Why You Can’t Use Pepsi Points To Get A Fighter Jet
A guy tried to use a huge number of points in a Pepsi reward program to buy a fighter jet, which the soda maker had jokingly offered in one of its ads. It didn't work, but still, an A for effort.
The Fabric With A Built-In Cooling System
Maybe everyone in junior high was right: the clothes you wear really can make you cool! At least if those clothes are the new fabric developed in China with a kind of cooling system embedded inside.
Scientists Are Putting Little Cameras On Beetles
Researchers at the University of Washington call it a "GoPro for beetles" - a ultralight, wireless, steerable camera that can ride on the back of a bug. And it's pretty effective at letting us see what these bugs see.
Humans Actually Do Perk Up Their Ears At Interesting Noises
Our entire show is based on the idea that we might say something interesting enough that it might get you to perk up your ears, figuratively speaking. Or, as a team at Saarland University has found, maybe not so figuratively speaking.
Earth Might Have Been Purple Back In The Day
Our planet is sometimes called the big blue marble, but there's a hypothesis that suggests if you look way back in time, Earth may have once been bright purple.
Bees Doing It For Themselves
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.
Do Chocolates Taste Better With The Right Music?
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.
Here’s A Tiny Particle That Spins Faster Than Anything That’s Ever Spun
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.
Scientists Can Make Diamonds Out Of Peanut Butter
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.
To Save Water, Sometimes LESS Is More
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.