“Balloons. That’s right. Balloons,” says the voice of a young girl in a video for Google’s latest endeavor: bringing the world online with massive balloons. The initiative, called Project Loon, comes from Google X, the experimental lab within the company whose sole purpose is to dream up big, borderline insane, ideas. Google X created self-driving [...]
Read More...Watch Researchers Discover a Sunken Egyptian City
Thonis, the legendary port city that served as an entryway to the Egyptian empire, was long considered to be a myth. The tales of its immense power and vast riches conflicted with the evidence of its existence—mainly that there was none. Cities of such grandeur do not typically disappear off the face of the earth. [...]
Read More...“I Am The Nucleus” and Other Bizarre Quotes By Kanye West
Kanye West says the darndest things. On his unrelenting quest to become his own species of hip-hop artist, he has established a reputation as irreverent, controversial, and unapologetic. Though he makes time for public grandstanding by claiming a US President “doesn’t care about black people” or interrupting the VMAs, he remains mostly quiet when it [...]
Read More...50 Charities, 10 Years, $1 Billion Wasted
In Holiday, Florida, sits a warehouse. From the outside, it looks like nothing special, but as a joint investigative report from the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered, inside is one of the most useless charity in America: Kids Wish Network. For every dollar it raises, a mere 3 cents goes [...]
Read More...Different Names For The Same Thing: The Regional Words That Divide Us
American English is a unique beast. Taken from British English and then purposefully tweaked to be different, the American variation has itself taken on diverse forms. We know this, of course, but you might not have realized just how pronunciations remain. As new data visualizations from Joshua Katz of NC State University (based on data [...]
Read More...In Ten Years, When We Talk To Our Pets, They’ll Talk Back
In 1998 Eddie Murphy did what most humans only dream about, he talked to animals, and they talked back. While Doctor Dolittle is a treasure mostly reserved for your memories, the idea of chatting with pets isn’t such an absurdity. The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber spoke with Con Slobodchikoff, a a professor emeritus at Northern Arizona [...]
Read More...Intergalactic Pin-Ups: The Galaxies Next Door Get High-Res Glamour Shots
“Well hey, good looking,” is a line I seldom use unless I am chatting up neighboring galaxies. Thanks to NASA’s ultraviolet survey, two of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbors the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds have been photographed and mapped, and though they look stunning, as galaxies are want to do, they are way out [...]
Read More...Grow Into Happiness
You know the situation, or at least you might remember it: as you’re just about to go out for the night, your parents are tucking themselves into bed. You look back and wonder how they could be content with spending the night watching Law & Order: SVU—how could they be happy with something so boring? [...]
Read More...How Beavers Became Fish
Taxonomy (the technique of classification is a science, but in practice, it becomes a lot trickier. Recall only a couple years ago when Congress notoriously chose to classify pizza in school lunches as a vegetable item. This was a convenient classification because pizza provided a grain serving and was smeared with tomato sauce—tomatoes being a [...]
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When in Rome… Make Better Concrete: How An Ancient Mix Beats Today’s Best
From the Hoover Dam and the Burj Khalifa to the Panama Canal, concrete underlies the greatest of modern architectural achievements. But modern concrete, it seems, doesn’t hold a candle to Ancient Rome’s. A little history for you: the Romans were the first to engineer concrete in mass, and it was upon this concrete that they [...]
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