Tag: Science
Hot flashes, moody outbursts, shriveling boobs… You’d think that with stuff like childbirth, stilettos and the gender pay gap already on the table, women could be spared that final nuisance-on-the-cake, menopause. Come on nature, can’t dudes take some of the brunt of baby-making? Well in theory, they could — at least according to Canadian evolutionary […]
Anechoic chambers–sealed-off rooms designed to prevent the intrusion or reflection of sound or radio waves–can be astoundingly beautiful places, it turns out. Though some chambers are filled with gray, institutional acoustic foam, others use otherworldly blue spikes like the ones above, which are designed to absorb and deaden any sound or electromagnetic waves that may […]
Watching a former member of Japan’s notorious Yakuza mafia snap off his pinkie prosthetic is terrifying. It’s not nearly as terrifying as his soft-spoken account of “yubitsume” — the Yakuza punishment for disgraced gang members which requires them to chop off their own fingers. He slammed a chisel through this one. This one didn’t break off, so […]
We’ve seen robotic roaches and tweet-controlled critters before, but nothing quite like this. RoboRoach, currently funding on Kickstarter, is a $99 kit that would allow users to turn a cockroach–yes, an actual, living cockroach–into their own personal cyborg. See the thing in action above. Getting the bug under your command is just as gruesome as you might imagine. […]
Bringing life to 18th-century physicist Ernst Chladni’s famous Plate Experiment, YouTuber Brusspup demonstrates incredible geometric patterns that form when sand is placed on a metal plate attached to a “tone generator.” This art-meets-science video really resonates with us. Here’s how it works: As the frequencies coming through the speakers increase, so do the plate’s vibrations. The sand gravitates towards the least-vibrating areas, […]
In today’s fun-recreational-substances-that-may-also-have-medical-uses news, research published this week in Experimental Brain Research suggests psilocybin mushrooms may have positive effects for victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. The study, led by Dr. Briony Catlow of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, found that low doses of psilocybin eased conditioned fear in mice. A group of mice–some dosed with shrooms, some not–were […]
What do you get when you get some scientists to crystallize your own hair and then put it under a kaleidoscope? A perfect, dandruffy combination of the innovative, the beautiful, and the insanely gross. British design student Dan Keeffe, along with his friends Amy Webster, Milly Bruce, and Sam Part were inspired to create Crystallised […]
Not to be outdone by Kill Bill bees and Johnny Depp Arthropods, a group of paleontologists studying a giant prehistoric reptile discovered in the 1970s decided to name it after the original Lizard King: Jim Morrison. The ancient beast, dubbed Barbaturex morrisoni, lived some 40 million years ago, weighed 60 pounds, and was six feet long. It’s one […]
In the video above, Antonio Melillo, who has been paralyzed from the waist down for two years, can be seen walking. He moves slowly, holding two handrails for support, and he has several people spotting him, making sure he doesn’t stumble along the way–but still, there he is, walking. Melillo is being assisted by a Mindwalker, […]
Each time you step on to the subway, you’re joining quite a large crowd of bacteria. How large? Microbiologist Norman R. Pace published a study this week detailing the roughly one billion tiny organisms living in every two cubic meters of air in the transit system–about the amount one person breathes each day. But don’t […]
