Suddenly, the volcano erupts. Molten lava pours toward the ice. If the lava were hot enough, it would melt its way through the glacial ice like a hot knife through butter, then follow the path of least resistanceflowing down into the valleys. As it t...
On our last program, we introduced a mysterious geological feature that can be found on the slopes of Mount Rainier, a volcano in Washington state. Flows of hardened lava cling to the tops of ridges as they wind down the mountainside, ignoring deep v...
Over eons, flowing water carved new valleys to the sides of the hardened lava. The hard lava didnt erode as much as the surrounding rock, eventually giving the landscape the appearance it has today. Think about pouring hot candle wax down a channel i...
Todays mystery concerns geological formations along the slopes of Mount Rainier in Washington State. Mount Rainier is a volcano, so we arent surprised to see hardened lava flows left over from past eruptions. We are surprised to see these flows stick...
Its one of the most painful aspects of starvation to witness: the stomachs of children who are dying appear ridiculously swollen. Its as if the body plays an unbelievably cruel joke on itself, causing the starved to resemble people whose bellies are...
Yael: Are you okay, Don? Don: Sorry,Yael . I just have a cold. Nothing, a little exercise can fix. Y: Wait, you're going to exercise even though you are not felling well? D: Sure.When I'm a little under the weather,I try to work up sweat,and then I u...
Then the process begins again and those two cells divide into four. So in order to reproduce, the bacterial cell has to be constantly building new cell walls. The way penicillin and some other antibiotics work is by do stopping the growth of cell wal...
Whats true for skaters is also true for planets. Our Earth doesnt have arms, but it does have a lot of oceans, which tend to bulge out at the equator. This weight distribution is like a skater with arms out, spinning slowly. In the past century, howe...
Antibiotics, as the name implies, work against life, or more specifically against living cells. Since our bodies are also made up of living cells, the antibiotics have to distinguish between the cells in our bodies and the cells of the bacteria causi...
When you first heat sugar solution, it boils at a temperature specific to that particular sugar-water ratio. As the water boils out, the solution gets more concentrated and the boiling point goes up. Eventually, all the water boils out and the temper...
In mammals, the sex of a baby is determined by the combination of chromosomes it inherits from its parents. Nearly every cell in a male body has two different sex chromosomesone is shaped like an X and one is shaped like a Y. Females also have two se...
We all know that humans have quite a knack for changing the natural environment. In spite of this, you probably think some things are simply too fundamental for human activity to affect. For instance, most people would imagine that the Earths twenty-...
They also put cuttlefish in tanks with a range of different checkerboard patterns to see how well they could differentiate between different colors or brightness. When in front of a high-contrast background, like alternating dark and light squares, t...
Today, a fever is an uncomfortable nuisance, but a hundred-plus years ago, fevers were often fatal. The difference between the n and now is the class of drugs known as antibiotics. As the name implies, anti-biotics work against life, or, more specifi...
Look closely at a lily pad sometime and youll see that its shape is different from virtually any other leaf. With most leaves, the stem attaches to one edge of the leaf. You can see how lily pads are different from other leaves if you imagine an inse...
