What’s The Fastest Possible Speed ?

Well imagine going 500,000 times faster than a concorde and you have a speed nearing 299,792,458 meters per second. This is the speed of light as it travels through a vaccum which is so fast that if you were able to move at this speed you could go around the earth 7 times in just 1 second, now that’s fast!

Obviously the speed of light passing through liquids and solids is slower but even then the speed of light is phenomenal. Many of you may also have heard of the concept of a light year, which represents the distance light would travel in a complete year.

This extraordinary number comes out to around 9,460,000 million kilometres. The term is used extensively in astronomy to measure distances between planets, stars and other celestial bodies. The simple fact of the matter is that distances involved when it comes to discussing the universe are so huge that you need a better unit of measure to make it more understandable.

Lastly those of you who watch too many space movies e.g. star wars, star trek etc and are familiar with concepts like warp speed or hyperspace then you’re probably wondering when we’ll be able to travel at speeds like those shown in the movies. Well the simple answer is it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see anything like that in our lifetime however tolearn more about the research going on in this area you can check out NASA’s section on breakthrough propulsion physics.

What’s The Fastest Possible Speed ?

Well imagine going 500,000 times faster than a concorde and you have a speed nearing 299,792,458 meters per second. This is the speed of light as it travels through a vaccum which is so fast that if you were able to move at this speed you could go around the earth 7 times in just 1 second, now that’s fast!

Obviously the speed of light passing through liquids and solids is slower but even then the speed of light is phenomenal. Many of you may also have heard of the concept of a light year, which represents the distance light would travel in a complete year.

This extraordinary number comes out to around 9,460,000 million kilometres. The term is used extensively in astronomy to measure distances between planets, stars and other celestial bodies. The simple fact of the matter is that distances involved when it comes to discussing the universe are so huge that you need a better unit of measure to make it more understandable.

Lastly those of you who watch too many space movies e.g. star wars, star trek etc and are familiar with concepts like warp speed or hyperspace then you’re probably wondering when we’ll be able to travel at speeds like those shown in the movies. Well the simple answer is it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see anything like that in our lifetime however tolearn more about the research going on in this area you can check out NASA’s section on breakthrough propulsion physics.

Where Did The Word Robot Come From ?

This is a question we get asked a lot so we thought we’d put people out of their misery. Firstly the word robot comes from the Czech word ‘robotnik‘ which means forced labour or even slave. Watching movies like I Robot, Wall-E and reading various sci-fi novels of the past you’ll quickly see that robots have mostly always been portrayed as helpers and servents of humanity.

It’s only in recent years that the image of robots has been upgraded to sentient beings with minds of their own e.g. transformers and even IRobot.

Anyway the word was first introduced by playwright Karel Capek in his play ‘RUR - Rossum’s Universal Robots‘ and it’s from there that the word and idea became popular. The first robot to be developed was by Joseph Engelberger and George Devol back in 1961 and if you’re imagining a metallic being with 2 arms, 2 legs and a head you can forget it. The first robot was basically a clawed arm that dropped hot steel car parts into water for cooling.

90% of robots today are used in factories, working on production lines and often handling dangerous materials that humans would find difficult or even impossible to handle. Other uses include exploration such as deep sea exploration and mining.

Deepest Lake In The World ?

Lake Baikal (Baikal) in Siberia, Russia is the deepest lake in the world measuring 1620m deep at its deepest point. This makes it not only deep but also the oldest lake in the world estimated to be around 25 million years old. At over 636 kilometers long and 80 kilometers wide this fresh water lake holds over 20 percent of all the fresh water in the world and is second in size only to the Caspian Sea (the caspian is called a sea but is technically a lake).

To put things into perspective the lake is so big that if all the rivers in the world flowed into its basin it would take almost 1 year to fill. We all know Siberia isn’t the warmest of places so you can imagine what a phenomenal site it is when in the winter months the lake freezes over holding ice up to 115 meters thick. Now that’s a lot of ice!