Science & Nature

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

Science & Nature A rare mutation among the Bajau people lets them stay underwater longer: natural selection at the PDE10A gene has increased spleen size in the Bajau, providing them with a larger reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells. March 15, 2019

Science & Nature It's been 125,000 generations since the emergence of human species, 7,500 generations since human physiology reached what is essentially its modern state, 500 generations since the agricultural revolution, and ONLY 20 generations since the scientific revolution! March 10, 2019

Science & Nature Here's a fact about the Murchison meteorite, which fell to earth in 1969. It contained high levels of organic compounds, came from a parent body that had liquid water, and the amino acids it contained could not have been synthesized on earth because they consisted of both left- and right- isomers. March 7, 2019

Science & Nature Jupiter's Great Red Spot is so loud, it's acoustic sound waves heat up the surrounding atmosphere to almost 2400 degrees Fahrenheit March 4, 2019

Science & Nature The reason why we view neanderthals as hunched over and degenerate is that the first skeleton to be found was arthritic. March 2, 2019