Four people, ranging in ages from 19 to 25, were arrested in Cleveland for pointing a $500 green laser pointer at two planes and two choppers at the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. The laser temporarily blinded at least one of the pilots, and created disorienting patterns while bouncing around between the windows and control panels. [...]
Do you like watermelon? Do you really like watermelon? The Japanese, they really like watermelon. Take this 17-pound, black-skinned marvel of watermelon-ness. Last Friday, it fetched a record $6,100 at a market in Hokkaido. That comes out to around $360 a pound. Why spend so much on the so-called “Densuke” watermelon? Because, says a spokesperson [...]
Hundreds of beachgoers at the Isle of Palms in South Carolina, USA got a little more excitement than they probably expected when they were called out of the water because of a six-foot long American crocodile wandering around the beach. The croc was later trapped by wildlife officials. It likely escaped or was released by [...]
Picture this: You really need to go, you’re in a really small room with only one toilet, and it’s broken. And you’re in outer space. This is what’s happening in the International Space Station, whose one and only (Russian-built) zero-gravity urine collection system has been having problems of late. Thankfully the recent Discovery shuttle mission [...]
Personally I think sloths are kinda cool. So I’m glad that new research suggests that they might have gotten a bit of a bad rap as… well… sloths. People used to think that sloths slept for 16 hours a day, but German and US scientists published a study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters [...]
What’s so small you can’t see it with the naked eye, has DNA spliced into it, and can solve computer science problems? It’s the DNA computer! Here’s the layman explanation, as far as I understand it: Scientists have found a way to insert a bit of DNA into a living bacterial cell, and the DNA [...]
So it’s like this: everything you see is a little late. It takes about one-tenth of a second for the stuff we see with our eyes to reach the brain. By then what we think we “see” in real time is actually one-tenth of a second in the past. The human brain compensates by calculating, [...]