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Basic Facts About Oil

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facts about Oil

Oils are liquids that do not dissolve in water and burn easily. Oils are usually made from long chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Do you know facts about Oil that there are three main kinds of oil: essential, fixed and mineral oils. Essential oils are thin, perfumed oils from plants. They are used in flavouring and aromatherapy. Fixed oils are made by plants and animals from fatty acids. They include fish oils and nut and seed oils. Mineral oils come from petroleum formed underground over millions of years from the remains of micro-organisms.

Facts About Oil

  • Petroleum, or crude oil, is made mainly of hydrocarbons. These are compounds made only of hydrogen and carbon, such as methane (see oil compounds).
  • Hydrocarbons in petroleum are mixed with oxygen, sulphur, nitrogen and other elements.
  • Petroleum is separated by distillation into various substances such as aviation fuel, petrol or gasoline and paraffin. As oil is heated in a distillation column, a mixture of gases evaporates. Each gas cools and condenses at different heights to a liquid, or fraction, which is then drawn off.
  • Hydrocarbons are compounds made only of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Most oil products are hydrocarbons.
  • The simplest hydrocarbon is methane, the main gas in natural gas (and flatulence from cows!).
  • Methane molecules are one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms.
  • Alkanes or Paraffins are a family of hydrocarbons in which the number of hydrogen atoms is two more than twice the number of carbon atoms.
  • Lighter alkanes are gases such as methane and propane which make good fuels.
  • Candles contain a mixture of alkanes.
  • Alkenes or olefins are a family of hydrocarbons in which there are twice as many hydrogen atoms as carbon atoms.
  • The simplest alkene is ethene, also called ethylene (C2 1-1 4) which is used to make polythene and other plastics such as PVC.
  • Do you know facts about Oil that Green bananas and tomatoes are often ripened rapidly in ripening rooms filled with ethene.
  • Ethene is the basis of many paint strippers.
  • Ethene can be used to make ethanol, the alcohol in alcoholic drinks.
  • Do you know facts about Oil that Crude oil is considered the “mother of all commodities” because of its use in the manufacturing of numerous products, including gasoline, synthetic fabrics, plastics and pharmaceuticals.
  • Approximately 50% of all the oil consumed in the U.S. is for the transportation industry.
  • Texas is the leading state in crude oil production with over 5 billion barrels in reserves.
  • Crude oil is measured in barrels, which are each equivalent to 42 U.S. gallons.
  • Products like fertilizers, plastics, car tires, ammonia, perfumes and even bubble gum are synthesized using petroleum products obtained during the crude oil refining process.
  • OPEC countries hold over three-quarters of the world’s proven oil reserves, and that number is rising.
  • The U.S. has over 200,000 miles of oil pipelines within its borders.
  • Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar oil field contains about 85 billion barrels of oil (the world’s largest).
  • Do you know facts about Oil that Oil is created from the decomposition of organic materials under intense heat and pressure over millions of years.
  • The largest oil spill in history, the Deep water Horizon oil spill in 2010, spilled 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Oil has been used by people for over 5,000 years, once used as a medicine for treating ailments such as gout and frostbite.
  • Oil was first successfully drilled in the U.S. in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859.
  • Crude oil was first pumped from the ground in Sichuan, China 2,500 years ago.
  • Glycerin — a sweet-tasting synthetic ingredient used in toothpaste and other products — is a petrochemical derived from oil.
  • Do you know facts about Oil that Oil is used to make common synthetic fabrics like polyester, nylon, vinyl and acrylic.
  • Canada has the third largest amount of reserves of any country, 97% of which are in oil sands.
  • The Trans-Alaska Pipeline has shipped over 16 billion barrels of oil since it came online in 1977.

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Interesting facts about Stars

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Syskool
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Interesting facts about Stars
stars

Stars are balls of mainly hydrogen and helium gas. Nuclear reactions in the heart of stars generate heat and light. The heart of a star reaches 16 million°C. A grain of sand this hot would kill someone 150 km away. The gas in stars is in a special hot state called plasma, which is made of atoms stripped of electrons. In the core of a star, hydrogen nuclei fuse (join together) to form helium. This nuclear reaction is called a proton-proton chain. Stars twinkle because we see them through the wafting of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Interesting facts about Stars

  • Astronomers work out how big a star is from its brightness and its temperature.
  • The size and brightness of a star depend on its mass – that is, how much gas it is made of. Our Sun is a medium-sized star, and no star has more than 100 times the Sun’s mass or less than 6-7 percent of its mass.
  • The coolest star, such as Arcturus and Antares, glow reddest. Hotter stars are yellow and white. The hottest are blue-white.
  • The blue supergiant Zeta Puppis has a surface temperature of 40,000°C, while Rigel’s is 10,000°C.
  • Stars start life in clouds of gas and dust called nebulae.
  • Inside nebulae, gravity creates dark clumps called dark nebulae, each clump containing the seeds of a family of stars.
  • As gravity squeezes the clumps in dark nebulae, they become hot.
  • Smaller clumps never get very hot and eventually fizzle out. Even if they start burning, they lose surface gas and shrink to wizened, old white dwarf stars.
  • If a larger clump reaches 10 million °C, hydrogen atoms in its core begin to join together in nuclear reactions, and the baby star starts to glow.
  • In a medium-sized star like our Sun, the heat of burning hydrogen pushes gas out as fiercely as gravity pulls inwards, and the star becomes stable (steady).
  • Medium-sized stars burn steadily until all of their hydrogen fuel is used up.
  • Plotting the positions of the stars in the sky is a complex business because there is a vast number of them, all at hugely different distances.
  • The first modern star charts were the German Bonner Durchmusterung charts of 1859, which show positions of 324,189 stars.
  • The AGK1 chart of the German Astronomical was completed in 1912 and showed 454,000 stars.
  • The AGK charts are now on version AGK3 and remain the standard star chart. They are compiled from photographs.
  • The measurements of accurate places for huge numbers of star depends on the careful determination of 1535 stars in the Fundamental Catalog (FK3).
  • Photometric catalogues map the star by magnitude and colour and position.
  • Three main atlases are popular with astronomers – Norton’s Star Atlas, which plots all stars visible to the naked eye; the Tirion Sky Atlas; and the photographic Photographischer Stern-Atlas. FASCINATING FACT. Astronomers still divide the sky into 88 constellations – many of the names are the mythical ones given to them by the astronomers of ancient Greece.
  • The map of the sky shows the 88 constellations that are visible during the year from each hemisphere (half) of the world.
  • Star brightness is worked out on a scale of magnitude (amount) that was first devised in 150Bc by the Ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus.
  • The brightest star Hipparchus could see was Antares, and he described it as magnitude.
  • The brightest-looking star from Earth is Sirius, the Dog Star, with a magnitude of -1.4.
  • The magnitude scale only describes how bright a star looks from Earth compared to other stars. This is its relative magnitude.
  • The further away a star is, the dimmer it looks and the smaller its relative magnitude is, regardless of how bright it really is.
  • A star’s absolute magnitude describes how bright a star really is.
  • The star Deneb is 60,000 times brighter than the Sun. But because it is 1800 light-years away, it looks dimmer than Sirius.
  • Giant stars are 10 to 100 times as big as the Sun, and 10 to 1000 times as bright.
  • Giant star have burned all their hydrogen, and so burn helium, fusing (joining) helium atoms to make carbon.
  • The biggest star go on swelling after they become red giants, and grow into supergiants.
  • Supergiant stars are up to 500 times as big as the Sun, with absolute magnitudes of -5 to -10.
  • The Pressure in the heart of a supergiant is enough to fuse carbon atoms together to make iron.
  • Our Sun is alone in space, but most stars have one, two or more starry companions.
  • True binary star are two stars held together by one another’s gravity, which spend their lives whirling around together like a pair of dancers.
  • Eclipsing binaries are true binary stars that spin round in exactly the same line of sight from Earth. This means they keep blocking each another’s light.
  • Stars in the star Epsilon in the constellation of Lyra is called the Double because it is a pair of binaries.
  • Mizar, in the Great Bear, was the first binary star to be discovered. Mizar’s companion Alcor is an optical binary star.
  • Albireo in Cygnus is an optical binary visible to the naked eye — one star looks gold, the other, blue.

Must Read: 

Facts about Constellations

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Concept of Thermodynamics

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Syskool
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Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the science that deals with work and heat—and the transformation of one into the other. It is a macroscopic theory, dealing with matter in bulk, disregarding the molecular nature of materials. The corresponding microscopic theory, based on the fact that materials are made up of a vast number of particles, is called statistical mechanics.

Must Read: Laws of Motion

Historical background

The origins of thermodynamics can be traced to the late eighteenth century. English-American physicist Benjamin Thomson, Count Rumford (1753–1814), became intrigued by the physical changes accompanying the boring of cannons. (Boring is the process of making a hole—in this case the barrel of the cannon—with a twisting movement.) He found that the work (or mechanical energy) involved in the boring process was converted to heat as a result of friction, causing the temperature of the cannon to rise.

Some of the fundamental relationships involved in thermodynamics were later developed by English physicist James Joule (1818–1889), who showed that work can be converted to heat without limit. Other researchers found, however, that the opposite is not true—that is, that there are limiting factors that operate in the conversion of heat to work. The research of French physicist Sadi Carnot (1796–1832), British physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), and German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), among others, has led to an understanding of these limitations.

Also Read: Physics Facts

The laws of thermodynamics

The first law of thermodynamics is actually nothing other than the law of conservation of energy: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can be converted from one form to another, but the total amount of energy in a system always remains constant.

The first law of thermodynamics is sometimes stated in a somewhat different form because of the kinds of systems to which it is applied. Another statement is that the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of work done on the system plus any heat added to the system. In this definition, the term work is used to describe all forms of energy other than heat.

The first law can be thought of as a quantitative law (involving measurement of some quantity or amount): the amount of energy lost by one system is equal to the amount of energy gained by a second system. The second law, in contrast, can be thought of as a qualitative law (involving quality or kind): the second law says that all natural processes occur in such a way as to result in an increase in entropy.

It is first necessary to explain the concept of entropy. Entropy means disorder.

The second law of thermodynamics simply says that any time some change takes place in nature, there will be more entropy—more disorganization—than there was to begin with.

The second law is sometimes described as the “death of the universe” law because it means that over very long periods of time, all forms of energy will be evenly distributed throughout the universe. The waste energy produced by countless numbers of natural processes will add up over the millennia until that is the only form in which energy will remain in our universe.

Must Read: Laws of refraction of light

Some facts about Thermodynamics

  • The word ‘entropy’ was invented by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1865.
  • Clausius showed that everything really happens because energy moves from areas of high energy to areas of low energy, from hot areas to cold areas.
  • Energy goes on flowing from high to low until there is no difference to make anything happen. This is an equilibrium state. Entropy is the maximum.
  • Energy cannot be reused once it has turned to heat and dissipated, just as you cannot rebuild an igloo once the snow has melted.
  • Clausius summed this idea up in the 1860s with two laws of thermodynamics.
  • The first law of thermodynamics says the total energy in the Universe was fixed forever at the beginning of time.
  • The second law of thermodynamics says that energy is dissipated every time it is used. So the entropy of the Universe must increase.

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Laws of Thermo-Dynamics

Laws of Motion

Laws of refraction of light

Amazing facts about English Language

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Syskool
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  • English words “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, from thousands of years.
  • The longest common English word without vowels is “rhythms”.
  • A new word in English is created every 98 minutes.
  • The word “bride” comes from an old proto-germanic word meaning “to cook”.
  • The word “queue” is pronounced the same way when the last 4 letters are removed.
  • 90% of everything written inEnglish uses just 1,000 words.
  • There are more English words beginning with the letter “s” than with any other letter.
  • Nigeria has more English speakers than the United Kingdom.
  • Until the 19th century the English word for actors was “hypocrites.”
  • The shortest complete sentence in the English language is “Go”.
  • Phrases in English such as”long time no see”, “no go”, and “no can do” come from literal translations ofChinese phrases.
  • Only two English words in current use end in “-gry”. They are “angry” and “hungry”.
  • A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a “pangram”.
  • The following sentence contains all 26 letters of the alphabet: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This sentence is often used to test typewriters or keyboards.
  • The “QWERTY keyboard” gains its name from the fact that its first 6 letter keys are Q, W, E, R, T and Y. On early typewriters, the keys were arranged in such a way as to minimize the clashing of the mechanical rods that carried the letters.
  • The chess term “checkmate” comes from a 14th century Arabic phrase, “shah mat”, which means “the king is helpless”.
  • English is the third most commonly spoken language in the world (the first and second are Mandarin Chinese and Spanish).
  • The closest languages to English are Dutch and West Flemish.
  •  “I” is the oldest word in the English language.
  • “Almost” is one of the longest English words to have all its letters in alphabetical order.
  • Most English grammar and spelling follow the standardised rules set out in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, which was published in 1755.
  • ‘Bookkeeper’ and ‘bookkeeping’ are the only 2 words in the English language with three consecutive double letters.

 

 Also, Read:

Rediculous facts about China

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Syskool
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  • Fortune cookies are not a traditional Chinese custom. They were invented in early 1900 in San Francisco.
  • Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times have been blocked in China since 2009.
  • The World’s First Paper Money was created in China 1,400 years ago.
  • The Sunrise in parts of China can be as late as 10 AM because the country joined its five time zones  into a
    single one.
  • Every 30 seconds, a baby is born with a birth defect in China.
  • If Walmart were a country, it would be China’s sixth-largest export market.
  • By 2020, China could have between 30 million and 40 million men who cannot find wives.
  • In 1973, China proposed to give 10 million Chinese women to the U.S. to boost the U.S. population.
  • China has the largest population in the world, with over 1.3 billion people.
  • In China over 30 million people live in caves
  • Twenty million trees are cut every year to make chopsticks in China
  • Some of the bricksin the Great wall of China are held together by rice flour
  • The world’s biggest mall is located in China and 99% is empty.
  • The Chinese believe that the number 8 is lucky because it sounds similar to the word for ‘prosperity’
  • The 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing were the most expensive yet. They cost US $40 billion.
  • Paper money was invented in China.
  • Half of the world’s pigs live in China
  • China’s railway lines could loop around Earth twice.
  • The Chinese developed a theory of three levels of heaven—Heaven, Earth, and man—which has been influential in landscape painting and flower arrangements.
  • China has the world’s oldest calendar. This lunar calendar originated in 2600 B.C. and has 12 zodiac signs. It takes 60 years to complete.
  • The oldest tree in the world is China’s gingko, which first appeared during the Jurassic Age some 160 million years ago.
  • Ice cream was invented in China around 2000BC. The first ice cream was soft milk and rice mixture packed in the snow.
  • Ketchup originated in China as a pickled fish sauce called ke-tsiap.
  • China is the second largest economy in the world, after the United States of America.
  • China is also known as the “Flowery Kingdom” and many of the fruits and flowers (such as the orange and orchid) are now grown all over the world.

Also, Read:

Amazing facts about France

Facts to know about Japan

Facts about Singapore

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