What do you consider space food? In the Apollo era, astronauts ate freeze-dried, cube-shaped delicacies such as shrimp cocktail and date fruitcake, which proved entirely adequate. Apollo 8 crew member Jim Lovell was quoted as saying “Happiness is bacon squares for breakfast” while midway to the moon in 1968. Visitors to the International Space Station typically
If you ever thought your houseplants might be plotting against you, you could be right. There is mounting evidence that plants can communicate internally and with each other. “I think we’re seeing that the complexity [of communication] is just as great with plants as it is with animals,” says Mamta Rawat, a microbiologist and program
So much of our health seems to come back to strong teeth and gums. To some people, this could sound disingenuous. What could be a connection between what happens in your mouth and the rest of your body? Consider this scenario: A chronic infection settles into your gums. Since your gums are living tissue nourished
From the fertile minds of scientists comes another off-the-wall question: Exactly what is the nature of the universe? Or even more out of this world: Could we really be living in a hologram? This topic has come up due to a recent experiment. Physicists used Google’s Sycamore 2 quantum computer to create a “baby” wormhole. The
Something you probably haven’t considered recently: just how many times can a sheet of paper be folded? Conventional wisdom says about seven times, maybe eight, because the more times a sheet is folded, the thicker it gets. Once the resulting stack becomes thicker than it is long, it can no longer be folded. Consider a
Good news for the environment: recently a startup company in Chile, Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF), opened its first synthetic gasoline production facility. HIF was organized to run the plant, which is a collaboration among Porsche, Siemens Energy, Exxon Mobil, Enel Green Power, the Chilean state energy company ENAP, and Empresas Gasco. The plant will begin operating
Biology has posed an interesting question: Why are there two pods of orcas, or killer whales, that live off the coast of the American Northwest — one off British Columbia’s Vancouver Island and one further south off Washington State — that are of the same species but show different behaviors? The Vancouver orcas like to
It’s one of those unanswerable questions of the modern age. With so many stars in the Milky Way (not to mention all the stars in nearby galaxies) with the potential for tens of billions of planets, the odds of intelligent life existing somewhere are pretty high. Yet in all recorded history, no confirmed contact with
In the spirit of Halloween, have you ever heard of the Meguro Parasitological Museum? If you haven’t, that’s understandable. First, it’s a private research facility specializing in parasites. Second, it’s in the Meguro Ward in central Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1953 by Dr. Satoru Kamegai, the collection boasts over 45,000 immersed and prepared parasite specimens, including
As children, it was fun to imagine how animals could be combined. And we knew it was possible — a mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. But animal “hybrids” are actually more common than you might think. In nature, animals can breed with difference species populations and different subspecies,
