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In 1965, 17-year-old high school student, Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours. That’s 11 days to see how he’d cope without sleep. On the second day, his eyes stopped focusing. Next, he lost the ability to identify objects by touch. By day three, Gardner was moody and uncoordinated. At the end of the experiment, …
What would happen if you didn’t sleep? – Claudia Aguirre 더 보기 »
We read fiction for many reasons. To be entertained, to find out who done it, to travel to strange, new planets, to be scared, to laugh, to cry, to think, to feel, to be so absorbed that for a while we forget where we are. So, how about writing fiction? How do you suck your …
Imagine if you could plug your brain into a machine that would bring you ultimate pleasure for the rest of your life. If you were given the choice to sign up for that kind of existence, would you? That’s the question philosopher Robert Nozick posed through a thought experiment he called the Experience Machine. The …
Would you opt for a life with no pain? – Hayley Levitt and Bethany Rickwald 더 보기 »
Chat with a friend about an established scientific theory and she might reply, “Well, that’s just a theory.” But a conversation about an established scientific law rarely ends with, “Well, that’s just a law.” Why is that? What is the difference between a theory and a law, and is one better? Scientific laws and theories …
What’s the difference between a scientific law and theory? – Matt Anticole 더 보기 »
The Naming of Clouds On a cold December evening in 1802, a nervous young man named Luke Howard stood before the assembled members of a London science club about to give a lecture that would change his life and go on to change humanity’s understanding of the skies. Luke Howard was a pharmacist by profession, …
Before he turned physics upside down, a young Albert Einstein supposedly showed off his genius by devising a complex riddle involving this list of clues. Can you resist tackling a brain teaser written by one of the smartest people in history? Let’s give it a shot. The world’s rarest fish has been stolen from the …
Can you solve “Einstein’s Riddle”? – Dan Van der Vieren 더 보기 »
What could octopuses possibly have in common with us? After all, they don’t have lungs, spines, or even a plural noun we can all agree on. But what they do have is the ability to solve puzzles, learn through observation, and even use tools, just like some other animals we know. And what makes octopus …
Why the octopus brain is so extraordinary – Cláudio L. Guerra 더 보기 »
If you’ve had surgery, you might remember starting to count backwards from ten, nine, eight, and then waking up with the surgery already over before you even got to five. And it might seem like you were asleep, but you weren’t. You were under anesthesia, which is much more complicated. You were unconscious, but you …
This is a thought experiment. Let’s say at some point in the not so distant future, you’re barreling down the highway in your self-driving car, and you find yourself boxed in on all sides by other cars. Suddenly, a large, heavy object falls off the truck in front of you. Your car can’t stop in …
The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars – Patrick Lin 더 보기 »
In the third millenium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dreams on wax tablets. A thousand years later, Ancient Egyptians wrote a dream book listing over a hundred common dreams and their meanings. And in the years since, we haven’t paused in our quest to understand why we dream. So, after a great deal …
