Mike
Carruthers:
If you've ever seen a GPS or global positioning system device
in a car you may have wondered how they work.
Marshall Brain:
The cool thing about that is the military put up the satellite
they put up 24 satellites.
Marshall Brain,
founder of howstuffworks.com website and author of several books
on how stuff works…
The way the GPS
receiver works, as long as it can see 3 of those satellites
it can pick up enough information to figure out where you are
on the planet. And if it can pick up 4 it can also tell you
what your altitude is.
Of the thousands
of articles on his website Marshall says the most popular one
is how engines work.
The miracle behind
a gasoline car engine is that if you take the tiniest drop of
gasoline and light it, it contains this incredible amount of
power. So what you're engine's doing is creating a place where
you can light little tiny, tiny drops of gasoline and turn that
into rotation-so that you can spin the wheels on your car or
the chain on a chainsaw, whatever.
And have you
ever wondered why FM radio stations frequencies always end in
odd numbers?
The way the FCC
decided things would be is that we would use odd number frequencies.
I believe if you go over to Europe it's the other way they use
even number frequencies over in Europe.
You can link
to Marshall's website
from ours: somethingyoushouldknow.net-
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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