Seven feet long and 665 pounds—that was the size of just one leatherback turtle saved by the Mass Audubon Sanctuary and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. And while that sounds like a massive turtle (and it is), realize that, at the time of rescue, it was underweight and near death. Thankfully, during the turtle’s brief stay at a New England Aquarium facility, aquarium vets, [...]
Remember the analog days before social media and the digital world took over? When the internet had yet to be born, photos were kept in an album in the closet and movies were made with unstable film that could either catch fire at any moment or slowly deteriorate into a useless vinegary mess? Unsurprisingly, when you take these two possibilities, and then add that many studios [...]
Take a look at this video. Did you get the first question right? How many times did the players in white pass the ball? Now, how about that second question? The video, done by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, is a replication of Ulric Neisser’s study from the 1970s representing selective attention, the tendency not to “see” major changes in the environment. A person’s attention [...]
Have you ever tried “astronaut” ice cream? It’s a freeze-dried treat most commonly found in museum gift shops. However, the name is something of a misnomer. Astronaut ice cream has only flown to space once since its creation, aboard Apollo 7. According to NASA, the foil-wrapped snack is too crumbly to enjoy in zero gravity, so the astronauts never request it! Us earthlings [...]
When I was in kindergarten, I was one of New Hampshire’s winners of an annual EPA award. It was an award given to students between kindergarten and sixth grade who demonstrated concern about the environment and used their creative skills to express their concern. My environmental efforts continued throughout my youth, with varying effectiveness. I vaguely recall crouching behind a rusty swing set after [...]
I was introduced to gothic literature late in life, but it wasn’t until I read Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla that I really fell in love with the genre. Published about 25 years before Dracula, Carmilla is the story of Laura, a young girl who lives in an ancient castle in Styria. After Laura learns an expected visitor, Bertha Rheinfeldt, has fallen mysteriously ill and died, she and her [...]
Google Glass seems like something out of a Star Trek episode, but, amazingly, this example of augmented reality exists today. Merriam–Webster defines augmented reality as “an enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device (such as a smartphone camera).” Although Google Glass may have seemed like the only technology of its [...]
Ever since the creation of automated machines, the fears of an artificial intelligence (AI) takeover (or cybernetic revolt, as more professional futurists call it) have been growing. From the minds of science fiction greats Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley to 2015’s blockbuster films Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ex Machina, culture shows that people are fascinated with what machines could someday be. This potential future has long [...]
What does have six arms and two legs and a brain in each one? An octopus! Three-fifths of an octopus’s brain is found in its eight appendages. The largest octopus on record, a giant Pacific octopus, reportedly weighed 600 pounds and was nearly 30 feet wide. Think of all that brain room! As if the brains-in-their-appendages fact weren’t strange enough, octopuses have additional unique characteristics that make them truly amazing [...]
My first cell phone was my mom’s old Nokia brick. I wasn’t able to do a whole lot more than make phone calls and play Snake—but then again, what else was a phone supposed to do? When I got my first iPhone, it changed my life. For the first time, I understood that one device could do many, many things. A phone was [...]