Whenever it rains, we get to see a rainbow in the sky, but did you ever wonder where that rainbow came from, or how it was formed. Well, it all has to do with light, and something called refraction. Refraction is when light travels through a different medium causing it to bend. In this light is refracted into all of the colors of the visible light spectrum.
When it rains there are lots of small water droplets in the air. Sunlight goes through those droplets, and gets refracted into all of the colors of the rainbow. Finally they form the arc that we know as a rainbow! As you can see there is actually some interesting science behind how a rainbow forms. As to whether or not there is a pot of gold at the end of it though, I couldn't say.
A lot of people ask why the sky is blue. And yes, there is actually a scientific reason for that. It all has to do with light. When light travels to the Earth from the sun it has to travel through the atmosphere. Once the light hits the atmosphere, all of it travels through the air, but something happens to the blue light that doesn't happen to the rest of the colors. It gets scattered more that the rest of them do.
Scattering is where light gets thrown different ways because of other things in the air such as clouds or anything else in this case, for example. When the light from the sun goes through the atmosphere all of the colors go through without being scattered very much, but blue gets scattered much more than all the other colors. Blue light gets thrown throughout the sky, making it blue.
In science class every table group was assigned a different animal to do research on. We had to do research on the classification of the animal, its' adaptations, its' methods of reproduction, and human interactions of it. My group was assigned to the keel-billed toucan, and I did research on the classification section. It was the easiest section of research, but after I finished my part I had to help my group who had a much tougher job than I did. That got kind of stressful, but we got it done as a group. I was actually very happy because my group got extra credit on the research for how much we did.
Well I was responsible for finding classification information for the keel billed toucan. Here is a brief summary of my research:
The keel-billed toucan's scientific name is ramphastos sulfuratus, which translates to "hind legs" and "to burn." The keel billed toucan is mostly black, with a yellow chest and blue feet, as well as some red tail feathers. It also has the famous, huge beak consisting of red, orange, green, blue, and yellow. The toucan lives in rain-forests of Mexico and into South America. Their diet consists of fruit, nuts, insects, eggs, and some other small animals. The keel-billed toucan is under the conservation status of least concerned.
I think the greatest scientific discovery in history is the discovery of electricity by Benjamin Franklin in the mid-1700s. Since the discovery of electricity, the whole world has changed and continues to change and develop every day. Without electricity we wouldn't have every day things like light bulbs, toasters, mixers, and electric ovens. We wouldn't have any of our cool new gadgets and such! Hwo terible would the world be?
Over the last two hundred and fifty years the world has changed drastically and electricity is one of the main reasons for that. Now people all over the world have access to simple electric machines that are always making their lives easier. Electricity has made complicated things quite simple. Imagine candles being the only light, other that the sun, that people had three hundred years ago. It was more work, and much more dangerous in a sense. This is why I think that electricity is the greastest scientific discovery.
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