Category: 9. Sci/Tech

Picture the scene. After a routine blood test, you visit your GP for the results. “It’s all good,” says the doctor reassuringly. “The only problem is that you’re getting older.” Then, with a flourish of the prescription pad, the…

This means these three values can’t be independent; if you know two of them, you can derive the third. How do physicists deal with this? We define the speed of light as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. (How do we know it’s exact?…

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it buried Pompeii under metres of ash and pumice, seemingly freezing the Roman city in time. But new research shows the story didn’t end there. Life crept back among the ruins, in a far more precarious…

The Earth is constantly receiving space signals that contain vital information about extremely energetic phenomena. Among the most peculiar are brief pulses of extremely high-energy radio waves, known as fast radio bursts (FRB). Astronomers…

Ah, the zoomies. There’s nothing quite like watching your cat pinging off the walls like a pinball. One minute they’re flying across the sofa, the next, they’re launching themselves at the lampshade. They’re here, there and everywhere,…

On 30 July at 12:25am BST (11:25am local time), a massive earthquake struck just off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. With a magnitude of 8.8, the event was the sixth-largest earthquake in recorded history, raising the spectre of a…

Key Takeaways on Octopus Arms

• Octopuses typically have eight limbs that are called arms. Because the limbs have suction cups for its entire length, they are called arms instead of tentacles.
• Octopus arms can help the sea creatures hunt, move heavy…

This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Air conditioners have been working overtime this hot summer, from those tiny window units to the massive AC towers that serve the tightly packed apartment…