Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Specular vs Diffuse Reflection

Light is central to our experience of the world. Without its reflective properties, our eyes would not work. When we look at an object, the light rays entering our eyes are ones that have reflected off of the object. Our ability to determine the location and distance of the things we see stems from the fact that light rays behave in predictable ways.
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Friday, April 29, 2011

genotype phenotype probabilities

Patterns of genetic inheritance obey the laws of probability. In a monohybrid cross, where the alleles present in both parents are known, each genotype shown in a Punnett Square is equally likely to occur. Since there are four boxes in the square, every offspring produced has a one in four, or 25%, chance of having one of the genotypes shown.

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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Note to mac users -

A recent update is causing the illustrations to run poorly on the chrome and firefox browsers. I expect a future update will resolve this issue.

For the time being you will get the best performance on a mac with safari or opera.

pH

The definition of pH is straightforward: pH describes the concentration (or activity) of positively charged hydrogen ions (H+) in a solution. Underlying this definition is a set concepts that can be challenging to understand. The challenge comes from needing to appreciate:

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Phase of the moon

The moon is second only to the sun as the most dynamic feature of our sky. It moves across the sky from east to west once every day and each month it goes from being invisible to the brightest object in the night sky and back to invisible again. These patterns result from the motions of the earth, moon and sun relative to each other.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Features of a wave

A standard set of terminology is used to describe the feature of waves.
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Saturday, March 12, 2011

Boyle's Law

On Earth, naturally occurring matter exists in one of three phases: solid, liquid or gas. Matter in each phase exhibits distinct characteristics. Gases, for example, do not have a fixed volume or shape. As a result, gases respond to pressure changes by changing their volume. In other words, gases are compressible. In contrast, liquids and solids are not compressible. Their volume does not change in response to changing pressure. This is the reason air filled spaces in our ears “pop” during airplane takeoff and landings while the liquid filled spaces in our bodies do not. Boyle's Law describes this relationship between gas pressure and volume.

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