分类目录归档：science
When ultraviolet sunlight hits our skin,
it affects each of us a little differently.
Depending on skin color, it will take only minutes of exposure
to turn one person beetroot-pink,
while another req
Denis Diderot left a dungeon outside Paris on November 3, 1749.
He'd had his writing burned in public before,
but this time, he'd gotten locked up under royal order
for an essay about a philosopher's
Since the dawn of humanity,
an estimated 100.8 billion people have lived and died,
a number that increases by about .8% of the world's population each year.
What happens to all of those people's bodi
In 2011, a team of physicists reported a startling discovery:
neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light
by 60 billionths of a second
in their 730 kilometer trip from Geneva to a detector in I
Imagine, for a second, a duck teaching a French class,
a ping-pong match in orbit around a black hole,
a dolphin balancing a pineapple.
You probably haven't actually seen any of these things,
but you
Why do humans drink so much milk?
And given that all mammals lactate,
why do we favor certain types of milk over others?
Milk is the first thing we drink,
and thanks to developments in the production
On July 26, 1943,
Los Angeles was blanketed by a thick gas that stung people's eyes
and blocked out the Sun.
Panicked residents believed their city had been attacked using chemical warfare.
But the cl
At about six o'clock in the morning on September 14, 2015,
scientists witnessed something no human had ever seen:
two black holes colliding.
Both about 30 times as massive as our Sun,
they had been or
Between you and the rest of the world lies an interface
that makes up 16% of your physical weight.
This is your skin, the largest organ in your body:
laid out flat, it would cover close to 1.7 squa
You hear the gentle lap of waves,
the distant cawing of a seagull.
But then an annoying whine interrupts the peace,
getting closer, and closer, and closer.
Until...whack!
You dispatch the offending mo