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What's Better Than A Total Eclipse Of The Sun? Check This

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyZoD7BRTtg Any eclipse is worth seeing. A total eclipse — where the moon completely blots out the sun, where day turns to night, where solar flares ring the moon's...

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An Animal Makes A $10,000 Deposit, But Not At The Bank

Editor's note: We've added an update at the bottom of this post with results of the auction. Read on! It's a highly specialized category to be sure: "Longest." But that's what the auctioneer is...

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Where The Birds Are Is Not Where You'd Think

This is a trick question. Where would you expect to find the greatest variety of birds? Downtown, in a city? Or far, far from downtown — in the fields, forests, mountains, where people are scarce? Or...

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Guess Who's Been Waiting In The Lobby For A Hundred Million Years?

Sometimes the quiet ones surprise us. Take moss — those fuzzy green pads you see on the sides of old trees, or hanging onto rocks. Who notices moss? It's just ... there, doing whatever it does — so...

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How To Cross 5 International Borders In 1 Minute Without Sweating

So many nations are breaking up. Ukraine is in pieces. Moldova is teetering. Libya has no government to speak of. Sudan broke in two last year; now both sides are fighting. Yugoslavia is seven...

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What A Balloon Shouldn't Do, But For Some Reason Does

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8mzDvpKzfY Great teaching — just plain old knock 'em dead, get it right, make 'em laugh, make 'em wonder instruction — is always going to be rare. Good teachers abound....

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Elemental Storytelling

There's a photograph I know that shows a kid's bicycle lying on its side, one wheel turned upright, a smear of blood tracing its path on the concrete. There's a little package still latched to the...

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When Snails Lose Their Way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkSN-kqAmxw Every so often, and I wish it were more often, Vi Hart becomes a snail. Vi is one of the Web's finest math geeks . Her site is where millions (and I mean...

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If You're Born In The Sky, What's Your Nationality? An Airplane Puzzler

Here's a puzzle I bet you've never pondered. Imagine you are very, very pregnant. For the purposes of this mind game, you are a married American woman (with an American spouse) and you are about to...

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When Venus Was Filled With Venusians — 50 Billion Of Them

What a difference 180 years makes. Back in the 1830s, a Scottish minister and amateur astronomer named Thomas Dick tried to calculate the number of intelligent creatures in the universe. He assumed...

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Roadways You Can Install Like Throw Rugs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiCLMePjK-Y Magic carpets you know about. Aladdin had one. But how about this? A country road carpet? Walk into a meadow, drag it behind you, and wherever you go, the...

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Glenn Gould In Rapture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB76jxBq_gQ What's going on here, I can only guess, but here's what you're about to see: In the video below, the great musician Glenn Gould, supreme interpreter of Bach,...

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Building Me: A Puzzlement

It's a puzzle — the deepest puzzle I know. The question is: What are we? One answer , from physicist-novelist Alan Lightman , is we are stuff. Just stuff. "Let me explain. A highly unpleasant idea, but...

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Mapping What You Cannot See, Cannot Know, Cannot Visit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo When I was a boy I had a globe. I could take it in my hands, rest it on my lap, give it a spin and look down on Africa, Europe, North America and Asia...

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Souls Tumbling In The Light

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGQ2msn0OR0 Every year on Sept. 11, this happens ... When it gets dark, New York City turns on 88 7,000-watt xenon light bulbs to produce two powerful beams that shoot...

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What Makes A Star Starry? Is It Me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVAKFJ8VVp4 Notice what Tyler Nordgren does in these posters. He's an artist, an astronomer (from Cornell, Carl Sagan's department); he's worked for NASA. He's an expert...

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Howling Babies Drove Prehistoric Warriors Into Battle?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm-sQnazFAQ If you have ever seen, or spent time with (or, God forbid, had to live with) a colicky baby, this will make perfect sense to you. It may not make actual...

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'Murdersquishing' Them To Death: How Little Bees Take On Enormous Hornets

I know, I know. You have Putin to worry about, ISIS to worry about, Britain's near breaking, Washington's broken, and the globe keeps getting warmer — so why bring up Japanese giant hornets ? You have...

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2 Ways To Think About Nothing, One Mo' Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ This being my last weekend with this blog, I wanted to repost a story I wrote a few years ago that has continued to intrigue me ... I'm going to show you two...

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Is That A Lark I Hear? A Nightingale? Surprise! It's A Bat

Bats produce "pings" or "clicks," right? They make these high-pitched sounds, too high for us to hear, but when their cries ricochet off distant objects, the echoes tell them there's a house over...

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