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The internet is full of videos of thoughtful people setting things on fire. Here’s a perennial favorite: Cleave a grape in half, leaving a little skin connecting the two hemispheres. Blitz it in the microwave for five seconds. For one glorious moment, the grape halves will produce a fireball unfit for domestic life. Physicist Stephen…

Inside an 80-foot-tall chamber on Lockheed Martin’s Denver-area campus, backgrounded by red-rock ridges, stands a hulking spacecraft. You have to crane your neck to see the top of the apparatus. At the bottom, wires spew from a porthole to snake up and down and away. The cylindrical structure flows into a duller, funnel-like cone, which…

If you were to boil all of biology down to a simple equation, it would be that DNA makes RNA, which makes proteins, which are what make every living thing you can see, smell, touch, and taste (and a lot of things you can’t). This central dogma of biology, built on strings of Cs, Gs,…

In Morocco there grows a cactus-like plant that’s so hot, I have to insist that the next few sentences aren’t hyperbole. On the Scoville Scale of hotness, its active ingredient, resiniferatoxin, clocks in at 16 billion units. That’s 10,000 times hotter than the Carolina reaper, the world’s hottest pepper, and 45,000 times hotter than the…

In a lab at the University of Florida, researchers are giving male jumping spiders a makeover. After knocking them unconscious for a few minutes with carbon dioxide, the scientists paint the bright-red faces of Habronattus pyrrithrix black with liquid eyeliner, or stick false eyelashes to the heads of Maevia inclemens with Elmer’s glue. Welcome to…

Two weeks ago, Hurricane Florence slammed into the Carolinas, unleashing six months of rain in a matter of hours. In inland Cumberland County, the Cape Fear River rose 40 feet1, inundating Fayetteville with the worst flooding the city has seen since 1945. But as the waters receded and citizens returned to their ruined homes, a…

Electronics often don’t mesh well with flesh and blood. Cochlear implants can irritate the scalp; pacemaker wires dislodge; VR headsets weigh heavily on the face. That’s why, for the past six years, Michael McAlpine has been Frankensteining alternatives. A mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota, he creates prototypes of bionic body parts with nice,…

Surely the Greeks weren't the first to ponder the nature of the universe. Just think about it. Aristotle and his friends were having discussions about physics in the 350 BC time frame. But beer and wine were first created thousands of years before that. Thousands. It seems plausible that there were some other humans sitting…

Click:小型辦公室 Suppose you are an astronaut out in space. You have nothing with you except your wits and … a fire extinguisher? Why a fire extinguisher? Because that's what Sandra Bullock's character has in the movie Gravity. Because a fire extinguisher shoots out gas (normally to put out a fire), it can also be used…

This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Americans love chicken, but it doesn’t always love us back. We eat way more of it than any other meat, and it triggers more foodborne disease outbreak-related illnesses than any other food, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and…