Mutations pop up all over the place, but our redundant chromosomes help blunt this effect. By avoiding inbreeding, a population reduces the odds that rare and harmful mutations will pop up at the same place on both sides of the chromosome.
The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.
Statistically, your first neutrino interaction probably happens somewhere around age ten.
Our most lasting relic will probably be the layer of plastic we’ve deposited across the planet.
Eventually, humans will die out. Nobody knows when,12 but nothing lives forever.
A 1-watt laser is an extremely dangerous thing. It’s not just powerful enough to blind you – it’s capable of burning skin and setting things on fire.
Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium and the wolf was like, “dude.
It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.
However, the tests still suggest that nuclear weapons probably don’t make great bottle openers.
From 1960 into the 21st century, Pennsylvania has voted for five different people named Bob Casey.
Anyone who says that they’re great at communicating but ‘people are bad at listening’ is confused about how communication works.
There’s no nondestructive test for indestructibility.
Physics doesn’t care if your question is weird. It just gives you the answer, without judging.
This is a completely ridiculous suggestion, so it should come as no surprise that it was studied by the US government during the Cold War.
In Thor the main character is at one point spinning his hammer so fast that he creates a strong tornado. Would this be possible in real life?
If a Venus fly trap could eat a person, about how long would it take for the human to be fully de-juiced and absorbed?
Hello! This is a book of bad ideas.
I really love that we can ask physics ridiculous questions like, “What kind of gas mileage would my house get on the highway?” and physics has to answer us.
To this day I have no idea where I got “3 billion” and “5 billion” from. Clearly, I didn’t really get how numbers worked.
It might seem confusing that someone navigating toward Earth’s north pole would be attracted to the MRI’s south pole, but that’s because the Earth’s pole names are backward. The “north” end of a magnet is the one that points toward the Earth’s north pole, which means the Earth’s north magnetic pole is technically a south magnetic pole, and vice versa. This is deeply annoying to me, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well move on.
Removing Japan would also have a big effect on ocean currents.