Perhaps you—like me—are disappointed by the amateur calculations done every December that purport to show how Santa couldn’t possibly deliver presents to all the good boys and girls in the world.
Category: Life Is Like Science Fiction
Michigan has taken its fight against invasive Asian carp to the U.S. Supreme Court, suing Illinois to force the closure of Chicago-area waterways that provide the fish a pathway to the Great Lakes.
The 100-pound fish have voracious appetites and rapid reproduction rates that could ravage native lake species.
Using snake-like fangs, saber-toothed dinosaur relatives of velociraptors likely subdued their prey with venom, scientists now suggest.
Paleontologists analyzed the skulls of Sinornithosaurus, whose name means “Chinese bird lizard.”
Airline passengers who sneak in cell phone calls, play with gaming devices or listen to their mp3 players during takeoff or landing probably won’t cause a plane crash, but they may risk a confrontation with flight attendants. Federal agencies and airlines typically err on the side of caution — even though researchers and aircraft companies have found almost no direct evidence of cell phones or other electronic devices interfering with aircraft systems.
Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad make people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.
Stinking lagoons of pig manure created by thousands of animals in giant hog farms can pollute rivers, poison groundwater and pump out clouds of methane and carbon dioxide. So finding alternative uses for the slurry – to generate electricity, say – makes a lot of sense. The problem was that no one has been certain which way of doing it makes the most electricity for the least greenhouse gas production.
If you’re looking to haggle, steer clear of big, beefy salesmen. The same hormone responsible for their brawn may also reduce their generosity, new research suggests.
“Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy,” says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California, who presented the work at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago last week.
EACH summer, a team from the University of Oslo in Norway go hunting for monsters on the island of Spitsbergen. They carry guns in case they get menaced by the world’s largest living land carnivore, the polar bear. But it is not bears they are after. They are searching for much bigger quarry, the most formidable predators that ever lived.
A spacecraft named LCROSS, speeding toward the moon at 5,600 miles an hour, fired a two-ton empty rocket casing precisely into the heart of a dark lunar crater early Friday and sent thousands of tons of moon rocks, sand and dust high into the sunlit sky in a quest for water near the moon’s South Pole.
Sharron Thornton knows exactly what she wants to do when she gets back home to Smithdale, Miss., pop. 2,034, in a week or two: “Play cards. Watch TV. Play with my grandbabies. I have seven new grandbabies since I was able to see.”
