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White sugar isn’t good for the human body. Everyone knows that, especially if your mother yelled, “stop eating that junk!” every time you put a piece of candy in your mouth as a kid. But how bad for you is it? Is it bad enough to be considered a toxin? Two credible news outlets explore [...]
These two photo galleries bring up a great point: Is it really possible to build a cheap, DIY/homebrew supercharger using a leaf blower? – Leaf Blower Supercharger Driving The New Corvette Hack – Wait, Did This Corvette Just Become More Fun? Once you see it, it makes sense. A leaf blower pumps lots of air, [...]
Good question – Can a map change our perception of the world?
by Marshall Brain | April 12, 2011
We have been looking at the map of the world all our lives – in text books, atlases, dictionaries, etc. – and it seems simple enough. But it isn’t, as explained in this dramatization comparing the Mercator projection with the Gall-Peters projection: This page summarizes the history: The Peters Projection World Map is one of [...]
It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does happen it is spectacular. A video goes up on YouTube and it takes off like a rocket with tens of millions of views. It happened to Susan Boyle: Susan Boyle, the overnight sensation It happened with the wedding video: How to have a fun wedding It [...]
Let’s imagine that you would like to do something like mail drop-off and pickup in a remote area where no landing strip is available. Or imagine that you would like to extract a soldier from a remote area where there is no landing strip. The traditional way to solve this problem is by using a [...]
Many people who go to see a 3D movie get a headache about 20 minutes into the movie. And even if you don’t get a headache, you may notice that your eyes don’t feel right. It could be anything from excessive tearing to an achiness that makes you take off the glasses and rub your [...]
As this article points out: NASA shows off the aircraft of 2025 Late last year, NASA awarded contracts to three teams — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing — to develop advanced designs for the year 2025. While all final designs have to meet rigid criteria for noise, exhaust and fuel consumption, the three concepts [...]
I was invited over to a friend’s house this weekend. Married couple, kids, nice folks. But they asked me to help with a problem – Their bathroom stinks. You walk into the bathroom and it smells. Bad. They had been closing the door and running the fan, which isn’t optimal because it wastes a lot of energy by sucking air conditioned air out of the house. They had looked for everything – dead animals, standing water causing mold, leaking toilet, etc. What was the cause?
There are dozens of new things that we have learned from the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We have learned about blowout preventers, methane hydrates, oil booms, etc.
Two facts have been especially intriguing if you are interested in green technologies. First, the deep water in the Gulf is very cold. This page provides a nice graph that shows how temperature decreases with increasing depth in the ocean. The second thing we have learned is that it is pretty easy to put pipelines in the Gulf – there are already hundreds of them.
What could we do with all of this cold water? There are two technologies that could take advantage of it. The first is air conditioning, as described in this video…
This is going to qualify as either one of the most interesting things you see today, or one of the grossest, depending on your constitution. In the following video, veterinarians dissect an elephant and show you some of the amazing mechanisms inside the world’s largest land mammal. You learn an incredible amount about elephants in the process…
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