This looks like something out of a video game, but it's for real. Some parkour masters can scale a building by jumping back and forth between two facing vertical surfaces, zigzagging upward. Seriously, check it out right now, I'll wait. (It's the move that starts at 0:10 in the clip.) …
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Catch it live: The Men's Long Jump Final at the Paris Olympics will be held on Tuesday, August 6, at 2:20 pm ET. The Women's Final is on Thursday, August 8, at 2 pm ET. Whether an athlete wins gold or silver at the Summer Olympics can turn on the …
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In the future I'm sure there will be a city on the moon. We know how to get there, it's super close, and it could be great for further space exploration. However, there's a problem with living on the moon for any length of time: the weak gravitational field, which …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Physicists have begun to explore the proton as if it were a subatomic planet. Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s interior. The proton’s core features pressures more intense than in any other known form of matter. Halfway to …
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Some of my favorite things to look for in the night sky (besides the International Space Station) are the planets. If you need help finding them, I recommend Heavens-Above. It's a website where you can enter your location and it will show you what's currently visible in your area. But …
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It's been crazy cold this week, even down where I live in Louisiana, thanks to an outbreak of a polar vortex. This frigid air is bad for all kinds of things, including football helmets, apparently. But it's actually a great time to demonstrate one of the basic ideas in science: …
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A batter hits a baseball, NASCAR has a 21-car crash, or maybe Thor punches the Hulk. When one object collides with another, we can describe the interaction with an impact force. But putting a specific number on that force is actually quite difficult.Let’s go over some methods we can use …
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I saw this post on Reddit: Would a cockroach survive a fall from the stratosphere? Oh, what a lovely question. But why stop there? The stratosphere only goes up 50 kilometers—what about a cockroach falling from outer space? Space starts at the Kármán line, which is 100 kilometers up (or …
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The world relies on electromagnetic waves for communications: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, even radio waves. But suppose you want to prevent a device from communicating—or interfering—with the rest of the world. You can't block EM waves, but you can cancel them by surrounding the device with an electrically conducting material. We …
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Although Spider-Man started as a comic book character, he has made his way to live-action video several times. I remember seeing him appear on The Electric Company in the 1970s for a short skit; it was cool but a little odd. In the modern era of live-action Spider-Man movies, we …
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