Did you know that working around a certain chemical can make your jaw glow green and have to be chopped off? Not your teeth. Not your bones. Not your head. Your jaw. Learn what happens when biochemistry gets terrifyingly specific.
An experiment shows how people deliberately sabotage themselves
If you got a great score on a test, you'd like to continue your winning streak, wouldn't you? One experiment proves you wouldn't. You'd self-sabotage. Not unintentionally and not subconsciously. You'd knowingly and deliberately screw up.
When forests glow green in the night
There are certain times when the woods begin to glow. Sometimes they glow so much that people call the Park Service and ask them to send a hazmat team. What they're actually seeing is foxfire. And although we know how it happens, we don't know exactly why.
What I'd like to see is what would happen to the future of families. On the one hand, if the future is supposed to be a utopia, with unlimited food, excellent medicine, good schools, and thousands of planets worth of resources, it seems like the human race would expand. On the other hand, families tend to shrink when …
At io9 we never neglect poop.
*stares nobly off into the sunset*
We were all impressed with the dramatic trailer for Gravity, with George Clooney weathering an explosion on an orbiting space station and Sandra Bullock spinning off into the void of space. Things like that make good cinema. There are other space crises, though, that will never get their own movies. Here are some space disasters that are just too awkward for the cinema.
Cataplexy: When emotions paralyze you
And not figuratively, either. Sometimes people have found that certain emotions literally cause their muscles to unhook from their brains. They collapse entirely. This is not some strange disease, or weakness — tt's the misapplication of a necessary function.
Well, she was fourteen in that picture, so I would hope not.
Check out the crazy-dangerous "phosphorus sun" demonstration
Ever seen white phosphorus? It takes very little heat to ignite, and burns on contact with oxygen. A phosphorus sun is an experiment that involves filling a glass vessel with pure oxygen and lowering phosphorus into it. It doesn't always go well, but at least it's always pretty.
Yes, I've read it's something like ten to one, in terms of the number of cells that are non-human to those that are human.
