Science & Nature

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

Science & Nature Pencils are yellow because in the 19th century, the best graphite came from China. Because yellow was a royal colour in China, pencil companies began to colour their pencils yellow to show both high quality and an association with China. April 29, 2019

Science & Nature While scientists were analyzing prehistoric worms recovered from permafrost, two 40,000 year old nematodes 'revived' and began moving and eating, making them the oldest multi-cellular life alive on Earth. April 20, 2019

Science & Nature In ancient Hawaiʻi, men and women ate meals separately and women weren't allowed to eat certain foods. King Kamehameha II removed all religious laws that and performed a symbolic act by eating with the women in 1819. This is when the lūʻau parties were first created. April 16, 2019

Science & Nature Researchers at Harvard and Columbia concluded that Sarcasm promotes Creative Thinking because both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. April 8, 2019

Science & Nature A man spent 60 hours underwater, in total darkness, after his vessel capsized and sunk to the bottom of the sea. He was discovered alive by divers sent to recover dead bodies. March 28, 2019

Science & Nature Of the 5000 or so species of mammals on the planet only female humans have permanent breasts. March 20, 2019