The other binary
In binary, 010 is equal to 2. But what if it were 3 instead?
Category: Sciences
The blob from the stars
The 1958 horror film The Blob was inspired by a real event in 1950: a close encounter between four police officers and a star jelly.
Longest elevator fall
In 1945 an Air Force bomber crashed into the side of the Empire State Building. An elevator cab carrying Betty Lou Oliver fell 75 floors straight down; she, incredibly, survived.
Space probe software bug
NASA lost contact with the space probe Deep Impact in 2013 because of a single software bug.
The last smallpox survivor
In October 1977, Ali Maow Maalin was the last person to contract naturally occurring smallpox. He died thirty six years later while coordinating a polio vaccination drive.
Animal helmets
The Vikings may not have worn horned helmets, but the ancient Greeks had helmets covered in boar tusks and the Dayak of Borneo had helmets covered in fish or pangolin scales.
The Yale blackboard rebellion
In 1830, nearly half of the mathematics class at Yale was expelled for refusing to use a blackboard in their exams.
Castaway rabbits and cattle
Rabbits and cattle were introduced to a remote island near Antarctica as food for shipwreck survivors; they bred there in isolation for more than a century.
Long Hindu time
One of the longest measurements of time appears in ancient Hindu scriptures: the mahā-kalpa, equal to 311.04 trillion years.
Cow magnets
If you’re a bovine veterinarian, one of the tools in your arsenal might be the cow magnet.
Da Vinci’s fractal trees
Leonardo da Vinci observed that tree branches together are always as thick as the trunk beneath them. This is true, and there are some good ideas why.
Sheep fruit
Behold the fabulous creatures of myth and legend! The dragon, the phoenix, the basilisk, the roc, the unicorn… and the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary?
The ant in the devil’s garden
Within the extraordinary biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest lie circles of a single tree species – the devil’s gardens. And these pockets of uniformity are created by ants.
Llama berserkers
According to animal breeders you should avoid bottle-feeding baby llamas, because when they grow up they might go berserk.
Cosmic ladder (Part 2)
To measure distances in deep space, you need to look for candles in the darkness. [2 of 2]
Cosmic ladder (Part 1)
It’s a lot more difficult to measure distances in space than you might think. [1 of 2]