Category: Weird Science

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

I’ve never been in the military before, but I know a few people that have been. They have all commented at one time or another how gross most of the MREs (“meals-ready-to-eat”) they have to eat are.…

There are untold numbers of people that go into surgery around the world every week due to cancer. Cancer surgery can be difficult on the patient and for the surgeon because it is very difficult to know if all of the cancer cells were removed.…

A very strange new study has been published by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that tries to link the behavior of gamers in the real world to the avatars they use on gaming services.…

About a year ago, we mentioned that DARPA was working on a plan to develop electronics that would destroy themselves on command. The idea was to get devices that soldiers could take into battle that could be destroyed if lost or left behind.…

If you’ve ever found yourself in a room where you discover that the acoustic properties create a great echo, you’ve probably tried to see how long you can make the echo last.…

It’s gotten ridiculously frigid here in Chicago, what with the recent Polar Vortex and colder than normal winter. But I’ve never seen anything like this scene, recently captured in Norway: Apparently, when harsh winds caused temperatures over a Norwegian bay to drop to sub-freezing temperatures, the fish swimming close to the surface were flash frozen.…

A few days ago, Virgin Galactic successfully completed another test flight. The test flight happened last Friday and saw the craft reach its highest altitude yet.…

Behold witchcraft! Some crazy mages who call themselves scientists are making stuff levitate using ultrasound waves. Check out the video below. It demonstrates three-dimensional, mid-air acoustic manipulation, aka levitation.…