Have you ever gotten turned around, without a map or handy GPS, and had to use the stars to navigate? Well, congratulations, you are the equal of the mighty dung beetle, which can not only use the Sun and Moon to get around smartly but also the Milky Way itself. They may be down in [...]
I’m not sure he intended this, but I’m finding Randall Munroe’s weekly “What If” articles more interesting than his regular comics. This week’s article, on if you can cook a steak by dropping it from a great height is not just interesting (in a “hey, you can win a bar bet from this” sort of [...]
Randall Munro, who draws the geeky and very funny xkcd comic strip has recently taken up the mantle of Internet Science Answer Man. As suits his strip, though, he doesn’t’ take on the usual questions like “Why is the sky blue?” or “Will I die if I eat 200 marshamllows? Asking for a friend *burp*”. [...]
So, you may ask yourself, what happened to the show post for Episode 155, which should have been out a week ago? Well, you see, I had written the post and had it sitting as a draft and then, for reasons I now attribute to either ancient aliens or a sudden influx of Higgs bosons [...]
Some comets hide debris in their long tails. Comet Lovejoy hides a fist and a leaping spin-kick.
We sent a squid into space today. Let me say that again. We sent a squid into space today. Now, when I say “squid”, I don’t mean an old sailor or some sort of WWII vintage weapon. I mean we sent a ten-armed marine cephalopod into space. Oh, and it’s not just any squid. It’s [...]
Oh, United States Navy, you had me at “lasers” and “pirates”. The US Navy’s MLD system, designed and built by defense contractor Northrop Grumman, is a bit different in nature. The MLD is a 15 kilowatt laser specifically designed to handle the pitch and roll of a ship deck without losing track of its target. [...]
Glenn Reynolds tossed up a link to this story on marital happiness and, strangely enough, didn’t go for the obvious punchline. Ladies: Are you nervously watching your weight to stay attractive for your husband or boyfriend? Well, put down those salad forks. It turns out you don’t have to starve yourself — unless he’s doing [...]
Good news, everyone! The Large Hadron Collider has succesfully caused its very first high-energy particle collision. The experiment went off pretty much as planned, which means it did not create a planet-swallowing black hole nor did it rend the very fabric of space and time and create a gateway through which horrors beyond man’s reckoning would heave [...]
When I was a kid, I used to love leafing through my Dad’s old collection of Popular Science magazines. He didn’t have quite as many of them as he did National Geographic, but he had more than plenty to keep a curious Science Geek in Training busy for many hours*. I got away from PopSci [...]
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