Category: 9. Sci/Tech

Being asked ‘how old are you?’ used to be a simple question to answer. If you weren’t sure, you could always just count the candles on your birthday cake. The candles may no longer tell you the whole story, however.

That’s according to a…

When the road gets tough, do you dig deep, push forward and refuse to back down? If so, you likely believe in the power of mental toughness – the ability to overcome obstacles with sheer focus and will.

The idea is simple enough: by…

Billions of sea stars have wasted away in recent years, their crustose, spiny bodies melted to goop by a mysterious illness known as sea star wasting disease.

The culprit behind this epidemic has evaded detection, until now. Four years of gene…

It’s fun to think about the fundamental physical constants. These are special values used in our models of the physical universe. They include things like the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and Planck’s constant, and they’re…

Many people are afraid of things without good reason. Phobias – irrational fears such as a fear of spiders or enclosed spaces – are commonplace and familiar. 

They’re deemed irrational because the average person in the modern world has…

“LIGO is this huge thing that thousands of people have been thinking about deeply for 40 years,” said Aephraim Steinberg, an expert on quantum optics at the University of Toronto. “They’ve thought of everything they could have, and…

The people of the ancient Incan empire kept careful records of their economics, religion, demographics and history. Those records took the form of knotted cords called khipus.

Until now, researchers believed that the only people who knew how…