Enlarge / Finding a distraction is key for young children trying to resist the marshmallow. The psychologist who famously demonstrated the importance of being able to delay gratification to achieving later success in life died on September 12 in New York City. Walter Mischel, emeritus professor of psychology at Columbia University and self-proclaimed "Marshmallow Man,"…
Enlarge / A general view of Laguna Colorada located near the border with Chile, in the Uyuni salt flats, Bolivia. The Uyuni salt flats are estimated to contain 100 million tons of lithium, making it one of the largest global reserves of this mineral, according to state officials at the Bolivian Mining Corporation. MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty…
Enlarge / The jewel wasp administers two stings: one to paralyze the legs, the other to make the roach her zombie slave. If you ever want to witness just how horrifyingly "red in tooth and claw" nature can be, you only have to look to the emerald jewel wasp. The female of the species is…
Enlarge / The Nobel Prize-winning first direct detection of gravitational waves announced in 2016 is being called into question. LIGO calls shenanigans. The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on February 11, 2016, spawned headlines around the world, snagged the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and officially launched a new era of so-called "multi-messenger"…
Enlarge / EnChroma glasses have always had both skeptics and true believers. Who's right? It's complicated. The much-touted EnChroma glasses don't help colorblind users see new colors; they merely let the colorblind see the same colors in a different way, according to a new study published in Optics Express by scientists at Spain's University of Granada.…
Enlarge / The position of Barnard's star relative to the Earth and its other neighbors. IEEC/Science-Wave/Guillem RamisaFrom the phenomenal success of the Kepler mission and a proliferation of ground-based telescopes, we now know that planets are common in our galaxy. But the methods we've used to detect most of them are biased toward finding large…
Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches in September 2018. The first satellite launched into orbit, Sputnik, launched from a spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The Central Asian country was then a Soviet republic. Later, the first human to fly into space, Yuri Gagarin, also launched from Kazakhstan. Today, despite its independence, this spaceport remains the…
Enlarge / A bike of roughly the same vintage as the author's. We tend to think of technology as something that moves electrons around. But I'm going to take a little diversion into technology that is used to move us around (and yes, our electrons as well, you pedants). The humble bicycle has been in…
Enlarge / Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), and Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), would need 100 times more oxygen than usual at smaller scales. Marvel StudiosThe ability to rapidly shrink down to bug size (and beyond) gives Ant-Man and the Wasp tremendous advantages. But it also comes with some scale-related drawbacks,…
A natural gas fracking well near Shreveport, Louisiana. The US Energy Information Agency (EIA) recently published two interesting sets of maps to show how the US energy mix has changed state by state between 2007 and 2017. That decade saw the rise of cheap natural gas that lead many utilities to switch away from coal,…
