Science
598 articles · most loved first · page 24 of 25· Tonble one of these
What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
A curious, well-sourced look at whether ants outweigh humans and which living group really tops Earth's biomass, with te…
What's That Bug?
A long-running community blog where entomology enthusiasts help identify mystery insects submitted by readers from aroun…
When Do We Stop Finding New Music?
A statistical analysis of listening data asking at what age our taste in music stops evolving, and why we drift toward t…
When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story
A personal story of a research project on website-fingerprinting side channels, where a machine learning result turned o…
Where Am I?
Daniel Dennett's classic philosophical tale of a man whose brain is removed and kept in a vat while his body roams, aski…
Where Do the Children Play?
An essay on growing up with machetes and wild places, and why children and the living world both need room to exist with…
Where does my computer get the time from?
A fascinating tour of how clocks reach your computer, from atomic clocks and GPS to NTP servers and leap seconds, writte…
Why A4? The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size
An accessible essay on why A4 paper has its odd dimensions, explaining the square root of two ratio that lets every A-se…
Why Almost Everything You Thought About Running Is Wrong
A visually rich ABC News long read explaining how running works, why many people do it poorly and what better technique…
Why Are Sloths So Slow?
The Sloth Conservation Foundation explains the metabolism, diet and muscle biology behind the sloth's slow motion and wh…
Why are there 5280 feet in a mile?
A short history of how the Roman mile of 1000 paces became 5280 feet, as Elizabethan England tried to reconcile the mile…
Why are these caterpillars climbing over each other?
A science writer explains the strange rolling swarm of Amazon caterpillars caught on video, showing how the same simple…
Why Are You So Slow?
A statistician explains how a pro sprinter compares with average and good runners, using running-speed data to show just…
Why Bell Labs Worked
An essay on how Bell Labs produced the transistor, information theory and Unix, and how management culture and funding c…
Why Busy Beaver Hunters Fear the Antihydra
A science journalist explains the busy beaver game, the Antihydra program that resists proof, and why it ties back to th…
Why Do Electronic Components Have Such Odd Values?
A clear explainer on why resistors and capacitors come in values like 4.7 and 22, the E-series preferred numbers and the…
Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them?
A clear explainer on track ballast, the crushed stone beside railway tracks, covering how it spreads load, drains water,…
Why Edge Detection Doesn't Explain Line Drawing
A researcher argues that line drawings are not simply traced edges, with examples from art and vision science that chall…
Why Everyone Hates the Electronic Medical Record
A long read tracing how medical records turned from a clinician's notebook into billing-driven software, and why doctors…
launiusr.wordpress.com
Article
Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa
The full text of Ernst Stuhlinger's 1970 reply to a nun in Zambia who asked why money goes to space while children starv…
Why Haven't Quantum Computers Factored 21 Yet?
Craig Gidney explains why quantum computers factored 15 in 2001 but still have not factored 21, and what that really say…
Why Intelligence Doesn't Improve Reasoning
An essay arguing that real-world rationality depends less on IQ than on timing, framing, and incentives, and why smart p…
plantscientist.wordpress.com
Article
Why is my orange green?
A plant scientist explains why oranges grown in the tropics often stay green when ripe, how chlorophyll breakdown depend…
Why is the sky blue?
An explainer that goes beyond the name Rayleigh scattering to actually show why the sky is blue and sunsets are red, eve…
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