Tag: SCIENCE

In 1889, at a meeting of the Société de Biologie of Paris, a physiologist named Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard described the results of an experiment he had recently performed on himself. He had painstakingly mixed an elixir of blood, semen, water, and “juice extracted from a testicle, crushed immediately after it has been taken from a dog…

Enough. It's time. You've decided to reclaim your morning commute by spending it on something substantive. No more bottomless Instagram feeds and auto-playing YouTube videos for you! So out the door you stride with that week's New Yorker wedged beneath your arm, a new episode of Flash Forward playing in your ear, or the latest…

You could forgive mathematicians for being drawn to the monster group, an algebraic object so enormous and mysterious that it took them nearly a decade to prove it exists. Now, 30 years later, string theorists—physicists studying how all fundamental forces and particles might be explained by tiny strings vibrating in hidden dimensions—are looking to connect…

In October 2013, a moon-orbiting NASA spacecraft aimed a laser beam at Earth, 239,000 miles away. Within seconds, the intended recipient—an observatory in New Mexico—locked onto the beam of infrared light, invisible to the naked eye. Encoded inside the light was a high-definition video of NASA administrator Charles Bolden delivering a short speech. Bolden had,…

You can see it on satellite imagery—a chaotic blur of wind and water shaped like a giant alien starfish over Australia, extending a tentacle diagonally across the Pacific and right into the Golden Gate. It’s called an atmospheric river, over a thousand miles of water and wind. This weekend is going to be as wet…

I make it my job to hunt through all the best trailers and find some cool physics thing to explore. In this case, it's the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story—the Han Solo-led movie, scheduled to come out in May, that takes place some time before Episode IV: A New Hope. Right at the…

The 6-foot-long, 140-pound Chinese giant salamander is a being that defies belief—and seemingly the laws of the physical universe. It’s the largest amphibian on the planet, a gargantuan (though harmless) beast that rests on river-bottoms hoovering up fish. Once it grows big enough, not many critters dare touch it—save for, of course, humans. Particularly the…

During Sunday's NFL game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Philadelphia Eagles, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson makes a pretty nice move. After taking the ball and running with it, he makes a quick pitch off to the side while faking out the defender. Looks pretty cool, but it probably wasn't legal. In the NFL, once…

You probably know the basics when it comes to black holes: A lot of mass squished into not a lot of volume makes for an entity so prodigiously dense, not even light can escape its gravity. Perhaps you even know about things like event horizons, the boundary outside of which escape becomes possible, and gravitational…

Until recently, Fergal Mullaly worked for the science office of the Kepler space telescope, the planet-hunting satellite that has verified more than 2,600 planets so far. “We have this really strong emotional desire to be able to point to a place in the sky and say, ‘That star there has a planet around it,’” he…