A Stormcloud of Bees Throw out the word “electricity” today and one clear connotation rules. The juice that runs the world, coming to us through hanging power lines or buried cables. The electricity that runs computers, televisions, appliances, and, increasingly, automobiles. This type of power is current electricity, a stream of charged particles that travels …
It’s All Mustard Today, we connotatively view mustard as a yellow condiment we might slather on sandwiches. It’s easy to forget that delicious spread comes from the seeds of plants known as mustards. In the grand genealogical tree, mustard plants fall into the Brassicaceae family. This demarcation not only includes mustards but also cabbages …
DART Today, Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck, Robert Duval, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood, and Morgan Freeman are proud astronauts and scientists. Twenty-four years after the summer that gifted the world with the films Armageddon and Deep Impact, astronomers have finally started the process of catching up with late-20th-century film science. Both movies deal with …
The Ozarks The area in the United States between the Appalachians and the Rockies typically garners a reputation of being flat, low, and bland. Glaciers did a wonderful job of leveling the center of the country, but anyone who’s been to the Arikaree Breaks in Kansas knows it’s not flat like an ice rink. “Low” is a …
The Tube Oven In our previous exploration, we discovered London’s subway system – the Underground, lovingly called the Tube – features some strange mosquitoes. The scientific oddities of the Underground don’t stop there, however. The British constructed the earliest tunnels near the surface, but they quickly realized they could produce conduits deeper in the earth. One …
Denizen’s of London’s Underground The British constructed the world’s first underground passenger railway in London in 1863. The first tunnels built for the Metropolitan Railway used the cut-and-cover method, forming conduits just below the surface. Circular holes at deeper levels soon became the preferred method. The round tunnels provided a nickname by which locals …
The Shape of Sound The air on our planet is (mostly) transparent. Sound is a mechanical phenomenon. A sound is caused by the pressure changing in a medium, as particles of the medium bump into other particles of the medium. Here on Earth, since that medium is air, it’s kind of hard to see a sound wave. Barring …
Loch Ness One could make a decent argument that Loch Ness is one of the most famous bodies of water in the world. Loch is the Scottish Gaelic word for “lake” (it can also signify a fjord). Most lakes in Scotland take the word as part of their nomenclature, including Loch Lomond and today’s topic. Located in the …
How Long Can You Hold Your Breath? Give it a shot. We’ll wait. According to the National Library of Medicine, the average human can hold their breath for 30 to 90 seconds. In the realm of survival skills, the ubiquitous maxim is the Rule of Threes. One can survive three weeks without food, three days …
Miracle Fruit In 1725, French explorer, cartographer, navigator, and slave-ship captain, Chevalier des Marchais noticed something incredible as he journeyed through West Africa. In addition to charting the continent, des Marchais also took a keen interest in the native flora of the region. He noticed the Indigenous people rummaging through forest undergrowth for a particular …