Science & Nature

Science & Nature One nuclear fuel pellet, roughly the size of a pencil eraser, provides as much energy as one ton of coal or nearly 150 gallons of oil. December 13, 2020

Science & Nature 11,000 year old footprints of giant sloths have been found preserved in gypsum in New Mexico. Some also have human footprints within them, which effectively records all the action of a sloth hunt November 28, 2020

Science & Nature The Brussel sprouts grown today taste better because they are genetically different. In the 1990's a Dutch research identified heirloom varieties that are less bitter and bred them to be tastier and have a higher yield. November 26, 2020

Science & Nature Our brains do not necessarily process everything as that would be an overload of information, a study from 2016 found that under the influence of LSD, the brain recruited many more regions for visual processing than normal, enriching the images people saw even when their eyes were shut. November 22, 2020

Science & Nature Pumpkins evolved to be eaten by wooly mammoths and giant sloths. Pumpkins would likely be extinct today if ancient humans hadn't conserved them. October 31, 2020

Science & Nature René Descartes was serving as a mercenary in 1619 when one night, he shut himself in a room to escape the cold. He had 3 visions which he believed to be a new divine philosophy. He likely had an episode of exploding head syndrome. Upon exiting, he had formulated analytical geometry. October 25, 2020

Science & Nature Scientists used 2,000 year old seeds to regrow an extinct species of date tree. The tree long disappeared from the Judean desert but archeologists found seeds on digs. Surprisingly, the seeds worked and grew a male and female of the species. They hope to use them to produce biblical era dates. October 23, 2020

Science & Nature There are microorganisms living on the seafloor that reproduce only once every 10,000 years and have been alive for millions. These are likely the oldest living things on Earth. June 13, 2019

Science & Nature A Stonehenge like structure has been found under Lake Michigan, which includes a boulder with a prehistoric Mastodon carving on it June 12, 2019

Science & Nature Meet a species of human that grew no larger than a modern 3-year-old child and lived on a remote island in Indonesia 18,000 years ago. These humans lived alongside Homo sapiens. They manufactured sophisticated stone tools, hunted elephants, and more, all with a brain only 1/3 the size of ours. June 4, 2019

Science & Nature Mythological smith gods, such as Hephaestus, Weyland, Svarog, Ptah, etc., are often depicted as crippled or deformed. This is now believed to be from constant exposure to arsenic, which was added to copper to make bronze. June 4, 2019

Science & Nature One evening, while rushing for dinner after a long day at the lab, Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist at Johns Hopkins, forgot to wash his hands that had traces of benzoic sulfimide. This compound made his dinner taste sweet, and that's how he discovered the artificial sweetener Saccharin. June 3, 2019

Science & Nature Charles Darwin ate many of the animals he discovered. Seeking out "birds and beasts which were unknown to human palate." May 31, 2019

Science & Nature In 1982, the comic strip The Far Side jokingly referred to the set of spikes on a Stegosaurus's tail as a "thagomizer". A paleontologist who read the comic realized there wasn't any official name for the spikes and began using the new word; Thagomizer is now the generally accepted term. May 29, 2019

Science & Nature Stephen Hawking once sent his PhD student away with a very hard problem - finding exact rotating black hole solutions of Einstein's equations with a cosmological constant - and was stunned when he came back a few days later with the solution May 20, 2019

Science & Nature James Watt calculated horsepower by measuring the output of an actual horse in order to quantify how many horses his steam engines could replace. May 13, 2019

Science & Nature Archaeologists routinely find edible honey in ancient Egyptian tombs - the stuff never spoils, due to extremely low water-content, very low pH, and hydrogen peroxide (made by an enzyme in the bees' stomachs). May 10, 2019

Science & Nature Timeless physics is the controversial view that time, as we perceive it, does not exist as anything other than an illusion. Arguably we have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it. May 8, 2019

Science & Nature Australia's Great Barrier Reef is being eaten alive by millions of venomous sea stars known as crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS). Scientist have developed a new robot to hunt and kill these sea stars-a murderous, autonomous underwater vehicle called RangerBot. It kills with a single shot of bile May 3, 2019

Science & Nature The oldest living human-planted tree in the world with a known planting date is the sacred fig tree "Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi", planted in 288 BC. May 2, 2019