If you want to call to a friend half a block down a crowded street, you might cup your hands around your mouth to better aim your voice. Have you ever wondered why simple megaphones amplify your voice so well? Actually, they work for two different re...
Frisbees and compact discs have the same advantages as far as gyroscopic force is concerned, but theres another physical property that gives your frisbee an aerodynamic edge over your music collection. The top surface of a frisbee is curved. Its wide...
With a gentle flick of the wrist on a warm summer day, you can launch a frisbee on a long and graceful flight. Why frisbees fly so well? One reason is something called gyroscopic force. This is the tendency of a spinning object to maintain a stable o...
Now, keep in mind that there may be other reasons to buy organic vegetables. Some people prefer the taste. And because pesticides and fertilizers can pollute rivers and contribute to dead zones in oceans, using less of these chemicals is good for the...
Where do medical scientists get tissue samples for their research? Say if youre a neuroscientist studying brain tumors; where would you find enough tumors to study? Great questions. And the answer is that youd make a withdrawal from a biobank. A biob...
Do you ever find little fluffs of lint trapped in your bellybutton? What is that stuff, and where does it come from? Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, a physicist from the University of Sydney was on an Australian public radio show when a listener called in to...
You know I read that the European Union is currently building an international biobank network. It will connect all the biobanks in Europe and make the combined resources available to researchers around the world. Some experts think thats whats neede...
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...
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...
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-...
While this second brain is not nearly as complex as the brain in your head, it does have its own motor and sensory neurons, and it uses many of the same brain chemicals and neurotransmitters. It even grows from the same part of the embryo that your o...
It sounds like a really bad horror movie, doesnt it? While this creature has an ordinary brain inside its skull, it also has a second brainmuch smaller, but still fully functioning squishing around inside its belly. While the skull-brain thinks, and...
Open an older book and you may find the paper yellowed around the edges. Even older books fall apart as you turn the pages. But you might be surprised to learn that the pages in some of the oldest books are still white and turn easily without crackin...
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,...
