SCIENCE

What if I told you that in Australia, a mouse-like marsupial called antechinus breeds so manically during its three-week mating season that the males bleed internally and go blind, until every male lies dead? And what if I told you that this isn’t the reason the species is facing an […]

Integrated Systems Europe is the biggest audio-video trade show in the world, and this year’s iteration, happening right now in Amsterdam, was going pretty well for Norm Carson. He’s president of a specialty AV gear company in Tempe, Arizona–it makes a nice HDMI cable with lots of adaptor jacks at […]

But after a quick search, I found that a titanium alloy has an ultimate tensile strength of 900 MPa. With that, I can calculate the width of a beam with a square cross section that can support this force. Actually, as you can see above, it isn’t bad–just 15 centimeters. […]

Last week Antarctica outdid itself, and not in a good way, setting a high for its warmest temperature ever recorded: 65 degrees Fahrenheit. If the first thought that popped into your head is that balmy weather certainly can’t be good for the continent’s ice, you’d be right. But the heat […]

To anyone who happened to be looking up that morning, perhaps from the deck of a boat off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the plane would have appeared to be on an extremely alarming trajectory. It rocketed into the cloudless late-summer sky at a 45-degree angle, slowed momentarily and […]

After the survey’s cancelation, “SETI became a 4-letter S-word at NASA Headquarters,” notes a recent paper by prominent alien-hunting researchers. The National Science Foundation then banned SETI projects from its funding portfolio. Astrobiologists, wary of being put in the same doomed basket as SETI, sometimes inched themselves away, emphasizing the […]

Everybody loves bubbles, regardless of age–the bigger the better. But to blow really big, world-record-scale bubbles requires a very precise bubble mixture. Physicists have determined that a key ingredient is mixing in polymers of varying strand lengths, according to a new paper in Physical Review Fluids. That produces a soap […]

Picture a calm river. Now picture a torrent of white water. What is the difference between the two? To mathematicians and physicists it’s this: The smooth river flows in one direction, while the torrent flows in many different directions at once. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an […]