IT Insights Blog — science

Probably almost everyone who has ever been to Yellowstone National Park in (mostly) Wyoming knows about the Old Faithful Geyser. Millions of visitors have stood and waited for one of its frequent eruptions to spew boiling water more than 100 feet into the air. Old Faithful blows its stack at regular intervals of between 44 minutes and 2 hours, and has done so for decades. The carefully managed area around the geyser's mouth might be the most visited spot in the entire park.

There's an old inspirational maxim that goes something like this: "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve." Such is the power of assonance ... to cause pithy inspirational adages to linger in memory. The power of the mind to believe things into existence is, well, less readily demonstrable. Science fiction authors and others have been conceiving technologies beyond the grasp of modern engineering for generations, after all.

Depending on who you ask, it's either 50 miles or 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) straight up from the surface of Mother Earth to "space." The discrepancy is accounted for by a variation in measurement between the United States and the rest of the world. You might ask the students of Clint Thomsen, a CTE instructor for Tooele County School District in Utah. The kids have firsthand ...

Nov. 8, in addition to sometimes being the date of general elections in the United States and also the birthday of board gaming pioneer Milton Bradley, is World Radiography Day. Radiography, as you may or may not know, is the imaging technique by which projecting X-rays at an individual or object enables the creation of images that reveal that individual or object's internal structure.