By now, you’ve probably seen the satirical posts where someone claims to have “forced a bot” to watch thousands of hours of video and then write their own script. The posts are funny, but if you haven’t realized, they’re jokes that don’t quite encapsulate how artificial intelligence works.
Weather is probably harder to understand than particle physics, given the numerous complexities that influence Earth’s atmosphere. But one researcher has published a controversial new paper that examines just how much high-energy, interstellar particles can affect Earth’s climate.
Every day it seems another natural disaster could bring about the apocalypse. Volcanoes. Earthquakes. Hurricanes. Sometimes that list includes asteroids. But despite exaggerated headlines from the usual suspects, there’s no need to worry about the latest nearby asteroid approach.
Imagine if someone came to your house to fix your pipes, then stumbled around your yard blindly with a pair of sticks. Now imagine if you called the company they worked for whose rep said “yep, sometimes that’s how we look for pipes.”
When you hear something is chock-full of antioxidants, the mental conclusion is often: That’s it—that’s the elixir of life, I have to eat a lot of that. But why do we all assume that loading up on anti-oxidants will somehow be the key to infinite youth?
One nice thing about teddy bears is that if your dog tears the head off of your child’s favorite one, you can just sew it back on. But you don’t proclaim your achievement a “wild success”—rather, you say, “here, I have fixed your lifeless play-thing.”
Three decades ago, scientists began to study the possibility that there was a plume of hot rock coming up from the mantle, heating parts of Western Antarctica. Back in September, researchers published results of a model showing how such a plume might affect the Antarctic ice sheet. Today, these headlines started to…
Researchers from Sweden made headlines last week after claiming to have found the Arabic characters for “Allah” and “Ali” woven into Viking burial costumes. The discovery suggested a more intimate cultural relationship between the Vikings and the Arab world, but some experts are now questioning key assertions made by…
If you agitate cream enough, you will make whipped cream. Continue agitating it and skim off the liquid, and you will make butter. Put that in your coffee, and you have now wasted a lot of energy to put cream into your coffee.
It would be really nice if something you could just go to CVS and buy off a shelf unequivocally had some massive health benefit. But the world does not work that way, and neither does science. There are an array of caveats, and layers of complexity, attached to nearly every health study you see sensationalized and…
Dietary supplements don’t need to do anything, by definition. Tons of them don’t. That might sound strange, since half of Americans take a vitamin or mineral supplement daily. But there are in fact, reasons to take some of them. Let’s say you eat nothing but ground beef, Cheerios and Dr. Pepper every day. My…
Lots of people went wild last month at the news that scientists had suddenly discovered some sort of physics holy grail: metallic hydrogen, hydrogen that turned into a metal. Gizmodo didn’t buy the hype. Well, according to ScienceAlert, that metal hydrogen sample has now disappeared.
You most certainly know someone taking fish oil pills—those fishy, translucent gold capsules—for their purported heart benefits. But evidence continues to mount that fish oil might be snake oil. At the very least, it doesn’t pack nearly the punch we once thought. Instead, it’s probably just worth eating actual fish,…
You may have read today that the entire universe is a giant hologram. Maybe your mind was blown while you hit your Big Bong and contemplated a 2D universe, or that researchers had somehow found substantial evidence you were “living in an illusion.”
I know that you want to get healthy this year, because it’s the most popular New Year’s resolution. Plenty of people want to help you, too, with everything from diet tips to exercise suggestions. They’ll tell you to make some lifestyle changes, to download a new app, or even to buy a wearable fitness tracker (those …
Earlier this week, news made the rounds that an Australian woman gave birth to twins conceived ten days apart, in an extremely rare case of “superfetation.” To make matters more intriguing, the woman had polycystic ovary syndrome, meaning her body doesn’t ovulate naturally. Apparently, she underwent a hormone…
Brain-training programs like the ones offered by Luminosity and LearningRx claim to boost intelligence and even offset the effects of aging. A re-evaluation of the existing scientific literature on the matter shows these claims are complete bullshit.
NASA did not just rewrite the zodiac chart. But here’s why so many people are convinced that the agency did—and the real story behind the rumor.
