Science

Why does the dark side of the moon look so very different from the side that faces the Earth? There’s a new theory that has gained acceptance, and it’s not at all obvious. A terrific read for a Sunday.

Ever wonder what makes you fall asleep, or puts you out when you get anesthesia?

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn’t respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed.

Read the rest. Fantastic!

[VIDEO] We’ve posted about the evolution of the World Cup soccer ball and just what makes those balls curve.

The original post has a compilation of some amazing bending shots that show that physics at work. Fantastic!

You probably have an instinct on what makes a ball curve, but there’s more to it than that:

Given an absolutely smooth ball, the direction of the curve may reverse: The same kicking motion will not produce a shot or pass curving in a right-to-left direction, but in a left-to-right direction.

Interesting read.

Dengue is a scourge of a disease. It’s spread by mosquitos and kills more than a million people every year.

The disease is carried by mosquitoes, mostly the Aedes aegypti. Found in urban areas, Ae. aegypti has proven a particularly difficult mosquito species to control—it has developed a resistance to common insecticides and, because it bites during the day, bed nets are no protection against it. But now Brazilian health officials are running a pilot program using genetically modified mosquitoes to breed the population to death. The mosquitoes are the invention of British biotech company Oxitec, and they’ve had a gene inserted into them that kills them. In the lab, the mosquitoes can be fed a sort of antidote: a supplement that keeps them alive until it’s time to release them. Once they’re released, the clock starts ticking.

Oxitec’s mosquito-suppression solution consists of releasing the modified male mosquitoes into the wild—male mosquitoes don’t bite; it’s the females who do. The Oxitec males mate with female mosquitoes and create progeny that also have the lethal gene. Without the supplement, those progeny die. “By applying the Oxitec Control Programme to an area,” the company’s website says, “the mosquito population in that area can be dramatically reduced or eliminated.”

Remarkable. Here’s hoping this works, with no hidden consequences.

A large number of doctors and med students use Wikipedia as a reference. If Wikipedia was regularly vetted for mistakes, or had editing limited to trusted experts in specific fields, this might not be a problem.

They printed off the articles on 25 April 2012 to analyse, and discovered that 90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research.

Yikes.

[VIDEO] I’ve read a lot about this highly hyped material. But what is it?

Watch the video in the original post. Best, most understandable explanation I’ve yet seen.

Ever wondered how a laser works? Follow the link. It does get a bit technical, but I found it to be reasonably understandable and incredibly fascinating.

[VIDEO] By far, the largest cost in a rocket launch is the cost of the rocket itself. By making the first stage of the rocket reusable, Space X can drop the price of a rocket launch from the traditional $100-$250 million all the way down to $55 million. That number will likely drop even further as reusability improves over time.

Ultimately, reusability will bring the cost low enough to make the Mars Colonial Transporter (another Space X project) a reality.

The video embedded in the main post was shot with a hexacopter. One of the keys to reusability is having the booster separation occur early enough in the launch so the rocket is still moving relatively slowly. Amazing to watch.

Interesting problem. To me, the answer depends on whether one of them is Jean Luc Picard.

Just thinking about the process of making my way down this map both scared me and filled me with wonder. I would love the chance to dive this cave. At least virtually.

[VIDEO] This was astonishing. One of those things that seem to defy the laws of physics. The whole thing is interesting, but if you just want the shiny bits, skip ahead to about 2:00, where the real action starts. Wow.

SCIENCE!