Think diamonds are forever? Well, sorry to disappoint you folks, but they’re not. I can’t stand diamonds. No, really, they just tick me off, because nearly everything about them is a lie. Diamonds are neither rare nor intrinsically valuable nor uniquely romantic. Those are ideas invented by the diamond industry. And no, despite what the […]
How big can a black hole get? What’s the largest one detected so far? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide? Find out in this amazing video documentary from SpaceRipTV.
Beau Lotto’s color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can’t normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what’s really out there.
Three scientists have shared the Nobel prize for physics for two technological advances. And without their work you might not be reading this article or looking at pictures on this site. This year’s prize has been jointly won by the men behind fiber optic cables and the digital camera. Half the $1.4 million prize grant […]
NASA has published a report (PDF) detailing more than 100 experiments carried out on the International Space Station between 2000 and 2008. Most of the research was based around the priority of making extended time in space safer and more comfortable for astronauts. However, some of the findings may also have uses on Earth. For […]
This is the kind of thing I dreamed of doing as a kid. Okay, it’s the kind of thing I still think about doing now. I’m not sure how I missed this earlier, but thought it would be worth a post for those of you who might not have seen it yet. The flight was […]
In the following video, Matt Strafuss, a technical instructor at MIT’s Physics Department, demonstrates the ideal gas law. A drop in temperature with fixed mass and external pressure will result in a smaller volume, and vice-versa. [Via MIT News]
A man who cracked his knuckles every day for 60 years and a team who made a convertible bra/gas mask have won Nobel prizes. Scratch that. They’ve won Ig Nobel prizes. The real prizes established by Alfred Nobel’s will are to be presented over the next couple of weeks. However, as has now been traditional […]
In the following video, American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gets asked if he believes in UFOs. As usual, the answer he provides is both hilarious and enlightening. The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam (“appeal to ignorance”), argument by lack of imagination, or negative evidence, is a logical fallacy in which it […]
Rubbing the rim of a wine glass with a wet finger will cause it to resonate at its resonant frequency. The glass is placed in front of a speaker playing a sine wave, created by the function generator, of this same frequency. When the amplitude is turned up, we can see by shining a strobe […]