January 28, 2015 Medical Science
Each human tongue contains an average of roughly 10,000 chemoreceptors. These microscopic hair-like nerve endings, called microvilli, are encapsulated in a protective envelope on a short stalk, called papillae. These buds sense chemicals in food, giving them their flavor. These…
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January 27, 2015 Medical Science
In technical anatomical terms, what is commonly known as the arm is really the “upper limb”. Of course, everyone is intimately aware of their arms. We use them before we are even aware of what they are. Arms, and the…
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January 27, 2015 Social Science
The true independents of society are few and far between. It takes a certain callousness to be able to weigh what is seen without automatically fitting it into prior constraints, be they of societal norms or of how we wish…
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January 27, 2015 Medical Science
How smell works Humans can distinguish about 10,000 different odors (for comparison, a dog or a rat can distinguish somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000). The details of how we do this were a mystery until the 1990s, and the people…
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January 27, 2015 Physical Science
Chinese physicists have attained another milestone with another great leap forward in teleportation. A team of scientists successfully broke all previous records by teleporting photons a distance of 62 miles. Their achievement is outlined in the paper “Teleporting Independent Qubits…
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January 27, 2015 Physical Science
Microwaves are common in every home, and are used to cook or defrost all manner of foods. But there are actually a lot more things that they can do for us, which most people don’t seem to know about. For…
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January 27, 2015 Physical Science
“Building Your Own Laser” A laser is defined as an optical device which emits a beam of light radiation. Unlike light from other natural and artificial sources, a laser is monochromatic, meaning it only casts light of a very specific…
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January 27, 2015 Social Science
The psychology behind volunteering is more complex than one might imagine. Obviously people believe that giving is good, and indeed it is, though there is a fine balancing act between what really is volunteering, and what is self-sacrifice or even…
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January 27, 2015 Physical Science
In physics, charge, also known as electric charge or electrostatic charge and symbolized q, is a characteristic of a unit of matter that expresses the extent to which it has more or fewer electrons than protons. In atoms, the electron…
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January 27, 2015 Physical Science
Most scientists aren’t household names, but Albert Einstein was one-of-a-kind. He became a worldwide celebrity not just for his work in physics, but also for his personality. People’s image of the friendly, absent-minded science professor with sloppy hair that’s all…
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