World’s Strangest

Staring woman image via Shutterstock You’d think watching pornography would be a turn on. But a new study suggests it actually causes part of the brain to turn off, at least in women.  A team of researchers from the Netherlands studied brain activity in 12 heterosexual, pre-menopausal women on birth control while they viewed “female friendly” pornography. [...]

Did you ever get a brain freeze? Scientists have just discovered the cause (well, they get a bit more detailed than just "eating ice cream and drinking cold drinks, duh!"): The researchers brought on brain [...]

Add this to the long list of amazing things that is the Amazon River: Brazilian scientists have found a new river that runs underneath it! The Rio Hamza, named after the head of the team of researchers [...]

Flow charts are wonderful for mapping processes for machines, as they lay out a sequence of binary decisions, meaning yes or no. When you think about it, most of what we do in life is also based on yes/no decisions -you just have to break the problem down into small pieces to see that clearly. [...]

Industrial designer Anthony Reale was inspired by the natural flow of water through a basking shark to design a water turbine that could be used to harness the energy of the Detroit River. The basking shark swims for eighteen hours a day with its five foot-wide mouth open to sift for food. Reale thinks that [...]

Sing along with this flow chart from xkcd! I guess it shows my age when I can sing all these except Katamari Damacy. Link

Detailed studies of traffic flow allow cities to adjust the timing of changes on traffic signal lights. But according to a trio of researchers in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, it may be better to simply allow individual lights to switch as local demand changes: If each traffic light responds to its immediate demands, [...]

The U.S. Geological Survey has an extensive database of lava-related events in Hawaii. One hundred of the best images have been assembled on a web page and placed on a DVD. These were… …selected from the collections of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory as enduring favorites of the staff, researchers, media, designers, and the public over time. [...]

When flow from a teapot (or a liquor bottle) is very slow, the liquid has a propensity to dribble back along the surface of the spout. “Previous studies have shown that a number of factors affect [dribbling], such as the radius of curvature of the teapot lip, the speed of the flow and the “wettability” of [...]