World’s Strangest

The temperature at Russia’s Vostok research station in Antarctica read -128.6F (-89.2 C) during the winter of 1983. This is the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth. The winter temperature at Vostok averages a mere -54F. Why the mercury dipped so low has puzzled scientists for 26 years. But scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) [...]

NASA’s Kepler space telescope mission is sending back data on exoplanets we’ve never seen before. Five new planets that the probe recently discovered are large planets that revolve close to their stars, making it easier for us to see them. The smallest of the new planets is about the same size as Neptune, though much more [...]

Now that it’s January, it’s time to prepare for two things: the NFL playoffs and terrifyingly low wind chill reports. What does it really mean when my weatherman is telling me that it feels like minus-20 in Chicago, though? Is there a wind chill thermometer somewhere, or is he just using a mathematical formula? Let’s [...]

Turkey Tracker is a bold experiment in social networking and turkey-smoking technology. Turkey Tracker combines a live video stream of a turkey smoking (at an undisclosed location, but I might as well tell you it’s in Portland, Oregon), a live Q&A session and other events throughout the day (see the Broadcast Schedule at the bottom [...]

How do starfish keep cool when lying on the sand during low tide? Dr Sylvain Pincebourde and colleagues at the University of California, Davis and Bodega Marine Laboratory, Bodega Bay, California, studied starfish (okay, sea stars) in an aquarium, replicating tides and environmental conditions. They discovered that a starfish will ingest cold seawater to lower its [...]

Lizards in the shades of Spiderman’s superhero outfit are turning out to be the latest craze in pets. Rock agamas (Agama mwanzae) are high maintenance animals, in need of special diets and strict temperature settings. So if you were thinking of running out to the store to claim your own, you might want to think [...]

We often describe our social relationships in temperature metaphors, like “cold shoulder” or “warm memories” or even “she’s hot!” This is no coincidence. An experiment last year from the University of Toronto showed that thinking about an incident where the subject felt socially excluded led them to estimate the room’s temperature to be lower than [...]

Behold the blessings of technology: After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the [...]