Robbie Gonzalez

Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics has an awesome roundup of fluids research that’s been recognized with an Ig Nobel Prize. Past winners include a study on why coffee spills when you walk, and another on pressures involved in penguin defecation. Check out the full list at FYFD!

What if you got blackout drunk every time you binged on carbs?

Yes, it’s possible. It’s called auto-brewery syndrome, and it happens when your stomach gets infected with Saccharomyces cerevisiae – the go-to yeast for brewers of beer. Top image by Ferran Jordà via Flickr Over at NPR, Michaeleen Doucleff tells the story of a 61-year-old man who recently arrived at a Texas emergency room with an…

Here’s why everybody is freaking out about methane on Mars

After almost a year of searching, NASA’s Curiosity rover has turned up no traces of the four-pronged hydrocarbon known as methane. This special molecule is regarded by many as a chemical signature of past or present life on the red planet. That means there’s no life on Mars, right? Wrong. Life on Mars? First and…

And now, an otter tossing a rock between its paws

In the future, when dictionary definitions are supplemented with looping animations, the word “frivolity” will almost certainly be accompanied by a clip of this otter at Sea Life Oberhausen in Germany, playing with a rock and generally enjoying life. Laughing Squid called what this otter is doing “juggling,” which, sure, it’s the cutest thing we’ve…

A black widow story that’ll make you shake out your sheets tonight

Inspired by Jackson Landers’s recent piece on black widows at The New York Times, It’s Okay to be Smart’s Joe Hanson decided to relate the story of his own harrowing encounter with the iconic arachnid. “It’s all true,” he writes. “This happened fifteen years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday.” Top photo…

Vintage NASA spacesuit photos are delightfully trippy

Seriously, is this what space psychosis looks like? Writes stacythinx: These vintage NASA space suit test photos from the San Diego Air and Science Museum Archive on Flickr look like they could have been shot on the set of a music video. Taken from a music video, or the mind of someone suffering from a…

Why is it so impossible to get out of bed in the morning?

Is it just laziness, or does the daily struggle to rouse yourself stem from something more serious? So you had some trouble getting out of bed today. Maybe you spent yesterday moving furniture into your new top-floor apartment, and your body really needed an extra hour’s rest. Or perhaps you chose the warmth of your…

What’s it like to soar through the Chamonix Valley on an eagle’s back?

We’re so glad you asked. This video – shot by an eagle with a camera mounted on its back – gives us a spellbinding look at what it’s like to wheel gracefully over the Mer de Glace in Chamonix, France. Good grief, talk about a stunning view. You’ll want to watch this one in full…

This graph of Boulder’s year-to-date rainfall is just staggering

In Colorado, rainfall characterized by the National Weather Service as “biblical” has left thousands homeless, hundreds missing and at least eight people dead. Among the hardest-hit cities has been Boulder, which last week catapulted from a dry spell into its wettest year on record in the span of just five days. http://gawker.com/more-than-2000-people-missing-as-flooding-continues-in-1313413960/1314940238@MaxRivlinNadler http://gawker.com/1-200-people-missing-as-devastating-floods-continue-in-1324051670 Via Climate…

Scientists have finally sequenced the tiger genome!

For the first time, scientists have sequenced the genome of a tiger. And not just any tiger, but a Siberian tiger – the world’s largest living felid. The researchers’ just-published report includes a comparative analysis of the sequence with those of several other big cats, revealing molecular signatures for adaptations ranging from the Siberian Tiger’s…

Professional pickpocket Apollo Robbins on the art of misdirection

Sleight-of-hand artist Apollo Robbins steals things for a living. In this captivating TED video, he explains how treating people’s attention as a limited resource keeps him employed. For more from Robbins on the nature of human attention, see his instructional video on how to steal someone’s watch. https://gizmodo.com/pickpocket-master-apollo-robbins-reveals-how-to-steal-s-5975788 [Via TED]

Nobody knows how these mysterious ridges formed on the surface of Mars

Planetary scientists studying photos of Mars’s ever-changing landscape have discovered a stunning formation of bedrock ridges near the planet’s equator, inside Schiaparelli Crater – but how they formed remains a mystery. https://gizmodo.com/high-resolution-images-of-mars-reveal-a-stunning-wind-5879398 The images you see here come by way of NASA’s stunningly powerful HiRISE camera. Researchers were originally drawn to Schiaparelli by the circumferential…

The CDC Warns of the Impending “Post-Antibiotic Era”

Speaking at a media briefing for the Centers for Disease Control’s first-ever report on “the burden and threats posed by the antibiotic-resistant germs,” CDC director Tom Frieden offered these sobering words of warning about the future of medical microbiology. https://gizmodo.com/can-we-avoid-an-antibiotic-apocalypse-472657488 Top image modified from the CDC’s report on drug-resistant tuberculosis Over at Superbug, Maryn McKenna…

This physics grad student made a mind-blowing Bohemian Rhapsody cover

Question: What do you get when you mix a cappella, sock puppets, string theory and Queen? Answer: The geekiest (and astonishingly good, musically speaking) cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” EVAR. Easily the greatest physics-themed cover of the classic we’ve ever heard. Seriously. The thing’s a masterpiece. To be fair, “Bohemian Gravity” may well be the only…

The Entire History of the American Civil War, in One Gorgeous Chart

From the Library of Congress’s digital collection comes this mind-numbingly comprehensive visual summary of The War Between the States. The chart hews to the informationally ambitious “Scaife Synoptical Method” (named after Arthur Hodgkin Scaife – an apparent data-visualization maven in post-Reconstruction America), which attempts to convey everything pertaining to the war – from its major…

Watch this dancer do battle with a beam of light

Feast your eyes on Nuance, a captivating short by artist Marc-Antoine Locatelli that features dancer Lucas Boirat interacting with an ever-morphing army of frenetic photons. On second thought, it’s hard to tell from the video whether Boirat is dancing with the light, or fighting it with everything he’s got. Either way, the precision with which…

Behold, the Moon as you’ve never seen it before

If something about this animation strikes you as unfamiliar, don’t worry, you’re not imagining things; though the Moon does rotate about its axis as it orbits Earth, you’ve never in your life seen it spin quite like this. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, forever hiding one of its faces from those of us…

Another ten bets you’ll (almost) never lose

From Quirkology’s Richard Wiseman comes another roundup of pub tricks that you can use to impress and/or vex your friends. As with Wiseman’s previous tricks, a lot of these are actually pretty clever (bet #2, for instance, relies on the creation of a partial vacuum, and bet #4 on an implementation of Bernoulli’s principle), while…

Everything’s not lost: America’s youth are living healthier lifestyles

Close to 100 million Americans are obese, making the U.S. the fattest country in the developed world. But while the AMA recently declared obesity a disease, the country’s youth actually appear to be eating better and exercising more, according to a report published today in the journal Pediatrics. https://gizmodo.com/fat-maps-show-where-the-obesity-epidemic-has-hit-the-5934298 https://gizmodo.com/the-american-medical-association-has-declared-obesity-a-517862216 Top photo by KG Sand…

A webcomic about tar that will make you tear up

Late last month, Professor John Mainstone, who for more than half a century oversaw the University of Queensland, Australia’s famous Pitch Drop experiment, passed away. Science cartoonist Maki Naro’s tribute to the late scientist is just perfect. Writes Naro on his website: Most tragically, Mainstone died without ever catching the experiment at the moment a…