If you want to understand the personality of a material, study its electrons. Table salt forms cubic crystals because its atoms share electrons in that configuration; silver shines because its electrons absorb visible light and reradiate it back. Electron behavior causes nearly all material properties: hardness, conductivity, melting temperature. Quanta Magazine About Original story reprinted […]
Arguably, there’s no bad time to watch horror movies. Everything from summer slashers to Silent Night, Deadly Night has its time and place. That said, Halloween season really is the best time to settle in with a good gory flick. Whether you’re planning to head to the theater to check out David Gordon Green’s Halloween, […]
In the summer of 2008, Rich Juzwiak was working as a culture writer for VH1’s website, a job that required him to keep up with a daunting assortment of reality-television shows. Some were well-established hits: Survivor, The Apprentice, Big Brother. Others were single-season oddities, like The White Rapper Show or Crowned. No matter what show […]
During a recent Uber ride, Madhuri Hegde’s driver asked her what she did for a living. The chief scientific officer for laboratory services at PerkinElmer, she prepared to bore him with a description of the tests her company had developed—most recently to flag serious genetic disorders. Instead, he was intrigued. “Where can I get one […]
There are two kinds of employees. (Three, if you count those who traffic in binary generalizations.) You've got those who squeeze as much life as they can out of every moment they’re not stuck in an office cubicle, and those who can’t resist checking/responding to work emails and Slacks, even when they’re on vacation. Fortunately, […]
In the midst of this exhausting week in the news, many questions have been asked on this here internet: Are Bert and Ernie gay? Do we really need Space Jam 2? Is Rihanna really an ambassador of Barbados? The answer to all of these questions, dear friends, is yes. But there are other questions, and […]
Step one: Gently suck up the bumblebees with a special vacuum. Step two: Place them in the fridge to chill until they’re immobilized. Step three: Remove bees and superglue a sort of tiny, simplified QR code on their backs. Superglue what, you say? Yes, QR codes—a pretty significant upgrade for entomologists. Researchers used to stand […]
The Predator is here to destroy us all—and so is The Predator, one of the more curious movie letdowns of 2018: An action-comedy at once incomprehensible and inconsequential, and so unfun-dumb that its stupidity feels like a contagion. The fact that it was co-written and directed by Shane Black—who sired the Lethal Weapon series, and […]
This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A 30-meter, Komelon-branded measuring tape, a pencil, and a yellow paper form are all Hallsteinn Haraldsson carries with him when he travels to the Snaefellsnes Peninsula in western Iceland. But unfurling the measuring tape before me at his home in Mosfellsbaer, a town just outside […]
This is a list of things that happen in the new movie Venom: Riz Ahmed, personifying every rich supervillain trope at once, utters the words "God has abandoned us … I will not"; Tom Hardy hops in a restaurant's lobster tank and eats a crustacean raw; the movie's titular character says "on my planet, I […]