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A green flash can occur at sunrise or sunset when some part of the Sun suddenly and briefly seems to change color from red or orange to green or blue. This is an optical effect caused by the larger refraction of light at the blue/ green end of the spectrum…

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Various theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain the bizarre phenomenon, but to date no satisfactory answers have been found. Some commentators suggest that kangaroos in the United States are the shy descendants of animals that, on some unknown occasion in the past, escaped from a circus or zoo. One rational explanation is that they are native marsupials not yet officially discovered or classified; however, the only evolutionary ancestors come from South, not North, America.

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An odd device patented in Britain in 1904 by a Prussian count, Vladimir Skorzewski, was a compressed air walking assister. It consisted of a seat and handlebars, shock absorbers, and leg extensions and soles attached to stirrups. The count’s notion was that the shock absorbers at the contraption’s joints would function much like a series of miniature pogo sticks. The user could bound along the street and still enjoy the comforts of sitting down while “walking”.

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Its a page describing five of the worlds weird creatures.

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The mathematicians of ancient Greece attributed characters to numbers and awarded some of the status of perfection. For Euclid, one of the finding fathers of modern mathematics, a perfect number was one that equaled the sum of its own divisors – that is numbers that will divide into it without leaving a remainder. The first perfect number is 6: its divisors are 1, 2, and 3, 14 which add up to 6. The second is 28 (1 + two + four + seven + 14). The Greeks knew only two other perfect: 496 and 8,128.

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The answer to the question in vol. one is revealed.

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A program being established by NASA will eventually cover and area 10 million times larger than that investigated so far. Using specially designed equipment, it will focus on some 1,000 carefully chosen sun-type stars. The hope is to detect radio signals. The equipment will also scan the entire sky over a wide range of frequencies. Although each point will be observed for only few seconds, the survey will increase the probability that all potential sites for intelligent life have been examined.

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Introduction to analyzing mathematical relationships between variables. Underlined words are marked in the glossary in Chapter 3.

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The Russians had witnessed one of nature’s rarest and most mysterious phenomena: ball lightning. Detailed reports date many centuries. Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henry II of France, is said to have been burned by a ball of lightning that chased her around her bedroom on her wedding night in 1557. One year earlier, eight people in England were reported to have been killed by a “fiery, sulfurous globe” that rolled through a door.

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The Sun has 11 –year cycles of sunspot activity due to changes in its magnetic field. The increased surface activity means that more changed solar particles reach Earth’s atmosphere, causing radio interference and aurora. Nuclear reactions in the Sun’s core send waves of energy flowing to the surface, where it is given off as light, heat and other radiation.The Sun’s diameter is 1,392,000 km (865,000 miles). More than one million Earths would fit inside the Sun.