Science Mysteries

Weird Experiments and Mad Science

January 2, 2012

I found out recently about a very entertaining blog (and accompanying book, see below), Weird Experiments.  He doesn’t post very often, but what he posts is fascinating and well-researched.  The book — THE MAD SCIENCE BOOK: EXPERIMENTS FROM THE WILDER SIDE OF SCIENCE — is an entertaining look at a laundry list of interesting experiments [...]

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Mind Hacks: Have an out-of-body experience

May 2, 2011

As I wrote in an earlier post I’ve been reading this wonderful book called Mind Hacks, with tips on how your brain works (and how to fool it). One that I found particularly interesting was the one entitled Have an Out of Body Experience.  The blurb reads: Our regular experience of the world is first [...]

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Hugs — and life — follow a 3-second rule

March 30, 2011

This is the kind of little tidbit I can’t pass up. Apparently, like food dropped on the floor, hugs also follow a 3-second rule.  Apparently a whole slew of studies — across a variety of cultures — have shown that waves, musical phrases, and bits of babbling from infants last about 3 seconds.  A researcher [...]

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Is it close-minded to be skeptical?

June 11, 2010

Here is a nicely produced little video about how it’s not the skeptics who are close-minded, but often the people who believe pseudoscientific things who are guilty of being unable to consider new ideas.  The author of this video says he gets a lot of flak from people for not believing in, say, reincarnation, and [...]

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Electricity makes flowers grow

February 2, 2010

Here’s a wonderful tidbit from a book that every physics teacher should have — The Flying Circus of Physics.  My old mentor PD gave it to me with the inscription, “until I write my book of physics stories, this is the best collection of science stories in print.”  As much as I love Paul, I [...]

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The Chemistry of Kissing

July 19, 2009

Since I’m woefully behind in posting on my own blog, I’m grateful to Sarah over at a Schooner of Science who wrote up an interesting article on the Chemistry of Kissing.  I was meaning to write something on this topic for a while, actually, since there was an interesting symposium at the AAAS Meeting in [...]

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A long day at the Exploratorium…

May 5, 2009

Biologist Charlie Carlson over at my favorite alma mater (the Exploratorium museum of science in SF) snapped this photo of me, perky and bright-eyed… but my bench-mates?  Not so much.  Looks like they had a long day of interactive science. One thing we found curious about the photo was its graininess in the low light.  [...]

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Myth: Helium makes your voice high-pitched

March 26, 2009

A friend just pointed out an interesting misconception that I hadn’t thought about. When you inhale helium, your voice sounds higher. It turns out that your voice isn’t actually higher-pitched! At least, not in the way that we think it is.  The reasoning is a little convoluted…. read on. Here’s the common misconception: The speed [...]

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The science of attractiveness

February 27, 2009

A recent volume of Science News had a feature article about attraction and the evolutionary basis of our conception of what makes someone beautiful.  As writer Elizabeth Quill says (I love this quote) — “For humans, there is osmething captivating and unforgettable about the arrangement of two balls, a point and a horizontal slide on [...]

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Revising the Rainbow

January 10, 2009

In this week’s episode of Science Teaching Tips, we look at my favorite thing — light.  Light, like, rulez.  Dude.  And so does my old mentor, Paul Doherty, who will tell you one of his best stories from the history of science about how the spectrum came to be the spectrum.  I mean, what the [...]

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New study on synthesia

December 16, 2008

I got a lot of comments on my previous post on synthesia, so it seems there’s some interest there.  Check out this post on Cognitive Daily about a study of the rarest form of synthesia – tasting words. For more common (or rather, less uncommon) forms of synesthesia, the most convincing evidence that it’s real [...]

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Why do your fingers wrinkle?

December 14, 2008

Why is it that your fingers get all wrinkly when you’re in the bath too long? It’s a pretty simple little answer.  You know how a spongue gets bigger when it gets wet.  The outer layer of our skin is like that too — it soaks up a bunch of water and gets swollen.  But [...]

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Photos of ovulation!

June 15, 2008

Here are some fantastic photos from the New Scientist website — accidentally captured the clearest picture of a woman’s ovary in the process of ovulation. Pictures and articles here I guess it’s pretty hard to get pictures of an event that happens for just a few minutes at one poorly determined time each month. They [...]

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This so-called life…

June 10, 2008

Yesterday’s post in Engineering Life talks about the questions that are raised by genetic engineering, and whether we ought to be more worried than we are. I wanted to take the chance to point you to WNYC Radio Lab’s (So-called) Life episode, which talks about just this — what is life, what counts as natural? [...]

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We’ve got 10X more bacteria than cells

June 6, 2008

check out this item from Science Daily… Humans have Ten Times More Bacterial Than Human Cells: How do Microbial Communities Affect Human Health? ScienceDaily -Jun. 5, 2008 — The number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1. Changes in these microbial [...]

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Synthesia

May 23, 2008

I’ve always been sort of fascinated by synthesia. A brain with a predilection to mix colors and letters and days and feelings and smells sounds kinda trippy. I’ve always thought (and I think I may have read somewhere) that it seems like a very rich way to experience life. I mean, confusion is orange? I [...]

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Mystery 1: Is polar bear fur transparent?

January 18, 2008

The answer seems to be yes! Even though polar bears are white, their hair is actually colorless. I found this out by looking at a great site, Everyday Mysteries, run by the Library of Congress. You can browse tons of questions, and their interesting science answers, compiled by the expert reference librarians at the Library [...]

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