In the heart of Rome stands one of the Eternal City’s most famous and well-preserved ancient monuments: the Pantheon. Constructed during the reign of Emperor Hadrian in the Second Century C.E, the building has been in near-continuous use for two millennia, first as a temple dedicated to the Olympian Gods, and then as a Catholic Basilica. Home to exquisitely preserved […]
Read more
If ever there was a criminally underrated natural resource, it would have to be Helium. Though most commonly associated with party balloons and making one’s voice sound like a cartoon, Helium’s most important application is in cooling the magnets of Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI machines. While the finite and ever-dwindling global supply of this vitally important gas is a […]
Read more
It is by far the most famous equation in the history of science – and one of the shortest: E=mc2. Derived by Albert Einstein in 1905, the equation describes the relationship between mass and energy, stating that the total energy contained in a given piece of matter is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared. Given that […]
Read more
In the 1969 science fiction film Marooned, a trio of astronauts manning an experimental space station attempt to return to earth, only for their spacecraft’s main engine to fail. Without sufficient fuel either to initiate reentry or return to the space station, the astronauts find themselves – well, marooned – in orbit, doomed to slowly suffocate unless some bold rescue […]
Read more
On the morning of August 27, 1939, a small aircraft was towed onto the runway at Marienehe airfield in Mecklenberg, northern Germany. To the handful of observers gathered at the edge of the field, the craft must have looked like something out of science fiction, with its gleaming barrel-shaped fuselage, gaping nose intake, and stubby wings awkwardly mounted high atop […]
Read more
On March 31, 1851, a crowd of curious Parisians gathered at the Pantheon to witness a historic scientific demonstration. In the centre of the building, directly beneath its towering dome, they found a deceptively simple piece of equipment: a 28-kilogram brass-coated lead sphere, suspended from the building’s dome by a 67-metre-long wire. Beneath this was placed a wooden platform covered […]
Read more
At around 7 P.M. on May 2, 1878, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota was rocked by a massive explosion. In the blink of an eye, the Washburn A flour mill – the largest in the world – disappeared, and a giant column of dust, smoke and debris shot into the sky. The blast was felt 16 kilometres away in Saint […]
Read more
If your parents ever took you to a science museum or planetarium as a child, you likely spent much of your visit in the gift shop, begging them to buy you one of the hundreds of shiny – and purportedly “educational” – items on offer. And most irresistible of all was undoubtedly “astronaut food”: shiny foil packets of freeze-dried strawberries […]
Read more
At 2:46 PM on March 11, 2011, at a spot 60 kilometres off the coast of Japan, the Pacific tectonic plate suddenly slipped and plunged under the Eurasian plate. The resulting Tohoku earthquake, lasting six minutes and measuring 9.0 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, was the most powerful in Japanese history and the fourth largest ever recorded, causing thousands of […]
Read more
Ah, the joys of vehicle ownership! Traffic jams! Construction! Costly insurance! Speed traps! Searching endlessly for parking! Having the check engine light come on just as you were about to buy that new game system and having the mechanic charge you thousands of dollars for parts and labour… and, of course, the greatest joy of all: that weekly soul-crushing, wallet-emptying […]
Read more
Ah, immortality, previously only for the gods and individuals with a fetish for chopping each other’s heads off. In more modern times, science is coming closer and closer to both identifying the tapestry of things that cause humans to grow old, and slowly but surely taking the first steps into finding ways to delay and even reverse this process for […]
Read more
For starters, we don’t mean to alarm you, but it turns out, despite how much we all fight it like a toddler who’s just been told it’s bedtime, sleeping is a basic, and critical human need. All animals known to man sleep. Humans, however, are seemingly the only ones who voluntarily forgo it, outside of cases like if an animal […]
Read more
31 countries currently use some form of nuclear power, with the 455 currently operational reactors generating some 393,000 Megawatts of electricity – nearly 20% of the world’s total energy production. Despite high-profile disasters such as Chernobyl, Three-Mile-Island, and Fukushima, nuclear power is actually among the safest and cleaner forms of electricity generation, placing dead-last in terms of deaths per kilowatt-hour […]
Read more
The symptoms were gradual but inexorable. It began with headaches, joint pain and tremors in the hands and feet, mild at first but growing steadily in intensity. The victims’ movements became increasingly uncoordinated and clumsy, their stance and gait unsteady. Soon they were unable to walk at all, racked by severe tremors and muscle spasms. And then came the most […]
Read more
Shortwave radio signals, which occupy the radio frequency band between 3 and 30 megahertz, have the unique ability to bounce or “skip” off the earth’s ionosphere, allowing them to propagate over vast distances. This has attracted a devoted international community of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who exploit the unique properties of the medium to listen to and communicate with shortwave stations […]
Read more
At precisely 3 in the morning on January 17, 1991, a series of explosions rocked the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The explosions were exact and devastating, destroying Iraqi military radars, command bunkers, and communications hubs with surgical precision. Immediately, Iraq’s aerial defence system sprang into action, its 3,000 anti-aircraft guns saturating the air with explosive shells. But the 60 surface-to-air […]
Read more
On Christmas Eve, 1968, nearly a billion people sat glued to their radios and television sets as the crew of Apollo 8 entered orbit around the moon. For three days the world had followed the pioneering mission three live television broadcasts, and they now waited eagerly to hear the historic words of the first humans to reach another world. Then, […]
Read more
Paul A. asks: Is there really such a thing as human pheromones? Insects, such as the male silk worm using the pheromone Bombykol have long been known to attract mates through pheromones. Moving over to the one humped camel, also known as the Arabian camel and dromedary, of all their adaptations, the grossest is probably the male dromedary’s proclivity to […]
Read more