WEIGHT (INC DRIVER)
FORMULA 1 FORMULA E
7 02kg
200kW
LikeFormula1,FormulaEisaracing
championship with single-seater, open cockpit
cars, but the vehicles are entirely battery-
powered. With a topspeed of 225km/h and a
vs
HEAD TO HEADpower-to-weight ratio 35 per cent higher than a
Tesla Roadster, they are no slouch. But F1 cars
still win – their 1.6-litre petrol/electric hybrid
engine has more than three times the power.LVMAX POWER
0-100KM/H
MAX SPEED
NOISE LEVELS
710 kW
2.1secs
378 km/h
13 4dB
898kg
3 secs
225 km/h
80 dB
Could an asteroid knock Earth out of its orbit?
CHRIS WISNER, SOUTH CAROLINA, USANo. The Earth has a lot of mass and
moves extremely quickly in its orbit
around the Sun; in science speak,
we say its ‘momentum’ is large. To
significantly change the Earth’s orbit,
you would have to impart a very great
change to the Earth’s momentum. Not
even the largest asteroids havesufficient mass and kinetic energy to
make much of a dif ference to the Earth’s
momentum. Even more of an obstacle is
the fact that our planet’s binding energy
is greater than its orbital kinetic energy.
This means that any object large enough
to change the Earth’s orbit is also big
enough to completely destroy it! AGA2003 studyat the Universityof
Regensburgin Germanyfound that
9 9.5per cent of dandelion seeds land
within10metresoftheirparent.
That’sbecausetheseed‘parachute’
falls at about 30cmper second and
dandelions onlygrow about 30cm
high. So thatgives each seedjust one
second of flight time to be blown
sidewaysbythe wind to its new home.
Higher wind speeds don’t really
increasethedistancetheseedsfly,
because strongwinds tend to blow
downwards as well as sideways, so
the seedsjustlandevensooner.The
best conditionsfordandelionseeds
are actuallyrelativelycalm, sunny
daysthatgenerate thermal
updraughts. Under these conditions,
dandelion seeds cangomuchfurther
andthestudyestimatedthat0.014per
cent–about one in 7, 000 ,would travel
more than akilometre.LVHowfarcan
dandelion
seedstravel?
LIZ DAWES, PRESTON