(Credit: Valentyna Chukhlyebova/Shutterstock) Superman was the Man of Steel. We can’t possibly be like him. But guess what? Ounce for ounce, our bones are stronger than steel. So why are people always breaking them? It’s because bones are also light and flexible, and the physics behind the speed and angle of blows make mincemeat of strength measures. That’s why a karate expert can break brick with his hand, but might also break a finger after slipping on ice. Chest compressio ...read more

An example of a Turing structure. (Credit: L. Yang and I.R. Epstein/Youtube) Water, it’s safe to say, is pretty important. A key necessity for life to flourish, the substance is also chemically important, the “universal solvent” that enables many familiar reactions. Also, we need to drink it or we die. It’s becoming an increasing concern. South Africa’s Cape Town barely managed to push back its “Day Zero,” when taps would literally run dry, into 2019. ...read more

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(Credit: Shutterstock) Here’s a sentence.  Here’s another one.  Notice anything? If you’re like me, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. Using two spaces after a sentence seems to serve no other purpose today than to signify that the typist probably learned their keyboard skills in another era. And it’s pretty annoying, to boot. Nevertheless, there’s a minority of purist (or simply contrarian) keyboard warriors who hold that the two-space r ...read more

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, as photographed by Galileo. (Credit: NASA/JPL) Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, is colossal. It’s bigger than Mercury or Pluto and boasts bright auroras, along with a unique magnetic field. Much of what we know about the moon comes from the Galileo spacecraft’s flybys of Ganymede in the 1990s. But a lot of information from the NASA mission has yet to be published. A magnetosphere, or the area where a planetary body’s magnetic field is dominant, i ...read more

A representation of a blastoid, which is a synthetic embryo formed in the lab, from stem cells. The green cells are the trophoblast stem cells (the future placenta), whereas the red cells are the embryonic stem cells (the future embryo). (Credit: Nicolas Rivron) Studying human development — especially the earliest stages of pregnancy — can be a tricky thing. Usually, scientists need embryos to examine these early stages. The problem is, embryos are an expensive, limited resour ...read more

Researchers say cut and percussion marks on a rhino suggest a hominin presence in the Philippines more than 700,000 years ago, ten times earlier than previously known. (Credit Ignicco et al 2018, 10.1038/s41586-018-0072-8) More than 700,000 years ago, in what’s now the north end of the Philippines, a hominin (or a whole bunch of them) butchered a rhino, systematically cracking open its bones to access the nutritious marrow within, according to a new study. There’s just one ...read more

He believes this is more than a trivial distinction. Our clothing has as much as 20 square feet of external surface area, touching nearly every part of the body. That means a piezoelectric textile could potentially hear our surroundings, sense our movements and monitor internal organs, such as our heart and lungs, with unprecedented fidelity. It could also generate energy as we walk. And piezoelectricity is only one of many electronic capacities Fink’s lab is systematically mastering. Mich ...read more

The longest sea route possible. Confused as to why it’s curved? Check this out. (Credit: B. Chabukswar et al) When your reddit debate spurs a scientific paper, you know it’s a good one. Back in 2012, reddit user kepleronlyknows posted a map to the r/MapPorn subreddit purporting to show the longest straight line you could sail around the planet without encountering land. It ran from Pakistan to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, barely scraping by the east coast of Africa and tunne ...read more