Tag archives for Science
Posted by 
Let’s talk about sex, baby. It brings us pleasure, it can cause us heartache, and it is a necessary function to sustain life. But how much do we know about how sex works? We’re leaving the snickering behind and diving into the science behind arousal, orgasms, partner preference, and sexual dysfunctions. We’ll take a fascinating…
Last month, the National Geographic Society played host to a first-of-its-kind event: TedxDeExtinction, a public forum on the groundbreaking science surrounding efforts to bring extinct species back to life, and the ethical and conservation issues that may arise. This Friday, the National Geographic Channel will explore this very topic in Mammoth: Back From The Dead.…
Calling all Adventurers and Explorers! National Geographic is searching for the most incredible expeditions of 2013 to film and feature in a dynamic new blue chip adventure series that will take viewers to the edge of the world… and back. Every riveting episode will feature a new explorer, a new territory, and a new adventure, which…
Posted by 
How Hard Can It Be…to fly a house with balloons, send a rocket to space, or dive the deep ocean floor? Welcome to the one place on TV where you can find out. Three ultra-ambitious hosts tackle fascinating engineering tasks with nothing more than ordinary materials and their infectious, boundless enthusiasm. Vin, Paul and Eric…
Meet the self-proclaimed Rocket City Rednecks. They’re five “backwoods” guys from the rocket city: Huntsville, Ala., home to NASA’s Marshall Flight Center and the birthplace of the U.S. space program. Sure, they love to shoot stuff and drink beer, and one of ‘em lives in a trailer, but with a family tree full of…
Today we finished shooting at the St. Augustine Gator Farm. It was one of those days when you realize how crazy close we come to death in our jobs! In this episode we explore what we can discover about T. rex’s senses, so we came here to film alligators because crocodilians and birds bracket dinosaurs.…
It’s believed that fireworks were accidentally discovered in China about 2,000 years ago when a cook mixed three ingredients together – charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur – while working in a field kitchen. Since fireworks were introduced to the United States (sometime in the mid-1600s), fireworks have become big business – last year alone, $190.7 million worth…
Back in the mid-1990s, a post-apocalyptic sci fi movie called Waterworld, envisioned a dystopia in which the polar ice caps had completely melted and most of the Earth’s land was thousands of feet under water. A mutant drifter, the Mariner (portrayed by Kevin Costner) roamed the oceans in a boat, looking for a mythical place called…
Is there a cheaper and more efficient way to put humans, equipment and materials into space than by using powerful rocket engines? Since the beginning of space flight in the late 1950s, we’ve relied upon thrust to enable satellites and manned vehicles to reach space. Escape velocity is the physics term for achieving enough kinetic energy…
One of the most disturbing science-fiction novels I have ever read is Jack Womak’s 1993 opus Elvissey, which takes place in a dystopian future in which a rising religion is centered upon the worship of the late Elvis Presley, whom the devout believe was a demigod with miraculous powers. A giant multinational corporation, Dryco, decides to co-opt the…
In Jules Verne’s 1864 classic of science fiction, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, an intrepid German scientist named Liedenbrock purchases an ancient Icelandic manuscript and decodes its script to discover an incredible secret. The manuscript explains that the crater of a certain Icelandic volcano is the entrance to an underground passageway that leads…
The British National Archives has just made public thousands of pages of documents about UFOs, and even is offering a highlights guide so that readers can sift through the material for the most intriguing–and the wackiest–stuff. And there are plenty of both types of revelations in the UFO documents. Pages 10-34 of this PDF file, for example, detail British diplomatic…
Most countries don’t view the occult as a potential government revenue source, but then again, Romania isn’t most countries. The land that gave us Vlad the Impaler and his fictional descendent, Count Dracula, has always seemed to border Hungary and Serbia on one side and the Astral Plane on the other. If you follow Romanian…
If you feel sheepish about your inability to remember your wife’s birthday or where you left your car keys, don’t fret. We’re all more or less memory-challenged compared to an early 20th-Century Russian named Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky, who could store more data in his head than we’ll ever forget. Pioneering Russian neurologist and memory researcher…
After an article on an Australian website, News.com.au, quoted a physics professor saying that Betelgeuse might go supernova on us and light up the sky like a second Sun, and speculated that it might happen next year, the the MSM and the blogosphere went into a frenzy.“Will the Earth have Two Suns by 2012?” a representative headline on Time.com…
Above: Tagged mussels Most freshwater mussel species burrow in the bottoms of rivers and streams. They draw water inside their shells, breathing and filtering food with gills. When mussels move, they don’t move far – one hundred feet for a mussel is impressive – but they do have a muscular limb that assists in burrowing and…
Sepilok Forest is a protected area of wild jungle along the Kinabatangan River in Malaysian Borneo. Each year only 300 people are allowed access to a restricted study site deep within the forest. This reserve – situated in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary – is utilized by Red Ape Encounters, HUTAN and other research…
© Mark Knobil / NGT The cat: a mysterious creature, at once loving and aloof. As a species, cats are proven survivors – they thrive on the islands of Antarctica, alongside giant lizards in the Galapagos and as urban scavengers in the world’s biggest cities. Across the globe, there are more than 600 million domestic…
Zebras are herbivores and a member of the horse family. In the wild, these animals are constantly on the lookout for predators, like lions, hyenas, cheetahs, African wild dogs and leopards. As social creatures, zebras live in a herd. And no two zebras are exactly alike– each has a unique stripe pattern. The exact purpose for these…
Photo Credit: Tina Lindeken Sea turtles can swim hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of miles to reach different areas of marine habitat. Tracking this highly migratory species by satellite is shedding light on sea turtles’ unique feeding locations and pathways of movement. Sea Turtle Conservation Bonaire (STCB) – in collaboration with the Wider Caribbean…
While some of us slept through our modern literature class in college, we couldn’t help but stay awake on the day that our professor gave a stirring reading of T.S. Eliot’s cryptic poem, “The Waste Land.” Scholars have written volumes about Eliot’s torrent of disturbing imagery, which is laden with about as many literary allusions…
We’ve been humming the Foo Fighters’ song “Stacked Actors” all morning, ever since we saw this story from the Daily Mail, via the Huffington Post, in which a past associate of George Lucas claims that the movie impresario behind the Star Wars series is planning to make a movie featuring computer-generated likenesses of various dead Hollywood stars of yesteryear. The Daily…
It’s been three decades since John Lennon’s murder by Mark David Chapman in front of his home in New York City on Dec. 8 1980. And those of us who were devotees of the funniest, most soulful, most protean, and most iconoclastic of the Fab Four have been left to wonder what else he might…
Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-born artist and assistant professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has developed a name for himself with his provocative experiments in body modification as a means of expression. In March, for example, to remind people of the death of his brother Haji and others, both Iraqi and American, in…
An article from Information Week’s web site reports that the Air Force is keeping a tight lid on its new unmanned space plane, the X-37B. The robotic plane landed in darkness in the predawn hours of Dec. 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, after eight months in space. The five-and-a-half ton vehicle…
