Tag: Science
Bad news for anyone who’s ever dealt with a roach-infested apartment: a group of scientists has discovered a strain of cockroaches that is no longer tolerant of glucose, the better to avoid our sugar-laced roach motels. According to a (thoroughly disgusting) BBC News video, the evolved bugs’ taste buds that would ordinarily respond to bitter […]
We’re one step closer to a beautiful, terrifying utopia in which we stop staring into computers all day every day and simply become them. A team of MIT researchers led by Rahul Sarpeshkar have developed a working calculator built entirely from living E. coli bacterial cells, capable of “performing addition, division and power-law computations,” according to SciLogs. It’s not the first […]
Hey, New York. Enjoying the weather today? The warm temperature, the lovely breeze, the breathable atmosphere, the lack of gravity storm vortexes swallowing up the sidewalk as it thunders along towards you? Being on Earth is pretty nice. Now, here’s artist Nickolay Lamm of StorageFront and astrobiologist Marilyn Browning Vogel, taking you through the unpleasantries of interplanetary New Yorks. […]
Tortured artists and sappy songwriters have long sensed that loneliness is not such a good thing, but now we know for a fact that it is detrimental to your mental and physical well-being. A growing body of research shows that feelings of emotional isolation can literally both make people ill and hasten death. Contrary to what […]
As the great scholar Rick James once said, cocaine is a hell of a drug. Alas, it’s also very expensive, is responsible for more annual U.S. emergency room visits than any other drug, and turns users into selfish, paranoid, sexually impotent jerks. Er, so we hear. And yet, according to the National Survey on Drug Use […]
At an event in London this year, a man named Max Post will debut a hamburger grown from beef stem cells that cost a staggering $325,000 to produce. The New York Times does a good job covering the process and potential for positive environmental impact, but we’d like to know a little more about what the thing […]
No, these aren’t those way-trippy black light dorm posters they sell at Spencer’s Gifts. They’re actually software-enhanced medical images of teeth, rotting teeth, the inside of a left nostril, heart valves, the brain’s fourth ventricle, stress lines in the skull, and cranial blood vessels; respectively. They just happen to be really, really, mind-meltingly psychedelic. Hong-Kong […]
Ask anyone who has groggily awoken in the sweaty arms of someone who looks like this — beer goggles are no joke. Even science says so. That booze inflates our own egos isn’t breaking news either — hence those painfully incoherent rants about your boring-ass job that, in the moment, make you feel like the most fascinating person […]
On October 31, 2011, the Earth’s population hit a staggering 7 billion. To celebrate, the people at Worldometers created this site, which represents each of those individuals with a cute little icon. That’s a lot of cute little icons! Hover over a little guy and the site will tell you what number he is. According […]
The popular conception that the South has America’s most obese people may be wrong, according to a new study. Conducted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham, possibly in attempt to regain the South’s good name, the researchers found that the most obesity is actually in the Midwest, in states like Minnesota, Kansas and North and […]
