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
Incredible Vision
How many different colours does it take to make a TV picture?
The picture on a colour television or a computer monitor is made from just three colours. If you are able to look closely at a white area of the picture on a computer screen (perhaps a magnifying glass will help) you will see that there are lots of little points of light (pixels = picture elements). Each pixel is made up from a tiny dot of red + a tiny dot of green + a tiny dot of blue.
Did you know?
- A person with normal colour vision can distinguish millions of different colours.
- About 1 in 12 males and 1 in 200 females have defective colour vision because of the way that the light sensitive parts of their eyes are made.
- People with defective colour vision see colours differently BUT still see colour and are not totally colour blind. They may see as few as 17 or up to thousands of colours. Total colour blindness is rare.
- If a person is totally colour blind their world will look like what you see in a “Black and White” movie.
- All humans are totally colour-blind in very dim lighting such as under moonlight.
- Animals like dogs and cats don’t see colour as well as humans. A television set designed for a cat or a dog would need only two colours to make its TV picture.