Youre at a party. You grab a big crunchy potato chip and dip it into a dish of creamy onion dip. But now youre left with half of a chip with no dip on it. You look at the half eaten chip. You glance around the room to see if anyone is watching. Shoul...
Os you may have heard, frogs and toads have had a rough time over the past several years. Some populations have vanished entirely, while others suffer disease and gross deformities like extra or missing limbs. And now there's more bad news for the sp...
Oost of the time, volcanos look like other mountains: solid, serene, capped with snow--a nice place to go camping. Unless, of course, it happens to explode and pour molten lava all over your campsite! Wouldn't it be nice if we could predict when a vo...
But wait! What about the protons and neutrons and stuff? Well, theyre in there, but only in the very center. Thats called the nucleus. An atoms nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of orbiting electrons. Virtually all the mass of the atom the stuff and n...
Sure, you think the world is full of solid objects. You think the radio youre listening to is solid. You think the floor youre standing on or the chair youre sitting in is solid. Heck, you probably think that you yourself are a solid object. Wrong! O...
Don: Say you're looking at an object on a table in front of you. How long do you think your eyeballs stay in one position? Ya?l: You mean, how long before they move? I'm going to guess... a minute. D: More like less than a second. Y: Yow! D: Though w...
So, the Archimedes mirror story is probably more myth than real, for a few reasons. First, for the plan to work, the Roman fleet would have had to attack in the morning, since Syracuse faces the sea to the east. This may have been the case, but there...
You stick yourself with a pencil, or maybe get pinched in a closing door. Your first response is a little cry and a flinch that draws the hurt place away from the source of pain -- two behaviors which are easy to understand. But what about the next t...
Zen masters are famous for being able to clear their minds and enter a state of sort of zoned-in wakefulness. Experienced Zen practitioners can be fully aware without thinking of anything in particular. Recently, scientists have shown that people pra...
When we think of outer space, we probably imagine--well--space: Vast empty regions with no air, no matter, no anything at all. Actually, where our Earth orbits, outer space is far from empty. It's downright dusty. Beyond our atmosphere flies a lot of...
Look at a cloud-filled sky, then look again through a pair of amber sunglasses. You'll be surprised to see the hazy, bluish clouds jump suddenly into focus, revealing a world of unexpected detail. Many skiers use amber sunglasses too, to help see det...
For those of us who live in the northern part of the country, arguably no other season transforms the environment quite as much as winter. Snow makes the world over so that it's hardly recognizable. The scenery isn't the only thing that changes durin...
If asked to imagine the first prehistoric tools, crafted and used by our early, hominid ancestors, you'd probably think of crude knives or spear heads, chipped from stone. You probably aren't aware of another human innovation that might be just as ol...
we humans have many ways to catch fish. From simple poles to vast fishing nets, you might imagine we've cornered the market on fishing tools and strategies. Not so. On today's Moment of Science we'll learn how the humpback whale uses strategy--and ev...
Any day of the week you can look outside and see squirrels scampering across power lines without any apparent difficulty. They can go from line to tree, from line to house -- no problem. Then, every once in a while, there comes a frightening flash of...
