WonderQuest
April Holladay, science journalist for HappyNews.com, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A few years ago Holladay and her husband canoed the flood-swollen Mackenzie. For forty-six days they paddled alone a thousand miles through Canadian wilderness to the Arctic Ocean.
Now she writes a column about nature and science, which appears each Monday at HappyNews.com. The syndicated Q&A column takes a lucid look at what interests people about our world. April Holladay solves the mysteries we wonder about! To read April's past WonderQuest columns, please check out her site, www.wonderquest.com. If you have a question for April, visit this informational page.
Light is an electromagnetic wave that rips through space — interacting with everything it encounters. In space, light meets little. A dense material like, glass, however, slows light as the wave "decides" how to interact with the material. But decisions aren't easy and there are many. The quantum-mechanical rules light follows are rigid, allowing only discrete answers: "yes" or "no." The rules forbid "almosts."
Q: Why is glass transparent even though it is made of...
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Q: Can a domestic cat be trained as well as a dog? Because, I've tried to train mine without much success...
- Vicky, Maracaibo, Venezuela
A: It depends... Certainly we can train some cats as easily as dogs to do certain things, for example, fetch. Some cat breeds (Bengals, Siamese and Burmese) naturally carry objects (like kittens) in their mouths, so they're easy to train. But I know of no breed of cat that leads the blind. Or herds sheep. We have trained and bred...
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