Where Does the Light Go When You Shut it Off?

light-bulb
It seems like a basic enough question, but when you realize that energy can’t be created or destroyed, things get less obvious fast. The knee-jerk reaction is to say that the light gets absorbed into the walls, but how? What does it even mean to say that light gets “absorbed?” Photon: The Particle That Didn’t Exist If you’ve [...]

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Why You Can’t Remember Things You Know

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If I showed you a picture of an obscure person from your past, there’s a good chance you’d remember them, and even be able to tell me something about them. But if I asked you to sit down and write a list of all the people you knew, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t remember that person? Why? Your Brain is Not a Computer Let’s [...]

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How Does Gravity “Escape” a Black Hole?

black-hole
Black holes are often described as collapsed stars with such an intense gravitational pull that nothing can escape. This begs the question: “How does gravity ‘escape’ the black hole in the first place?” What Space Elevators With Rocket Engines Can Tell us About Gravity After Einstein pieced together the theory of special [...]

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Burnt Out: What Spit Tests and Brain Scans Tell Us

burnt-out
Some estimates put the number of North Americans and Europeans suffering from burnout at about ten percent. The word “burnout” might sound like flimsy psychobabble, but science is showing us differences between the brains of people suffering from it, and those who don’t. Some call it exhaustion depression, and others call it work [...]

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What Does Memory Have to Do With Intelligence?

chess
How much does our intelligence rely on our ability to hold ideas in our mind? It turns out memory and intelligence are very closely related, to the point that some have questioned if they could be the same thing. Show Me Working Memory and I’ll Show You Intelligence? In the early 1990s, a series of studies conducted by Kyllonen and [...]

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