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 [...]
I talked about why it’s easier for us to recognize something than it is to remember it, even though the information is clearly sitting in our brain somewhere. A 13-story asteroid passed closer than our satellites today. Biotechnology transforms a bacterium into a living computer. Are we witnessing the birth of a black hole first hand [...]
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 [...]
Earth-like planets are everywhere. Kepler discovers another 461 potentially habitable planets, bumping the total count up to 2,740, and estimating a total 17 billion of them in the Milky Way. Australian wind energy is now cheaper than coal. African physicists develop the world’s first digital laser, which would allow the [...]
I discussed why gravity doesn’t need to escape a black hole in order to work. Using an evolutionary algorithm, Northwestern University developed an efficient solar cell that would trap more light due to its shape. The design is so effective that it outperforms the theoretical limit three times over. Meanwhile, Norwegians produce a [...]
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 [...]
Tons of breakthroughs in genetic science this week, possible new physics, astronomers getting ready to snap a picture of our galaxy’s black hole, and more. I talked about the science of burnout, what brain scans and spit tests can tell us about tired overachievers. More than a double helix: four-stranded segments of DNA also exist in [...]
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 [...]
Yet another series of shocking discoveries this week: I discussed the incredible overlap between memory and intelligence, and the controversy over whether intelligence can be trained. Scientists discovered the first “solar powered” vertebrate. A commercially scalable way of producing carbon nanotube fibers has been presented. At [...]
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 [...]
