Category: Weird Science

We’ve all seen movies and TV shows over the years that give us a glimpse at what life on Earth would be like if we lost all power and our electronics were inoperable. What you might not know is that in 2012, only a single week separated humanity from a potentially devastating solar event that might have made such a scenario reality.

A group of scientists unearthed a massive bird fossil in South Carolina 30 years ago, and it has taken them until now to identify the fossil. The researchers have now identified the fossilized remains as the largest flying bird ever discovered.

NASA scientists have been working hard to replicate the chemical composition of the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan has a very dense, high pressure, brownish atmosphere. We know the chemical composition of Titan’s atmosphere thanks to the Cassini spacecraft and data it has collected.

A story in Sky News claims that Google is in talks with Virgin Galactic to invest millions of dollars in the venture. Virgin Galactic is the project that aims to eventually take private passengers on a trip into space where they will get to experience weightlessness.

I’d wager what most of us know of the velociraptor is what we learned from Jurassic Park. The Raptor is a smaller dinosaur that is believed to have hunted in packs. Scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have created a robot that is based on the velociraptor.

Perhaps the most famous scientist alive today is astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He has his own internet meme and is the host of the major network TV show Cosmos. Tyson recently talked about alien contact being the next frontier.

A poor calf was literally left out in the cold this winter and suffered frostbite to both of its hind legs. The frostbite was so severe that the calf lost both the back legs to surgical amputation.

Last year we found out about TellSpec, a portable scanner that can identify the composition of food as well as provide nutritional data. A company called ConsumerPhysics is raising funds for SCiO, which works similarly to TellSpec but seems to be more versatile.

When I was growing up, the only putty-like plaything I had was good old Silly Putty. I always loved messing around with it until it started to turn a sort of weird grey color after picking up too many prints of the Sunday funnies with the stuff.

While there’s no shrink ray in existence as of yet, scientists are hard at work at making magazines available for us, just in case we ever get down to the micrometer scale. In fact, a laboratory in Switzerland has managed to print an image so small that you could fit over 2,000 of them onto a single grain of salt. 

NASA has announced that it is set to send the OPALS – or Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science – device to the ISS. What that means is that NASA is sending a laser up to the ISS that can be used to send messages including HD video back to the Earth with more bandwidth and speed than conventional methods.

One of the many staples of science fiction and other fantasy movies and TV shows is suspended animation. If you have to fly somewhere on a starship, suspended animation will get you there without you being 114 when you arrive, at least in the sci-fi world.

A lot of people out there really enjoy brewing their own beer. There are plenty of kits out there that make it easy to make your own brew and get drunk without having to trek down to the convenience store.

A rather large asteroid named 2014 DX110 is set to make a “close approach” to the Earth today. Astronomers say the asteroid will indeed pass between the Earth and Moon. While that sounds frighteningly close to use, it’s actually very far away.

You know how forensic artists are. They can’t pass up an opportunity to take a skull and see what it looked like when it was alive. They might even be curious to see what the skull-shaped bottle of Crystal Head Vodka looked like, had it been living.

Last week in the California desert, a $2.2 billion solar plant opened that creates electricity by harnessing solar energy. Rather than using traditional solar panels, this facility has hundreds of mirror-like reflectors that shoot the sunlight at a tower filled with water in the center of the mirror arrays.