Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Research at Binghamton University in the US found that every person has a unique pattern of brain activity when shown a series of images. In the study, a computer measured the brainwaves of 45 volunteers and was able to determine the identity of each person with 100 per cent accuracy. …
Will We Ever Be Able to Log Onto Facebook With Our Minds? Read More »
Most ‘predictions’ of the rate of meteors per hour during meteor showers are based on both theory and observation. Essentially, a computer model is built containing the trajectories of every known comet – since it is the debris from comets that forms the ‘stream’ of particles we see during a meteor shower. This model contains …
One theory is that it’s a hunting behaviour that evolved as a way to mask the dog’s own scent to make it easier to stalk prey. It’s odd that a dog would choose the poo of another predator though. It may be that for most dogs, fox poo is the only really stinky poo they …
According to the Guinness Book Of Records, the largest walking robot in the world is reported to be Tradinno, a 15m-long dragon robot weighing 11 tons that was used in a German theatre for the play Drachenstich. Powered by a two-litre turbo diesel engine, it can breathe flames to a distance of 1.5 metres. However, …
In one sense we can never know because reaching absolute zero is an impossible task as an infinite amount of work is required to cool something down that far. However you can get close – the world record coldest temperature is 0.0000000001°C above absolute zero. At super cold temperatures strange things start occurring. Exotic states of matter appear, …
First proposed over a century ago by the Russian astronautical pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the space elevator offers a whole new way of getting into orbit. Instead of using rockets, electric lifts travel up a cable anchored at the Earth’s equator and extending up to an orbiting counterweight whose motion keeps the cable taut. But while simple …
Will It Ever Be Possible to Build a Space Elevator? Read More »
As our planet bulges at the equator, its gravitational pull there is lower than in the UK. Better still, the effect of the spin of the Earth at the equator also helps offset the force of gravity. The bad news is that even the combined effect would reduce your weight by less than 1 per cent – so it’s probably easier, …
Would I Weigh Less If I Were to Move to the Equator? Read More »
Typically when we’re reading, we do it in a comfortable position – sitting or lying down – in a quiet place, and often at the end of the day or after more energetic activities, all of which contributes to a state of relaxation and sleepiness. Also, an absorbing text will take your focus away from the outside …
Actually, gases aren’t invisible: many are quite brightly coloured. For example, nitrogen dioxide is brown-y orange, chlorine has a yellowish green hue and iodine vapour is a vivid purple. Other gases in the atmosphere (particularly oxygen, carbon dioxide and water vapour) also absorb light, but at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths that we can’t see. There’s a sweet spot between the absorption spectra of oxygen and water where not much light gets absorbed. Lo …
Egg white is 92 per cent water, with a mixture of around 148 different proteins, mainly ovalbumin, ovotransferrin and ovomucoid. At room temperature, these proteins are held in a complex 3D globular structure by sulphur bonds between the amino acids in the protein chain. When the egg cooks, the heat causes the sulphur bonds to come undone …
Why Do Hard-Boiled Eggs Sometimes Get a Grey Ring Around the Yolk? Read More »
Although the ‘Big Crunch’ idea is currently out-of-favour with cosmologists, it is still one possible fate for the Universe. However, the eventual endpoint of the Big Crunch is not known. In simple terms, if we regard it as the opposite of the Big Bang, we might indeed expect that all matter and space-time itself would collapse into a ‘singularity’: an infinitely dense point similar …
Would the Big Crunch Collapse Everything – Matter and Space-Time? Read More »
People with damage to the brain’s parietal lobe, which integrates sensory information, don’t dream. One hypothesis suggests that while we sleep, the parietal lobe continues generating signals, and our forebrain tries to make a story out of this activity. Other researchers have suggested that dreams occur when short-term memories are encoded and moved to long-term memory, or when …
Just two. The most common, wet earwax, evolved as a way to remove dead skin cells from your ear canal. Earwax is 60 per cent skin, with various different oils binding it together in a brown lump. But there is a recessive gene mutation that results in a different mix of oils, giving grey and flaky …
The genes we inherit from our parents influence our psychological characteristics – things like our intelligence and memory ability – and our chances of developing conditions that affect the way we think, such as autism and schizophrenia. In that sense, identical twins – who share all the same genes – do think more alike than …
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