Snakes, serpents, danger noodles. Whatever you call them, you’ve gotta respect them. I mean, have you tried getting around without any arms or legs? (Also, they can bite you.) The snake’s ambulatory secret is its special belly scales, which grip a surface like cleat spikes to help the reptile push forward. And now that secret […]
Bijunath Patla’s experiment sounds like a real bore: Gather 12 of the most accurate clocks around the world, and watch them tick. It’s like a physicist’s version of watching paint dry. Patla’s team, based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, began monitoring the clocks on November 11, 1999. And they’ve […]
Children’s blocks lie scattered on the floor. You start playing with them—squares, rectangles, triangles and hexagons—moving them around, flipping them over, seeing how they fit together. You feel a primal satisfaction from arranging these shapes into a perfect pattern, an experience you’ve probably enjoyed many times. But of all the blocks designed to lie flat […]
Update: SpaceX scrubbed Thursday's launch after an abort during the countdown sequence. The next window opened Friday at 4:14pm Eastern. The Falcon 9 successfully launched and its first stage landed on the drone ship off the coast of Florida, which marks the company's 25th landing. SpaceX is set to launch the Block 5 version of […]
Sending a rover to Mars is cool—but sending one to Mars along with a helicopter is even better. Yes, that is the plan for the next NASA Mars rover, scheduled for 2020. The idea is to have a driving rover that brings along a small coaxial helicopter. The helicopter will be self-powered and fly for […]
For a long time, my most prized possession was a strategy guide. A lush, thick booklet of information and art devoted to the first game I ever beat: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I would look lovingly at the concept art and screenshots on the pages as I learned how to find all […]
Of all the apparatuses presidents have at their disposal for making pronouncements—press secretaries, official statements, televised addresses from the Oval Office—the one President Trump used to trumpet forthcoming sanctions on Iran is by far the strangest: a Game of Thrones meme. On Friday morning the president posted the image below on Twitter. It’s a picture […]
This story originally appeared on The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Sea level rise driven by climate change is set to pose an existential crisis to many US coastal communities, with new research finding that as many as 311,000 homes face being flooded every two weeks within the next 30 years. The swelling oceans are […]
Last spring, filmmaker Paul Hough got a eerie bit of intel from his 12-year-old daughter: Apparently, an empty school bus had been spotted in their Los Angeles neighborhood, cruising around without any passengers inside. For Hough, a horror writer and filmmaker, the chilling incident proved inspirational. He quickly got to work on a video, titled […]
Pain is an indispensable tool for survival. The prick of a nail underfoot is a warning that protects you from a deep, dirty wound—and maybe tetanus. The sizzle of a steel skillet is a deterrent against a third-degree burn. As much as it sucks, pain, oddly enough, keeps us from hurting ourselves. It's a luxury […]