Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Sufi stories of the wisdom of the foolish Mulla Nasrudin have been around for a thousand years or more. One of them tells how the Mulla was walking down the street one day. Three stories above him, a man was working on a roof. The workman slipped and fell. He…
From the American Chemical Society. WASHINGTON — Have you ever seen a drop of water navigate a maze? It’s possible thanks to the same phenomenon that lets you know if a griddle is hot enough for pancake batter. Water droplets that dance and skitter across a hot surface instead of boil away on the spot…
This is curious new technology; imagine the US Flag being able to play the National Anthem from the flagpole! How scientists turned a flag into a loudspeaker MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY EAST LANSING, Mich. – A paper-thin, flexible device created at Michigan State University not only can generate energy from human motion, it can act as…
WASHINGTON, DC — One million miles from Earth, a NASA camera is capturing unexpected flashes of light reflecting off our planet. The homeward-facing instrument on NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, launched in 2015, caught hundreds of these flashes over the span of a year. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument aboard DSCOVR…
NASA’s Fermi Catches Gamma-ray Flashes from Tropical Storms About a thousand times a day, thunderstorms fire off fleeting bursts of some of the highest-energy light naturally found on Earth. These events, called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs), last less than a millisecond and produce gamma rays with tens of millions of times the energy of visible…
From the UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS, and the “at least they didn’t blame climate change” department: A research team led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Colorado College has solved a century-old mystery involving a famous red waterfall in Antarctica. New evidence links Blood Falls to a large source of salty water that may…
From the “Day of the Killer Tomatoes” department comes this curious story from the AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY about food science and making tomatoes great again…at least the store bought ones. Why are so many supermarket tomatoes tasteless and rock hard? In the 1990s, breeders developed a tomato that produces less of the hormone ethylene, so…
