The Web is likely one of the best innovations in human historical past, revolutionizing communication and altering the world without end. This huge community connects computer systems internationally through greater than 750,000 miles of cables operating underneath land and sea. It’s our quickest technique of communication, making it doable to ship a message from London, UK, to Sydney, Australia, in simply 250 milliseconds.
Developing and sustaining this international hyperlink has been a monumental feat of ingenuity. Possibly you have been born this facet of the brand new millennium, or possibly you’re sufficiently old to recollect a time while you needed to go to the library to get extra info on a topic, step outdoors your own home to buy groceries or cellphone a buddy to remain in contact. In any case, as we speak the Web is a staple for many of us, each bit as important a utility to fashionable residing and dealing as electrical energy.
We take without any consideration the truth that we will decide up our telephones or use a PC to entry a cornucopia of information and providers, however most of us don’t perceive the way it all works. Within the newest challenge of How It Works journal, you’ll uncover how miles of cables, tens of millions of computer systems and complicated software program packages and protocols come collectively to attach you to a web based world.
Associated: Learn a free challenge of How It Works right here
Additionally this challenge, uncover why ostriches are unable to fly, how diamonds are mined, lower, polished and even made, see inside a bionic eye and uncover how this expertise is turning into a viable treatment for some types of blindness. You may make your individual thunderstorm in a tank in our sensible How To…, see how fashionable automobile central locking works, what the Romans taught us (trace: loads) and, may we construct Star Trek’s USS Enterprise?
Learn on to seek out out extra about challenge 161’s largest options.
Learn how to make a diamond
A diamond is basically simply carbon, one of the vital frequent parts. However we often discover carbon compounded with different parts, and when pure carbon does happen on the Earth’s floor it takes the type of graphite. Making diamond requires a lot larger temperatures and pressures — these discovered contained in the Earth’s mantle at depths of 100 miles or extra. There could also be plenty of diamonds there, maybe as a lot as a quadrillion tonnes, however they’re completely inaccessible to us.
However there’s nothing mystical or supernatural about diamonds: they’re merely the shape that carbon takes underneath sure situations of temperature and strain. Pure diamonds have been fashioned the place these situations exist contained in the Earth, however it’s additionally doable to create the required situations artificially.
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This has been achieved on a business scale to make artificial diamonds because the Fifties. One strategy — referred to as the high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) method — makes an attempt to imitate the pure course of as intently as doable. An alternate, referred to as chemical vapour deposition (CVD), requires much less excessive temperatures and pressures. At first artificial diamonds have been poor in high quality and solely appropriate for industrial functions, however as we speak they are often made enticing sufficient to make use of in jewelry. See how diamonds are made, mined, lower and polished, in How It Works 161.
Might we construct the USS Enterprise?
The USS Enterprise is the enduring flagship from Star Trek and a formidable work of science fiction. However that is all it’s, proper, it is simply sci-fi?
In the intervening time it’s, however engineers and scientists nonetheless have 233 years to attain Roddenberry’s imaginative and prescient for house exploration, and a number of other scientific breakthroughs counsel that we may be heading in direction of a spaceship that’s paying homage to the Enterprise.
As a Structure-class Starfleet Federation starship, the principle position of the Enterprise is to enterprise on intergalactic exploration and diplomatic missions. To help the crew on their journeys of discovery, the ship is supplied with an array of superior scanners and sensors: simply flip a number of switches and a planet might be scanned for indicators of life — and scientists are one step nearer to creating this expertise a actuality.
One of the iconic talents of the USS Enterprise is its potential to zip from one finish of the galaxy to the opposite in mere moments utilizing its fictitious warp drive. Human expertise is presently nowhere close to superior sufficient to copy the Enterprise’s warp drive. Nonetheless, the idea behind constructing one has been round because the early Nineteen Nineties. To attain speeds sooner than the velocity of sunshine, physics’ pure velocity restrict, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed that we should bend the material of space-time.
In How It Works 161, we discover the numerous rudimentary applied sciences we have now as we speak that might result in a spacefaring future that is not gentle years away from Roddenberry’s imaginative and prescient.
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