Divers and scientists are baffled by the appearance of large gelatinous spheres, up to a meter across, that have appeared in the ocean off the west coast of Norway, among other locations. Spotted in cold, northern locales and off the coast of Turkey, some have speculated that these could be eggs laid by giant...
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In the early nineteenth century, a Swiss mechanician built an automaton that could write poetry and draw pictures. Granted, the poetry and pictures it could draw were pre-programmed, but the memory involved in the machine is the equivalent of slight more than one-third of a megabyte–not bad for a 200-plus year old machine! Henri...
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Few things are as evocative of America’s Old West as the tumbleweed, but this plant is not native to North America and it’s a huge problem. Kali tragus, more commonly known as Russian thistle, is an invasive weed brought over by Russian immigrants in 1873 in a batch of flaxseed. In 15 years, the...
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If you’re familiar with hexadecimal codes, a shortcut for representing binary, which can be used to get a brilliant variety of colors for webpages, you may be interested in this website, called #c0ffee is the color. On this page, you can learn which real English words can be used as hexadecimal codes, and thus...
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Did you miss the eclipse on Monday? The good news is that you don’t have to wait long until the next total solar eclipse. There will be another in 2024. What’s strange about the next eclipse, though, is that while the path of totality moves from the southwest to the northeast in 2024 (as...
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Just when you thought science couldn’t get any cooler, paleontologists recently reexamined fossil evidence of a prehistoric giant crocodile and determined that an additional species had been identified in the fossil record. They also decided to give this crocodile an awesome name: Lemmysuchus obtusidens. The Lemmysuchus portion of the name means “Lemmy’s crocodile,” and the Lemmy...
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We recently bought a bag of xanthan gum. We wanted to try and make gluten free pancakes from scratch, and this was one of the ingredients. Xanthan gum is one of those things that appears on different food ingredient labels, but we had no idea what it was. Things like guar gum and locust...
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A mathematician has suggested that the distribution of dialects can be linked to the physics of bubbles. Sounds weird? There seems to be something to this idea. Just as small bubbles merge into larger ones in the tub, groups of dialect speakers tend to merge with their nearest neighbors, creating larger pockets of a common...
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When pre-industrial peoples across Europe and other parts of the world saw oversized bones eroding out of landforms, they often believed that they could have been the bones of creatures from myths and legends. Elephant skulls seemed as though they could have belonged to cyclops, and a variety of large bones were believed to...
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When you look up at clouds in the sky, you typically think of them as fluffy and light, right? Turns out, clouds are HEAVY! The average cumulus cloud weighs over a million pounds! Which presents a couple of questions: 1) how do clouds remain aloft, and 2) how do you weigh a cloud? The answer...
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