Inside the ant colony
Adults ScienceAnts have one of the most complex social organizations in the animal kingdom; they live in structured colonies that contain different types of members who perform specific roles. Sound familiar? Deborah M. Gordon explains the way these incredible creatures mate, communicate and source food, shedding light on how their actions can mimic and inform our own behavior.
How playing an instrument benefits your brain - Anita Collins
Adults ScienceWhen you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What's going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians' brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.
How do we smell?
Adults ScienceAn adult human can distinguish up to 10,000 odors. You use your nose to figure out what to eat, what to buy and even when it's time to take a shower. But how do the molecules in the air get translated into smells in your brain? Rose Eveleth charts the smelly journey through your olfactory epithelium and explains why scent can be so subjective.
Another Reason Why Dogs Are Amazing: They Can Detect Cancer.
Adults ScienceHaving a dog for a pet is a great way to find love, loyalty, friendship and fun; but canines are now using their keen senses for something remarkable. New studies have shown that through intense observation and an astute sense of smell (which is is about 100,000 times more powerful than that of a human), our canine friends are able to alert us when cancerous cells are present. In many instances dogs have pointed their noses on the precise locations of unidentified tumors. Read the Article
Why is ketchup so hard to pour?
Adults ScienceEver go to pour ketchup on your fries...and nothing comes out? Or the opposite happens, and your plate is suddenly swimming in a sea of red? George Zaidan describes the physics behind this frustrating phenomenon, explaining how ketchup and other non-Newtonian fluids can suddenly transition from solid to liquid and back again.
Facebook Will Use Drones and Lasers to 'Beam' Internet to the World
Adults ScienceAfter announcing Internet.org last year, an initiative to improve Internet access across the globe, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Connectivity Lab, a new team of scientists that has been working on the ambitious project. He said that the Connectivity Lab would develop "new platforms for connectivity on the ground, in the air and in orbit," according to a post on Internet.org on Thursday. How are they going to do it?
The chemistry of cookies
Adults ScienceYou stick cookie dough into an oven, and magically, you get a plate of warm, gooey cookies. Except it's not magic; it's science. Stephanie Warren explains via basic chemistry principles how the dough spreads out, at what temperature we can kill salmonella, and why that intoxicating smell wafting from your oven indicates that the cookies are ready for eating.
The loathsome, lethal mosquito
Adults ScienceEveryone hates mosquitos. Besides the annoying buzzing and biting, mosquito-borne diseases like malaria kill over a million people each year (plus horses, dogs and cats). And over the past 100 million years, they've gotten good at their job -- sucking up to three times their weight in blood, totally undetected. So shouldn't we just get rid of them? Rose Eveleth shares why scientists aren't sure.
How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries
Adults ScienceAdam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.
Anti-Gravity Wheel Explained
Adults ScienceIt's a little shaky but if you average out the oscillations I think the result is clear. Again, huge thank you's to A/Prof Emeritus Rod Cross, Helen Georgiou, Alex Yeung, and Chris Stewart, the University of Sydney Mechanical Engineering shop, Duncan and co. Ralph and the School of Physics.
The Most Amazing Thing About Trees
Adults ScienceTrees create immense negative pressures of 10's of atmospheres by evaporating water from nanoscale pores, sucking water up 100m in a state where it should be boiling but can't because the perfect xylem tubes contain no air bubbles, just so that most of it can evaporate in the process of absorbing a couple molecules of carbon dioxide. Now I didn't mention the cohesion of water (that it sticks to itself well) but this is implicit in the description of negative pressure, strong surface tension etc.
Why do we cry? The three types of tears
Adults ScienceWhether we cry during a sad movie, while chopping onions, or completely involuntarily, our eyes are constantly producing tears. Alex Gendler tracks a particularly watery day in the life of Iris (the iris) as she cycles through basal, reflex and emotional tears.
Dead stuff: The secret ingredient in our food chain
Adults ScienceWhen you picture the lowest levels of the food chain, you might imagine herbivores happily munching on lush, living green plants. But this idyllic image leaves out a huge (and slightly less appetizing) source of nourishment: dead stuff. John C. Moore details the "brown food chain," explaining how such unlikely delicacies as pond scum and animal poop contribute enormous amounts of energy to our ecosystems.
Anti-Gravity Wheel?
Adults ScienceIn this video I attempt to lift a 19kg (42 lbs) wheel over my head one-handed while it's spinning at a few thousand RPM. This replicates an earlier experiment by Professor Eric Laithwaite. He claimed the wheel was 'light as a feather' and could not be explained by Newton's Laws. I wanted to find out for myself what I really felt like.