Whether it’s the rhythmic tapping of a spoon on a plate, the clicking of a car’s turn signal, or the drips of a leaking faucet, humans find a beat wherever we go. But why is it that we are so susceptible to a single note that is repeated over and over again?
It was 1915 when our resident genius Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity. As Christmas trees stood tall and families reunited for the holidays that year, Einstein received a letter from a German soldier on the Russian front. This soldier was Karl Schwarzschild, who, amongst the guns and shouts, found a solution to Einstein’s theory that directly predicted black holes.
We hear about zombies all the time in movies, books, and TV shows. They often start with a corpse coming back to life and passing a virus onto others, who then get infected and pass it onto more people— and suddenly you’ve got a zombie apocalypse on your hands. But what happens when the virus itself is a zombie, resurrected from its thousand-year underground slumber? While they might not be the bringers of the apocalypse, the release of ancient viruses that were previously frozen underground is a new and unprecedented consequence of climate change that has researchers wondering if they might cause issues for us in the future.
Most of us have become well acquainted with the term “anaesthetics”- whether it’s from personal experience, anecdotes from friends, or portrayal on TV. Even though its use has become commonplace, there are many mysteries surrounding anaesthesia waiting to be explored.
Orcas and Ross seals accompanied by a violin? A bowhead whale’s call remixed as a love song? Colliding icebergs combined with synths and electric guitars? These are all songs that feature in Polar Sounds, a newly released album from the sound project Cities and Memory.
Life on Earth exists under a constant particle shower. Tiny invisible particles form in the
atmosphere and fall towards the Earth’s surface, passing through our bodies and everything around us on their way. From the Great Pyramids of Giza to Mount Vesuvius, one such particle, the muon, is being used by particle physicists to make new discoveries about the physical structures that surround us on Earth.
How many times have you downloaded Duolingo, fired up to learn Portuguese or Korean, only to give up after losing your 40-day streak? Even after 40 days, you think, I still only know how to say “Hi, how are you?” It’s easy to get discouraged, but if it’s any solace, our struggles with learning new languages are mostly biological.
Earlier this year in the US, a lawsuit was taken against the popular juice product Simply Tropical for containing levels of dangerous chemicals called PFAS. It turns out that these chemicals were at levels “hundreds of times” greater than the US Environmental Protection Agency’s advisory limits for drinking water.
On December 13, 2022, the world of clean energy changed forever with a groundbreaking announcement from the US Department of Energy. Fusion ignition had been achieved for the first time in history on December 5, 2022. Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) at the US National Ignition Facility successfully achieved one of the largest scientific milestones of the 21st century by producing an excess of energy – even more than they put in.
In the 1933 classic King Kong, a giant gorilla terrorizes New York City, towering above trucks and houses and standing menacingly atop the Empire State Building. Since then, the idea of animals larger than human-made structures has fascinated us. From the giant reptiloid Godzilla and insectoid Mothra to the fish-like Sea Kings in One Piece, colossal creatures are a recurring theme across media.