiling while others aren’t. The edges and corners of crystals are particularly good at nucleating bubbles, so that tossing salt grains into such nearly boiling water will encourage its hot regions to boil more vigorously, at least until those salt grains dissolve away. The appearance of bubbles makes you think the water is at a full boil when it really isn’t.
Yes, everything in the universe exerts gravitational forces on everything else in the universe. However, those forces are usually so small that they are undetectable. The gravitational forces between two bowling balls are only barely measurable in a laboratory. The gravitational forces between two atoms are so small as to be hopelessly undetectable.
A sound dish is actually a mirror telescope for sound. When sound waves from a distant source encounter a rigid parabolic surface, they reflect in such a way that they focus to a point. If you put a microphone at that point, it will detect the sound waves from the distant source. You can see this focusing effect by drawing a parabola on a sheet of paper and directing parallel lines—the sound waves from the distant source—toward the parabola. If you reflect each line in a mirror-like fashion from the surface it hits, you’ll find that all the reflected lines pass through a single point as they move away from the parabola.
There are homing devices small enough to fit on bugs, so there should be no problem fitting one on or into a laptop. A homing device is simply a radio transmitter and, while it has recently become possible to build a homing device that actually knows where it is and can tell you via its transmission, the techniques involved in locating most normal homing devices are those of trying to find the source of a radio transmission. Using directional receiving antennas and studying the transmission from several locations, you can figure out where the transmission is coming from.
The glass envelope of an incandescent bulb can’t contain air because tungsten is flammable when hot and would burn up if there were oxygen present around it. One of Thomas Edison’s main contributions to the development of such bulbs was learning how to extract all the air from the bulb. But a bulb that contains no gas won’t work well because tungsten sublimes at high temperatures—its atoms evaporate directly from solid to gas. If there were no gas in the bulb, every tungsten atom that left the filament would fly unimpeded all the way to the glass wall of the bulb and then stick there forever. While there are some incandescent bulbs that operate with a vacuum inside, most common incandescent lamps contain a small amount of argon and nitrogen gases.
Argon and nitrogen are chemically inert, so that the tungsten filament can’t burn in the argon and nitrogen, and each argon atom or nitrogen molecule is massive enough that when a tungsten atom that’s trying to leave the filament hits it, that tungsten atom may rebound back onto the filament. The argon and nitrogen gases thus prolong the life of the filament. Unfortunately, these gases also convey heat away from the filament via convection. You can see evidence of this convection as a dark spot of tungsten atoms that accumulate at the top of the bulb. That black smudge consists of tungsten atoms that didn’t return to the filament and were swept upward as the hot argon and nitrogen gases rose.
However, some premium light bulbs contain krypton gas rather than argon gas. Like argon, krypton is chemically inert. But a krypton atom is more massive than an argon atom, making it more effective at bouncing tungsten atoms back toward the filament after they sublime. Krypton gas is also a poorer conductor of heat than argon gas, so that it allows the filament to convert its power more efficiently into visible light. Unfortunately, krypton is a rare constituent of our atmosphere and very expensive. That’s why it’s only used in premium light bulbs, together with some nitrogen gas.
Incidentally, the filament in many incandescent bulbs is treated with a small amount of a phosphorus-based “getter” that reacts with any residual oxygen that may be in the bulb the first time the filament becomes hot. That’s how the manufacturer ensures that there will be no oxygen in the bulb for the tungsten filament to react with.
Fluorescent tubes produce relatively little heat, so they’re relatively fire safe already. However, incandescent light bulbs become very hot and you have to be careful with them to avoid fires. First, make sure that the bulb can get rid of its waste heat. That means that you shouldn’t wrap the bulb in insulation because it needs to transfer its waste heat to the air. Second, keep flammable materials away from the bulb, particularly above the bulb since hot air from the bulb rises upward.
An electric field can always been shielded by encasing its source in a grounded conducting shell. Electrically charged particles in the shell will naturally rearrange themselves in such a way as to cancel the electric fields outside the shell. But magnetic fields are harder to shield, particularly if they don’t change very rapidly with time. The difficulty with shielding magnetic fields comes from the apparent absence of isolated magnetic poles in our universe—there is no equivalent of electrically charged particles in the case of magnetism. As a result, the only way to shield magnetic fields is to take advantage of the connections between electric and magnetic fields.
Because changing magnetic fields are always accompanied by electric fields, the two can be reflected as a pair by highly conducting surfaces or absorbed by poorly conducting surfaces. In these cases, the electric fields push and pull on electric charges in the surfaces and it is through these electric fields that the magnetic fields are reflected or absorbed. However, this effect works much better at high frequencies than at low frequencies, where very thick materials are required. Appliances that operate from the AC power line have magnetic fields that change rather slowly with time (only 120 reversals per second or 60 full cycles of reversal each second) and that are extremely hard to shield with conducting material. Instead, their magnetic fields have to be trapped in special magnetic materials that draw in magnetic flux lines and keep them from emerging into the surrounding space. One of the most effective magnetic shield materials is called “mu metal”, a nickel alloy that’s like a sponge for magnetic flux lines. Since it also conducts electricity pretty well, it is an effective shield for electric fields. So if you wrap your mercury vapor ballasts in mu metal, there would be almost no electric or magnetic fields detectable outside of the mu metal surface.