NAIJASCHOLAR

Late at night, I tend to flip through the channels just to see what's up. If there's a good movie on, I might watch part of it—and recently, I stumbled on Iron Man 3. I know what you're gonna say—that's a terrible superhero movie. But I disagree. Fantastic Four, now that's a terrible superhero movie. […]

What is temperature? This question comes up quite a bit—especially in introductory science courses. The most common answer is something like this: Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in an object. When temperature increases, the motion of these particles also increases. It's not a terrible definition, but it's not […]

You and your favorite cheese—whether it's cheddar, Wensleydale, or a good aged goat brie—have something in common: You’re both home to a constantly evolving menagerie of microbes. The bacteria inside you and your fermented dairy live together in a community called a biome, growing and changing in response to their environments. And they adapt to […]

If Jonathan Rothberg has a superpower, it’s cramming million-dollar, mainframe-sized machines onto single semiconductor circuit boards. The entrepreneurial engineer got famous (and rich) inventing the world’s first DNA sequencer on a chip. And he’s spent the last eight years sinking that expertise (and sizeable startup capital) into a new venture: making your smartphone screen a […]

There’s teamwork—NASA putting people on the moon, for instance, or the Mighty Ducks triumphing over Team Iceland—and then there’s teamwork. A gelatinous sea creature called a salp knows this better than anyone, forming long chains of neurologically connected individuals that work together for the greater good. That is, eating and not dying. A new study […]