Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Can You Hear Whether Water Is Hot or Cold?
With your back turned you can usually tell a hot pour from a cold one, and the tidy explanation everybody repeats may have the whole thing the wrong way round.
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Everything filed under physics.
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Fact-based Kitchen Science
Every Popcorn Kernel Is a Tiny Pressure Cooker
A popcorn kernel pops because the water sealed inside it turns to steam, and when physicists filmed the moment, they found the pop sound is not the shell cracking at all.
Fiction Made-Up Words
Seatecho
(n.) The lingering warmth of a seat recently vacated by a stranger, which is somehow far less welcome than a cold seat, even on the coldest day of the year.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Teaspoon of Neutron Star Would Weigh a Billion Tons
Squeeze more than the mass of our Sun into a ball the size of a city and you get a neutron star, where a single teaspoonful of matter would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
Fiction Useless Inventions
The Heritage Tangling Case
A handsome leather pouch for your old wired headphones that, with the help of a tiny motor, ties them into a proper knot overnight, just like they used to do by themselves.
Fact-based Kitchen Science
Why a Pot of Pasta Boils Over When a Pot of Water Never Does
Plain water can bubble away for an hour and stay politely in its pot, but drop in some pasta and a white foam climbs the sides, because starch turns ordinary bubbles into a stretchy blanket.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
A Gecko's Toes Showed Scientists How to Stick Without Glue
A gecko can hang from a glass ceiling on perfectly dry feet, and once scientists looked at the whole foot rather than just its tiny hairs, they built a pad that grips like one.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Lightning Does Strike the Same Place Twice
The old saying is wrong: tall, pointy, isolated things are struck again and again, and New York's Empire State Building takes an average of 23 hits a year.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Own Voice Sound So Strange on a Recording?
Hearing yourself played back is like meeting a stranger who has borrowed your words, and part of the reason is that you have spent your whole life listening from inside your own head.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Other Side of the Pillow Always Cooler?
Flipping your pillow to the cool side is the smallest holiday there is, and the reason it works is a lovely bit of physics hiding in the fluff.