How good are you with money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. […]
In 1980, Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon bet $1,000 on a question with stakes that couldn’t be higher: would the earth run out of resources to sustain a growing human population? They bet $200 on the price of five metals. If the price of a metal decreased or held steady over the next decade, Simon […]
You know how moths like to fly into lamps or crawl all over your tv screen at night? Why do they do this?! The answer is more complicated than you might think… [Sci Show]
Octopuses are incredibly smart, yet the majority of their neurons exist in their arms and suckers, and not in their brain, making them as close to alien intelligence as we can find on Earth. Imagine: What if our hands and fingers could think for themselves? [OPB | Via Neatorama]
Your heart beats more than 100,000 times a day. In just a minute, it pumps over five liters of blood throughout your body. But unlike skin and bones, the heart has a limited ability to repair itself. So if this organ is severely damaged, there’s often only one medical solution: replacing it. Dig into the […]
From Nature: Roboticists have designed all sorts of jumping robots over the years, and many of them have been inspired by biology. But, as diverse as the natural world is, evolution hasn’t cracked every option. Now a team of researchers has investigated the differences between biological and mechanical jumpers – and have managed to design […]
Something’s up with the data coming from Voyager 1. NASA says such an unexplained issue is not unexpected given the craft’s age and circumstances. Launched in 1977, Voyager entered the interstellar plasma in 2015. That made it the first man-made object to leave our solar system and no longer be significantly affected by the sun. […]
From Insider: Medical toxicologist Dr. Cyrus Rangan rates nine poison scenes in movies and television, such as “The Princess Bride,” for realism. He discusses the accuracy of poison scenes in “The Princess Bride” (1987); “Snakes on a Plane” (2006), featuring Samuel L. Jackson; and “Casino Royale” (2006), with Daniel Craig. He also comments on toxicity, […]
From SciShow: You might want a really sturdy umbrella to dig into this video, because we’re discussing 5 animals that have a tendency to rain down from the sky and the reasons we think this might be happening! [SciShow]
You know how you somehow end up getting smoke in your eyes wherever you stand around a bonfire? Well, it turns out that’s not a curse! It’s much more easily explained with physics. [SciShow]