About us
Last updated: September 2, 2009.
About this site
Who writes that stuff?
The articles on Explain that Stuff! are by British science writer Chris Woodford, who has written lots of books on science and technology, including the best-selling how-it-works titles Cool Stuff and How it Works, Cool Stuff 2.0 (The Gadget Book), and Cool Stuff Exploded.
Is this site safe for children?
This is an educational website designed to be safe and suitable for family users. We take our responsibilities to young people very seriously. All our site content is labelled using the standard Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) system. Our Google-powered site search has "safe search" enabled by default. If you discover anything that you think may cause a problem for young readers, please alert us straight away using the email address at the bottom of this page.
Legal notices
© Copyright
Please note that different rights apply to the words and the pictures on this website.
Using our words
All the text on Explain that Stuff is protected by international copyright laws and all rights are reserved. With the exception of fair use, or where expressly stated otherwise, you are not permitted to copy, broadcast, download, store (in any medium), transmit, show or play in public, adapt or change in any way the text of Explainthatstuff.com web pages for any other purpose whatsoever without our prior written permission.
If you'd like to reprint or reuse our articles please contact us about licensing terms, giving details of the extract you'd like to use and where/how you propose to use it, and we'll be happy to give you a quote.
Using our pictures
The images and photos we use are believed to be in the public domain if they come from sources such as NASA, the US Department of Energy, or the US Military, but we cannot guarantee this. If you want to reuse one of these photos, it's your responsibility to confirm the copyright status for yourself. In case you're wondering, we have sometimes "cropped," blurred, scrambled, or otherwise disguised people's faces in public domain photos to protect their right to privacy.
We also use a few photos from Flickr that are published under various Creative Commons licenses. If you wish to reuse these photos on your own website, please follow the licence exactly. Usually that means you have to credit the original photographer (which is only fair) and repeat the licence. If you're not sure, copy the exact words we've used to credit the photographer and the link to the Flickr and Creative Commons websites and you should be OK.
Any other photos or artworks that are not attributed are ones we have created ourselves and
they are available for you to use and reuse, with pleasure, under a Creative Commons License.
In short, you are very welcome to use the photos or artworks we have created for
noncommercial purposes only, providing you follow the terms in the license.
If you would like to use one or more of our images for noncommercial purposes, please copy them to your own server and use them from there rather than linking directly to them ("hotlinking"). Image hotlinks to our server are now blocked: if you try to link to our images directly, you'll find a dummy placeholder image (right) appearing on your pages instead of the one you actually want. To get the correct image, simply copy it to your own webspace: right click on the image you want, save it to your hard disk, and then upload it to your own web server. If you're using an image we created, you don't need to ask our permission to copy it in this way.
Please kindly attribute any images we've created by crediting Explainthatstuff.com, making a link to the page on our website where the original image appears, and repeating the licence. Some HTML along these lines would be just great, thanks:
Image from <a href="http://www.explainthatstuff.com">Explain that Stuff</A> published under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons License</a>.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any queries about copyright or reuse.
Hi-res versions of a few of our photos are available for commercial use, under license, in our science and technology photo library page.
Privacy policy
Please see our privacy policy page.
Product photographs
Our website contains photographs of real-world products purely for illustrative purposes. The inclusion of a photograph in an article does not represent any endorsement by us of the product shown or any endorsement by the product manufacturer of this website or anything we may say in the text.
Advertising on our site
We're delighted when advertisers enjoy a business boost by advertising on our site. We have chosen the very effective Google Adwords program to serve our targeted advertisements. If you'd like to advertise on our site, please would you do so through Adwords. We think you'll find it's a highly cost-effective way to boost traffic to your site and promote your business. Find out more about Google's advertising programs.
Please note that we do not sell any advertising space or advertising links directly. We're very sorry, but we are unable to reply to the many emails we receive proposing advertising links to commercial sites.
Link policy
- This is an educational and informative website, so we're delighted to make links from our pages to other high-quality, high-content pages likely to be of genuine educational value and relevance to our readers.
- On our main site (www.explainthatstuff.com), we do not generally make links to commercial sites or pages that are purely selling products or services. Our "complete guide" sub-sites (for example, www.explainthatstuff.com/photography) do make links of this kind, so you're welcome to suggest sites for inclusion there. However, we do not guarantee we will include your site.
- We never sell links to or buy links from other sites.
- Thanks for your interest, but we don't take part in those "please link to us and we'll link back" link swaps.
- We're very sorry, but we're unable to reply to the many emails we receive proposing links to commercial sites.
- You don't need to ask our permission to link to pages on our website. If you have a corporate policy that requires you to seek our permission before making such a link, please cite this web page as your permission.
Contacting us
We're extremely sorry, but we cannot provide extra information about any of the articles on this website or help students with projects, essays, or schoolwork. Why not try a Google search in the box below? Just think of five or ten words that sum up the information you're looking for, type them in the box, and click search.
