Our planet is sometimes called the big blue marble, but Professor Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland-Baltimore has a hypothesis that suggests if you look way back in time, Earth may have once been bright purple. Plus: meet a guitar with LEDs built into its body that can flash in time with the music.
There are lots of human efforts to help bees out, but there’s also some new research out that says bees help themselves by taking steps to get plants to flower earlier than usual. Plus: a man in Canada ordered hair cream in 2012, and it just arrived this month. Patience is a virtue!
Washington State University has a Sensory Science Lab that tests all the ways we encounter what we eat and how that can affect how we think it tastes. Now they’re testing whether different kinds of music can affect how we think about chocolate. Plus: this weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina, there’s a chance to go out on a bar crawl that’s like none other.
Researchers at Purdue University have managed to spin a very tiny object at the ungodly rate of 300 billion revolutions per minute - and it's powered only by light. Plus: Google Maps allows users to rate and review rivers, lakes and anywhere else that people want to go. So what's the best-reviewed river Earth has to offer?
On National Peanut Butter Day, a reminder that peanut butter is so versatile it can be turned into diamonds. It actually takes more time to explain why you can turn peanut butter into diamonds than to explain how. Plus: this weekend in McCall, Idaho, the Idaho State Snow Sculpting Championships are taking place.
Researchers at Penn State University have created liquid-entrenched smooth surface, or LESS. Why? To coat our toilets. Why? So stuff can't stick to them. Why? To save water, which we use by the tens of billions of gallons each day just to re-flush that stuck stuff. Why? Because life is unfair sometimes. Plus: Twitter minus words, videos, pictures and links is a pretty amazing thing, judging by the project called Emoji Storm!
The nefarious filbertworm is trying to infest our hazelnut supply! Researchers at the University of Oregon think the solution might lie with pigs. Plus: the Ebo is a little ball-shaped robot that will play with your cat when you're not home.
A project in Russia tracks the movements of steppe eagles through trackers that can send text messages back to research HQ about their whereabouts. There's one problem: the eagles have been crossing into other countries and their trackers are using roaming data!
Researchers may have finally solved the long-running mystery of what the Loch Ness Monster is. What Nessie is not is the thing that is in the picture you’ll most likely see when you search for “Loch Ness Monster” on the internet.
Do people still say “look, it’s Halley’s Comet” as a distraction, or is that over for the next 40 years or so?
