Incredible Facts
Select topics from the contents below to find out some fascinating and incredible facts about them!
- Animal senses
- Are you Paying Attention?
- Computer Science Unplugged
- Captain Cook's First New Zealand Voyage
- Captain Cook's Second New Zealand Voyage
- Crystals
- Glassblowers
- Incredible Vision
- Incredibly Boney Bones
- Life on the Rocky Shore is Hard!
- Light Metals Transporting the World
- Life on Mars
- Why did the Moa grow so large?
- What is Colour Blindness?
- Slime
- Sport and Exercise
- The Internet
- Antarctica
Computer Science Unplugged
Did you know?
Computers only know 0 and 1.
So how is it possible that they can do maths at all – and so incredibly fast?
Easy, they just represent numbers differently. While we use the digits 0-9 to “build” numbers, computers do it using only 0 and 1. This is called the BINARY SYSTEM.
Computers can deal with mistakes.
Like in every machine, parts of computers can cause errors. That's why it is necessary to quickly find out when things go wrong, for example when saving data onto your harddrive.
One method to detect errors is a CHECKSUM. It is a very simple principle and you find it in many places, for example, on everything that you can buy in a shop. Wouldn't it be cool if we humans had such a system to prevent us from making mistakes?