Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Sky Blue but the Sunset Orange?
The same sky and the same sunlight give us a blue afternoon and an orange evening, and the difference comes down to how tiny air molecules toss light around.
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Everything filed under physics.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
A Fluffy White Cloud Weighs About as Much as a Hundred Elephants
The small cumulus drifting over your garden is carrying roughly five hundred tonnes of water, and it stays up there for a reason that has nothing to do with being light.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Can You Hear Whether Water Is Hot or Cold?
With your back turned you can usually tell a hot pour from a cold one, and the tidy explanation everybody repeats may have the whole thing the wrong way round.
Fact-based Kitchen Science
Every Popcorn Kernel Is a Tiny Pressure Cooker
A popcorn kernel pops because the water sealed inside it turns to steam, and when physicists filmed the moment, they found the pop sound is not the shell cracking at all.
Fiction Made-Up Words
Seatecho
(n.) The lingering warmth of a seat recently vacated by a stranger, which is somehow far less welcome than a cold seat, even on the coldest day of the year.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Teaspoon of Neutron Star Would Weigh a Billion Tons
Squeeze more than the mass of our Sun into a ball the size of a city and you get a neutron star, where a single teaspoonful of matter would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
Fiction Useless Inventions
The Heritage Tangling Case
A handsome leather pouch for your old wired headphones that, with the help of a tiny motor, ties them into a proper knot overnight, just like they used to do by themselves.
Fact-based Kitchen Science
Why a Pot of Pasta Boils Over When a Pot of Water Never Does
Plain water can bubble away for an hour and stay politely in its pot, but drop in some pasta and a white foam climbs the sides, because starch turns ordinary bubbles into a stretchy blanket.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
A Gecko's Toes Showed Scientists How to Stick Without Glue
A gecko can hang from a glass ceiling on perfectly dry feet, and once scientists looked at the whole foot rather than just its tiny hairs, they built a pad that grips like one.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Lightning Does Strike the Same Place Twice
The old saying is wrong: tall, pointy, isolated things are struck again and again, and New York's Empire State Building takes an average of 23 hits a year.