To break the world record of the largest stick bomb chain reaction, Tim Fort (warning: this link will make your eyes bleed) built a montage of 2,250 sticks. He then set the apparatus off and caught the whole thing on tape. Check it out: [Via BoingBoing]
An article at NewScientist tells of the deadly effects of traveling at or near light speed, citing a presentation by William A. Edelstein, Ph.D, a professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (“I’m a doctor, not a physicist!”). He uses Einstein’s special theory of relativity to explain how the human body could not [...]
The way we eat in the developed world is causing needless death — and shortening the lives of the next generation of kids. Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
If once again Bill Gates decides to unleash a swarm of mosquitoes at this year’s TED conference, former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold will be ready for him. Designed from parts obtained on eBay by scientists at Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures Laboratory, this Death Star-like laser gun can track and destroy mosquitoes in mid-flight. The main goal [...]
By Jimmy Rogers (@me) Contributing Writer, [GAS] Back in April we published “The Cure for Cancer“ and got a fantastic response from our readers. It seems you folks are really interested in the topics of cancer science and cancer research. Maybe because, unlike other diseases, cancer eventually effects everyone because it is a “disease of [...]
Last week we brought you the news that scientists have now found a way to deduce which colors dinosaurs may have been by analyzing the structure of melanosomes. Those are cell bodies which carry melanin, which determines color, and in the case of the Sinosauropteryx had survived in fossils. Unfortunately there’s some bad news to [...]
Traditional lab tests for disease diagnosis can be too expensive and cumbersome for the regions most in need. George Whitesides’ ingenious answer, at TEDxBoston, is a foolproof tool that can be manufactured at virtually zero cost. Check it out:
We’ve read the books, we’ve seen the movies (lots of them), but what does a real physicist say about time travel? Sean Carroll of the blog Cosmic Variance is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He wrote a book called From Eternity to Here: The Quest [...]
If you’ve watched Western movies you’ll know that most of the time there’s a predictable pattern to shootouts: the villain draws his gun first, but the hero shoots quicker and wins (before blowing the smoke from the tip of the barrel.) Ask most people why this is and they’ll guess it’s to tell a moral [...]
It’s Groundhog Day today in the world of meteorological superstitions. (In the world of multi-channel cable film networks, of course, it’s Groundhog Day every day.) But that’s just one example of the curious historical methods we use to guess what the weather will be, with mixed results. The basis of Groundhog Day is that if, [...]
Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Afsaneh Rabiei recently invented a new material that is actually stronger than stainless steel but lighter than aluminum. Rabiei’s metal foam is primarily made out of hollow steel spheres surrounded by aluminum. According to the following news report, it can absorb seven to eight times the energy absorbed by other [...]
Forget everything you thought you knew about dinosaurs. It turns out that they weren’t necessarily the green scaly creatures many of us imagine. (Or purple and fluffy.) At least one of them had… get this… ginger feathers. Much of what we know about dinosaurs comes from fossils which are great for size and shape, but [...]