When Snails Lose Their Way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkSN-kqAmxwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW-tzEKwD7g
View ArticleIf 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...
View ArticleWhen 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 that...
View ArticleBuilding 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 one...
View ArticleMapping What You Cannot See, Cannot Know, Cannot Visit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo
View ArticleHowling Babies Drove Prehistoric Warriors Into Battle?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm-sQnazFAQ
View Article'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...
View ArticleIs 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...
View ArticleWhat's Better Than A Total Eclipse Of The Sun? Check This
http://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...
View ArticleAn 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...
View ArticleWhere 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...
View ArticleGuess 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleWhat A Balloon Shouldn't Do, But For Some Reason Does
http://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....
View ArticleElemental 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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