Why can one decide from Mumu's text that Gerasim was a dwarf? Detailed answer

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Why can one decide from Mumu's text that Gerasim was a dwarf? Detailed answer

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Why can one decide from Mumu's text that Gerasim was a dwarf?

At the beginning of the story "Mumu" Turgenev describes the protagonist as follows: "Of all her servants, the most remarkable person was the janitor Gerasim, a man twelve inches tall." However, when translating from inches, it turns out that Gerasim was only 53 cm in height. The fact is that in those days, when describing growth, the words “two arshins” were often omitted, because almost all adults were above this mark (142 cm). If we add two arshins and twelve vershoks, then Gerasim's height is about 196 cm, which is consistent with the heroic physique mentioned by Turgenev. Horses were measured in the same way, so the Humpbacked Horse "only three inches tall", taking into account these two arshins, grows from 13 to 156 cm.

Authors: Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

How was the asteroid belt formed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter?

Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter there is a belt 100-300 million kilometers wide, formed by several tens of thousands of rocky bodies - asteroids. They revolve around the Sun, passing their orbit in 3-6 years. Most of them are irregular in shape, ranging in size from a few centimeters to 100 kilometers.

There are two hypotheses for the origin of asteroids.

According to one hypothesis, asteroids are the remains of a planet that has split as a result of some kind of catastrophe - for example, a collision with another massive body. This hypothetical planet was named Phaeton. According to the supporters of the hypothesis, the Moon testifies to the time of its destruction: 4 billion years ago, a flurry of fragments of Phaeton fell upon it, which formed giant impact craters with a diameter of up to 1000 kilometers. The same fragments flew to the Earth, but they collapsed in its dense atmosphere.

Proponents of another hypothesis of the origin of asteroids consider them to be a kind of planets that ended up in their current orbits due to intense gravitational processes near Jupiter.

Test your knowledge! Did you know...

▪ Why are there no seasons on Mercury?

▪ Why do plants turn towards the sun?

▪ What translation inaccuracy caused the emergence of the theory of a highly developed civilization on Mars?

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Photocell based on graphene 25.09.2013

Three groups of physicists at once: from Austria, Hong Kong and from the USA presented prototypes of photodetectors based on graphene. These devices convert infrared optical signals into electrical impulses, and the efficiency of graphene photodetectors is higher than that of similar devices of the traditional type.

All three developments are somewhat different from each other, but they all use the key feature of graphene - the ability to convert light quanta with different energies into electrical impulses. Traditional photodetectors work due to the fact that a light quantum transfers energy to a charge carrier sufficient to overcome a potential barrier, a gap between energy levels in a semiconductor, but graphene is not a "full" semiconductor and it does not have a so-called band gap.

Due to the absence of a band gap, graphene detectors were able to register (in the case of the development of a group from the Chinese University in Hong Kong) light quanta in the mid-infrared range, with a wavelength of 1,55 to 2,75 micrometers. The authors claim that their detector is capable of operating at room temperature, although germanium analogs with sensitivity in the same range require cooling with liquid nitrogen. As Nature News explains, operating at room temperature could make it easier to identify chemicals in the atmosphere and make biochemical studies more accessible for diagnostic purposes.

A member of the American group, Dirk Englund, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also emphasized that the data transfer rate through graphene-based photodetectors was 12 gigabits per second, that is, it turned out to be comparable to conventional semiconductor devices. According to his forecasts, the rapid transition to graphene will occur when scientists and technologists learn how to synthesize this two-dimensional material in industrial quantities with consistently high quality: today this is the main obstacle to graphene electronics.

The absence of a band gap, explains one of the scientists who created the new detectors, Thomas Müller of the Institute of Technology in Vienna, made it an ideal material for a device that converts infrared pulses into electrical ones.

Muller explained (and these explanations are true for all three devices described in Nature Photonics) that graphene promises to be cheaper than traditional germanium, and operations with graphene have already been sufficiently developed at the technological level. The key problem that prevented the creation of graphene photodetectors earlier was the transparency of the material: graphene, which transmits light and infrared radiation, was poorly suited for a device whose action, by definition, is associated with the absorption of radiation. The first samples of detectors obtained in 2009 and then described in Nature Nanotechnology had very low efficiency due to their transparency, and it was impossible to talk about the practical application of such devices. The problem has only now been solved: the current emitted by the detectors during illumination has not yet reached the value typical for germanium devices, but has already exceeded the results of 50 by more than 2009 times. According to all developers, the gap will soon be closed; in addition, the new detectors have already surpassed germanium in other parameters.

Due to the greater mobility of charge carriers compared to silicon and many semiconductors, graphene is considered a promising material for electronic devices. Its disadvantages include the absence of a band gap in unmodified graphene, as well as the technological complexity of obtaining large homogeneous sheets.

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