Explain that stuff
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Last updated: 3 February 2012

About this site

Who writes this stuff?

All the articles on Explain that Stuff are written by Chris Woodford, a British science writer with over 20 years of experience in explaining science and technology.

Is this site safe for children?

This is an educational website designed to be safe and suitable for all family users, though it's mainly intended for ages 10+. We take our responsibility to young readers very seriously:

If you discover anything that you think may be inappropriate for young readers, please alert us straight away and we will put it right immediately.

External links

Please be aware, however, that many articles on this site contain links to external sites for further reading. We do my best only to include links to useful and reputable sites, and we do recheck links periodically, but—by the very nature of the Web—we have no control over, or responsibility for the content of, external sites. Again, if you find anything problematic, please do let us know.

Why explain stuff that way?

Here's a word or two about pedagogy, for parents and teachers and anyone else who's interested. Science and technology is fascinating, fun, and incredibly important, but most people don't really understand it, even when they've studied it for years in school. Whose fault is that? I'm not sure—but my mission is to help put things right.

Explainthatstuff.com is a completely free guide to the science and technology that surrounds us, designed for a broad, family audience. You'll find my articles are a bit different from the ones you get on other websites or in science books: I try to give you a good, clear, simple understanding of a subject rather than drown you in facts, details, and trivia. Generally, my approach is to talk you gently around a subject, building on familiar stuff you're likely to understand already, a bit like a decent teacher would do.

After studying science for over 30 years, and writing about it for over 20, I firmly believe that it's better to completely understand a small amount about something—the essence of how something works or the science behind it—than to know vast amounts of non-essential details that don't entirely make sense. In my book, it's even okay to have a slightly wrong or oversimplified understanding of something than a totally correct misunderstanding. So, for example, I think it's much better if children have a firm, oversimplified understanding that electrons "whiz around" atoms that they can explain to a friend than some sort of fuzzy, unclear, confusing, half-understood (but scientifically more accurate) idea about orbitals and probability that they don't properly understand and could never explain to anyone else. This is absolutely not an argument for dumbing down: it's an argument for teaching with sensitivity—understanding your audience and what they need to know. You can always build on a firm, simplified understanding (or correct, tweak, or qualify it) later on; you can never build on confusion. And if you turn people off too soon, you may well lose them forever.

There are plenty of websites that merely describe gadgets and technologies without explaining them—and that's not my approach at all. The emphasis here is on building knowledge and understanding, not filling your head with undigested information: this is absolutely not an encyclopedia. Apart from explaining how things work, I try to get across the fundamental scientific principles behind things so you can make the connections, see the patterns, and figure out how everything links together. So while I have (for example) articles about toasters, loudspeakers, and refrigerators, they're also quietly teaching you the science of heat, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics. Learn the basic science behind a few things and you can figure out the technology of quite a lot of other things.

This site is dedicated to helping you learn useful things about everyday stuff in an interesting way. I've spent over five years (so far!) putting it together and I really do hope you enjoy it. If not, do please write and tell me. Your feedback is very welcome!

Using material from this website

Please note that different rights apply to the words and the pictures on this website. Briefly:

Here's a more detailed explanation if you need it...

Using our words

Can you copy and use articles from this website on your own website? We're very sorry, but we do not permit reuse of our articles on other websites for any reason whatsoever.

Fair use ("fair dealing"), such as briefly quoting from my articles for purposes of commentary or discussion, is fine, providing you cite this website as the source of your quote. Fair use does not allow you to republish extensive or entire copies of our articles and use them as you wish on other websites, or elsewhere, even if you're doing so for noncommercial or educational purposes. Please note that we will generally regard copying anything more than about a couple of paragraphs and any unattributed quotation (passing our material off as your own) as copyright infringement. Please be aware that all the articles on this website are either registered at the US Copyright Office (or deposited there pending registration), which means copyright infringement can make you liable for severe financial and even criminal penalties. We routinely scan for unlawful copies of my articles and take some kind of action in every case of copyright infringement we find. We take this matter extremely seriously and employ law firms in Europe and North America to help us deal with the problem.

The simplest way to avoid any kind of copyright problem or misunderstanding is to ask for permission. Please feel entirely free to contact us if you have any queries, you'd like to discuss reprinting or reusing our articles, or you'd like us to confirm whether some use you have in mind is "fair use" or otherwise okay. We are always happy to help—and generally we'll reply within a day or so.

Using my pictures

Can you copy and use our pictures? Broadly speaking, if you're not using them to make money, yes, with pleasure! But do read on.

The photos and artworks on this site fall into three different groups:

  1. Any images and photos used on this website are believed, in good faith, to be in the public domain if they are credited to US federal government agencies such as NASA, the US Department of Energy, or the US Military (US Army, US Air Force, US Navy, US Marines), or their employees. We have taken reasonable steps to check each image, but we cannot and do not guarantee its copyright status. 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. It is our policy to give individual photographers full credit for their work whenever we possibly can and we would suggest you do the same.
  2. We also use a few photos from Flickr that are published under various Creative Commons licenses. Please note that these photos are still protected by copyright and their owners kindly grant us permission to use them, but only if we follow their conditions (the licence, in other words). If you wish to reuse these photos on your own website, please be sure to 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. (We return the favor to the Flickr community by offering our own photos for reuse on our Flickr page, all under a Creative Commons licence.)
  3. Creative Commons License Any other photos or artworks that are not attributed are ones we have created and you're welcome to use and reuse them for noncommercial purposes only under the terms of the Creative Commons NC-SA license. For the avoidance of doubt, please note that "noncommercial" means you may not charge a fee for the use of our work, use it to sell, endorse, or promote any product or service, or earn any money from it by advertising or any other means whatosever, irrespective of whether you make a profit. Hi-res versions of a few of our photos are available for commercial use, under license, on our Flickr page; other photos are available in high resolution on request. Please would you kindly attribute any images we've created by crediting explainthatstuff.com and making a link to the page on our website where the original image appears. Some HTML along these lines would be just great, thanks:

Hotlinking to our pictures from your pages

Hotlink artwork

If you would like to use images from this site, you'll need to copy and upload them to your own server rather than linking directly to them ("hotlinking"). Please note that image hotlinks to explainthatstuff.com are automatically blocked. If you link to our images directly from your own pages, you'll find a dummy placeholder image (right) appearing instead of the picture you actually want. Or you may find your images suddenly disappear without warning when we change the image addresses (as we do regularly). Worry not. To get the correct image, all you need to do is 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 as though it were a file you created yourself. If you have problems, send us an email and we'll try to help.

Privacy policy

You'll find the full privacy policy for this website on our privacy policy page.

Permission to reprint in books

Since this website is all about science education, we're happy to discuss requests for limited reuse of material from this website in educational books and other materials, but (as explained above) not on other websites or in any other material that appears online. Please kindly send us details of your publication, intended audience, approximate print run, publisher, and anything else you think might be relevant, and specific details of the material you'd like to use, and we'll let you know what's possible (usually the same day). Please note that if your use is commercial, rather than educational, we will normally charge a licensing fee. If you're a nonprofit or charity educational publisher, we don't normally charge.

How (and when) should I cite your articles?

When to cite

It's often a good idea to acknowledge the source of articles you use—and absolutely required by many schools, colleges, and other academic instutitions. If you're quoting verbatim from something, citing a source is the way to avoid problems of plagiarism; it's also generally a requirement if you're claiming "fair use" (fair dealing) of copyright material. The way to cite a web page varies according to the citation style you're using (if no-one has told you which style to use, it doesn't matter). Most of our articles have ready made cut-and-paste citations at the bottom of the page. A few articles may still be missing them. In that case, please use a citation like this in your bibliography, references, or footnotes:

For example:

If you need some help with your citation, please feel free to send us an email.

When not to cite

Wikipedia users have become obsessed with finding sources and citations, which is generally a good thing—but only if you understand the difference between primary and secondary sources. I do not claim to be an expert on many things; I am an educator: my articles are general and educational and should not be cited as definitive, primary sources of factual information (Beethoven's birthday, the population of Fiji, the melting point of iron).

Copyright and legal information

You'll find this on our copyright and legal notice page.

Advertising on this website

Please note that explainthatstuff.com does not currently sell any advertising space or advertising links directly. We are very sorry, but we are unable to reply to the many emails we receive proposing advertising links to commercial sites. We never sell links to or buy links from other sites.

Would you like to join my affiliate scheme?

Thanks for your interest, but we're afraid not interested in affiliate schemes, referrals, or any other similar programs; we've tried them, they don't work on this site, and we won't be trying any more of them. Thanks all the same.

Link policy

Will you syndicate your articles to us to publish on our site?

We're very sorry, but we are not interested in syndicating articles to other websites. We do not allow my material to be copied or published by other websites for any reason and we will take action against unlawfully copied material whenever we find it.

Will you license your articles to us to use offline?

We will consider licensing material for use in commercial publications, though not for online use. As of January 1, 2012, the standard licensing fee we charge for text is £(GBP)300 per thousand words, with a minimum charge of £(GBP)300. For photos or artworks, the precise licensing fee is negotiable and varies according to how and where you want to use an image (for example, how big it will be on the page), the type of use you intend (commercial or educational), your print run, and so on. We will happily customize our "how-it-works" artworks to your precise requirements and redraw low-resolution artworks in high-resolution. As of January 1, 2012, the minimum charges are currently £(GBP)100 (approximately US$160) for a standard resolution photo or artwork or £(GBP)250 (approximately US$400) for a high-resolution image. Please email us to discuss your requirements in more detail.

Do you accept articles or submissions written by other people?

Sorry, but we only publish our own material. There are no exceptions to this. Thanks for the thought, but we are not interested in publishing articles by anyone else, for any reason.

Contacting me

We're very sorry, but we cannot provide extra information about any of the articles on this website or help students with projects, essays, or schoolwork. We're really sorry about that, but there just aren't enough hours in the day and school assignments are meant to test your abilities, not ours! 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.

If you find any errors or inacccuracies in any of the articles, if something really confuses you and you think we should reword it, or if you'd like to suggest any other improvements, please do get in touch. We'd be very pleased and grateful to hear from you. We do our very best to fix mistakes immediately (usually the same day we hear about them).

You can write to us at the following address:

explainthat (all one word) followed by at sign followed by explainthatstuff (all one word) followed by dot com

If you prefer, please use the feedback form.