Boy or girl? That's the first question we ask about new babies, new puppies and newly-found fossils. Fossils? Yep. Experts can tell if an ancient Egyptian mummy or a prehistoric human was a boy or a girl just by looking at the skeleton. Here's how th...
Conscious, human-like machines are so popular in science fiction that it may come as a surprise to learn Artificial Intelligence researchers aren't even sure what it means to ask whether a computer will ever think. In the middle of the last century,...
Dear Annie: My wife has been having an affair and I have filed for divorce. Our children do not know about the infidelity yet, but I'm sure it will come out. I am the husband who cooks, cleans and cares for our children. I massaged her feet. I sent f...
On our last program we discussed a simple experiment run by an Alexandrian named Eratosthenes in the third century B.C. By noting that, at the same time of day, sticks in the ground cast different-length shadows depending on whether they were in a no...
Imagine if the only way for you to eat were to trek twenty-five miles on foot to a restaurant and then trek all the way back home afterwards. Imagine that this restaurant is a buffet, so you can't carry anything home in a doggie bag--you carry only w...
Imagine that you hit a deer with your car. You don't suffer any physical harm whatsoever. Your car suffers cosmetic damage, but you have insurance. So the question is this: are you the type to feel lucky to be alive? If you had been driving faster or...
How big a stick would you need to measure the planet? A thousand miles long? A million? How about three feet? That ought to be enough to do it, as an ancient Alexandrian man named Eratosthenes figured out. Eratosthenes was a multi-talented man who li...
A Dutch museum has begun restoring three antique musical clocks from the imperial collection of the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The three clocks are part of the largest collection of musical clocks worldwide and were made by Weste...
Researchers in Germany say that a cancer-fighting substance found in hops could be enhanced to brew a special anti-cancer beer. The discovery could lead to healthier beers and food supplements. The result could one day be that when you hold up a glas...
If you're planning a trip to Greece in the future, you'll want to schedule a visit to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. This famous temple was the home of the Pythia, a specially chosen and trained woman who according to legend channeled the voice and...
In 1993, water aerobics was only for senior citizens or patients in rehab. Nowadays, it encompasses a variety of trendy underwater sports, all of which are healthy. The body has 90 percent support when under water. That means the joints only have to...
Despite the wisdom of the constitution, it is simply not true that all people are created equal. Some are faster than others. Some are better at math and some are musical geniuses. And some people have a higher threshold for pain than others. But as...
It's 3 a.m., pitch dark, and you can't sleep. How can you survive the next day after being awake so long the night before? Difficulty sleeping is a common problem, but there are ways to escape it. Falling asleep is something passive and not forceable...
the previous show Don and Yael discussed communication from other worlds. Well, as it turns out if E.T. does try to phone it will be much more complicated than can you hear me now? D: Okay, Yael, so suppose one day scientists pick up a transmission t...
When Anothai Kongwattana decided to open a healthful vegetarian restaurant in Bangkok she ran into one minor problem: She couldn't find any organic vegetables on the market. Her solution was to launch her own organic farm. With the help of her husban...
