Top 20 Greatest Inventions of All Time Technology is a core component of the human experience. We have been creating tools to help us tame the physical world since the early days of our species. Any attempt to count down the most important technological inventions is certainly debatable, but here are some major advancements that should probably be on any such list (in chronological order): Library of Congress - Kids and Families The Library of Congress has many websites designed for young readers and for the whole family to explore together. Veteran's History ProjectCollecting, preserving, presentingMemories of American war veteransSo future generations may hear & understand the realities of war
Molecular Workbench Three Views of MW Senior Scientist and Molecular Workbench Developer Charles Xie, Researcher and Manager Amy Pallant, and Technology and Curriculum Developer Dan Damelin describe the history of Molecular Workbench and our vision for the future. Watch the Video undefinedundefinedundefined Selected Curriculum Modules Transistor
How Does the Internet Work? - A Simple Explanation of the Internet You’re on vacation in Italy, sitting at a nice café (with free Wi-Fi). It’s a few days into your trip now and you’ve taken some beautiful photos that you want to share with your parents back home. Mom and Dad aren’t too familiar with Dropbox or Google Drive, so instead, you attach the photos to an email. Your mouse hovers over the send button and click…almost instantaneously it shows up in your Mom and Dad’s inboxes halfway across the world. What just happened?
Education Resources from the Library of Congress The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections. Read.govResources and opportunities to celebrate the wonder of reading Teacher ResourcesFree resources to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching Lesson PlansTeacher-created lesson plans using Library of Congress primary sources
How Does WiFi Work? - 8 Things You Didn’t Know About Wifi Ah, good ‘ole WiFi. From helping us to keep our phone bill low (except March, goddammit) to allowing our laptops/tablets/etc. to connect to the internet, WiFi has been a ubiquitous companion that we’ve all come to know and love. WiFi is also useful for some IoT applications (wait, what is IoT?), such as building and home automation or in-house energy management. For many other IoT applications, WiFi is absolutely useless.
The Ongoing Battle Between Science Teachers And Fake News : NPR Ed Every year Patrick Engleman plays a little trick on his students. The high school chemistry teacher introduces his ninth-graders in suburban Philadelphia to an insidious substance called dihydrogen monoxide. It's "involved in 80 percent of fatal car crashes. It's in every single cancer cell. This stuff, it'll burn you," he tells them. But dihydrogen monoxide is water.
First He Invented The Phone. Then, Bell Left A Voice Message As the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell is credited with bringing countless voices to our ears. And now, for the first time, here he is imploring us to hear his own voice: "Hear my voice. The Sun’s Energy Doesn’t Come From Fusing Hydrogen Into Helium (Mostly) “The sun is a miasmaOf incandescent plasmaThe sun’s not simply made out of gasNo, no, noThe sun is a quagmireIt’s not made of fireForget what you’ve been told in the past” -They Might Be Giants If you start with a mass of hydrogen gas and bring it together under its own gravity, it will eventually contract once it radiates enough heat away. Bring a few million (or more) Earth masses’ worth of hydrogen together, and your molecular cloud will eventually contract so severely that you’ll begin to form stars inside. When you pass the critical threshold of about 8% our Sun’s mass, you’ll ignite nuclear fusion, and form the seeds of a new star. While it’s true that stars convert hydrogen into helium, that’s neither the greatest number of reactions nor the cause of the greatest energy release from stars. It really is nuclear fusion that powers the stars, but not the fusion of hydrogen into helium.
How does fracking work? - Mia Nacamulli What is it about fracking that causes so much concern? Read this BBC article to find out more about what exactly fracking is and why it is an issue to so many people. This video: Fracking explained: opportunity or danger? will provide more information on the topic. CNN also addresses fracking here. Early modern humans formed complex social networks to avoid inbreeding as early as 34,000 years ago Even in small Paleolithic communities that lived 34,000 years ago, our early ancestors seem to have been aware of the dangers of inbreeding. Anthropologists report finding evidence of complex social structures at a site in Sunghir, Russia, which suggests people took precautions against inbreeding. One of the burials from Sunghir, in Russia. Credit: University of Cambridge, UK. The Upper Paleolithic burial site contains the complete remains of an adult male, the symbolically incomplete remains of another male, as well as those of two younger individuals.