In his book The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, author Simon Singh claims that in the 1998 episode of The Simpsons titled “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace“, the character Homer Simpson nearly calculated the mass of the Higgs boson “God particle” more than a decade before it was discovered…</ … Read More → "Homer Simpson nearly calculated the mass of the Higgs Boson years before it was discovered"

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has achieved the distinction of becoming the first to orbit a dwarf planet. The spacecraft recently began circling Ceres, the largest known body in the main asteroid belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter.

Dawn confirmed its orbiting success by sending a signal to mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion … Read More → "NASA’s Dawn makes history by orbiting a dwarf planet"

In today’s male-dominated computer programming industry, it’s easy to forget that a woman — Grace Hopper — helped usher in the computer revolution.

During World War II, Hopper left a teaching job at Vassar College to join the Navy Reserve. That’s when she went to Harvard to work on the first programmable computer in the United States: the Mark I.
via Read More → "Grace Hopper, ‘The Queen Of Code,’ would have hated that title"

To help promote its online store that sells nothing but tiny plastic bricks, Bulk Dominoesenlisted the help of the extremely patient FlippyCat to build a giant Etch A Sketch that only works through the magic of stop motion. But it’s the perfect way to represent just what a pain it is to draw anything recognizable on the classic toy.
via < … Read More → "A stop-motion Etch A Sketch made of dominoes is even harder to draw with"

If your cat has ever meowed along to your favorite pop song, it’s probably not because he liked it. That music was designed in pitches and tempos that humans enjoy, so your cat is, at best, likely indifferent to your tunes (and, at worst, maybe tortured by them). Now, two psychologists at University … Read More → "Scientists have composed music for your cats"

Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist is the autobiography of Chuck Jones, the animator behind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other great classic Warner Bros. cartoon characters. In it, Jones lists the rules that governed interactions between Wile E. Coyote and his lifelong foe, the Road Runner.
via Neatorama 

This is a video of big wave surf legend Laird Hamilton riding some waves on a surfboard with a hydrofoil attached, so it rises up out of the water when it gets up to speed. Personally, you’d never catch me in the ocean with ANYTHING strapped to my feet. That’s like, a death sentence. That surfboard might as well be cinderblocks because I’m a goner.

Read More → "Surfer Laird Hamilton rides giant waves with hydrofoil surfboard"

Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.

Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has … Read More → "The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave"

“They arrange themselves in an orderly queue, the biggest at the front, the smallest at the back; they’re lining up with one aim: to exchange properties. But none of the crabs can make a move because the chain is not yet complete. They’re all waiting for the right-sized crab to come along.”

The Hermit Crab vacancy chain, as featured in the ‘Home’ episode of Life Story, on the BBC.< … Read More → "Hermit crabs line up in order of size to swap and upgrade shells with one another"

Japanese hardware hacker Ugoita T. created a whimsical display of five origami cranesbusting a move with choreography provided by electromagnets, which were used to manipulate the feet of the paper birds into all sorts of dance positions. Ugoita T. has also created a behind-the-scenes video detailing how the display, which was exhibited at a Honda China art … Read More → "A quintet of paper origami cranes perform a choreographed dance routine using electromagnets"