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BIG QUESTIONS

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When I was a kid, my parents often tried to sell me on the idea that carrots were good for my eyes—and if I wanted to avoid vision correction in the future, I would eat them now. But after I was fitted for my first pair of glasses in fourth grade, they dr

Matt Soniak
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Though fingerprints are handy for identifying perps, biologically, scientists still aren't quite sure what our fingerprints are for. But as they test different hypotheses, they're getting closer to the answer—and learning some pretty cool stuff in the pro

Matt Soniak

Image credit: Duke.eduThere was a time when almost every university student was a sophomore.  Well, a sophister, to be exact, but that’s where the word “sophomore” originated. A sophist was a wise man (derived from the Greek word sophos), so when Henry VI

Kara Kovalchik
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Before a ship slides from its berth into the water, it must first get hit on—by a bottle of booze, usually champagne. Here’s the lowdown on the history and physics of smashing some bubbly and launching a ship

Matt Soniak
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In the wild, giant panda mating occurs just as nature specials would have you believe. There’s intense competition for each female, and the dominant male will mate with her several times to ensure success. And that strategy works: Wild female pandas gener

Erin McCarthy
Finally, an answer!

When I was a kid with a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), sometimes my games wouldn't load. But I, like all kids, knew the secret: take out the game cartridge, blow on the contacts, and put it back in. And it seemed to work. (When it failed, I'd ju

Chris Higgins
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Christopher Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, was killed last night along with three other Americans when an Islamist mob stormed the American Consulate in Benghazi. With the tragic story all over the news today, reader Kimberly wrote to ask what, ex

Kara Kovalchik
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A friend of mine recently got pinkeye. Whenever she put in her eye drops, she noticed a distinct and very unpleasant taste on the back of her tongue.

Matt Soniak
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Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Who put the -stan in Afghanistan? I don’t know about the former, but we can thank the Proto-Indo-Europeans for the latter.

Matt Soniak
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Readers Meg, Wayne, and Rajiv all wrote in to ask about the tune that clock chimes typically play. What’s it called? Where did it come from? How’d it get so popular? Here’s the story.http://youtu.be/2mfBkd7MAdMIn 1793, a new clock was installed at St Mary

Matt Soniak
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Reader Jen wrote in to ask, “Why do old injuries ache during crummy ache during crummy weather?" The idea that certain aches and pains correspond with, and can even predict, the weather is widespread, and has been around since at least the days of ancient

Matt Soniak

Everyone wants dibs (such as “I’ve got dibs on that last piece of pizza!”) but do we know what they are or why we call them? Chances are you first started calling dibs back when you were a kid on the playground. Coincidentally, the playground is exactly

Kara Kovalchik

They don’t, technically. It’s actually their larvae, or caterpillars, that eat clothes, not the adult moths.It’s only a relatively small group of moths, the family Tineidae, that have any interest in your clothing. Throughout much of the US, you’ll only f

Matt Soniak
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While they might be bright red when they hit your dinner plate, crabs and lobsters are usually brown, olive-green or gray when alive and in the wild (at least in the mid-Atlantic U.S.; crustaceans farther south come in a variety of vibrant colors).

Matt Soniak

There are probably blackout periods you can’t remember at all from your childhood, and the memories you do have are likely hazy and garbled. Although pretty much everyone experiences this phenomenon known as childhood amnesia, its causes are still somewha

Julia Davis
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The heart is the most important muscle in the body, so it seems like something of a marketing ploy by the folks at Bayer to suggest that something so simple as a humble aspirin tablet can be of any use when this life-sustaining organ goes into epic fail m

Kara Kovalchik

At some point in the last few thousand years, someone in India or Southeast Asia decided to try catching one of the wild fowl than ran through the jungles and roosted up in the trees. We don’t know exactly what that person was intending, but the bird prob

Matt Soniak
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As more and more Americans embrace email and other communication technologies, the U.S. Postal Service has absorbed the hit. The agency lost an estimated $10 billion in 2011 and expects to top that this year, leaving many analysts to wonder how long it ca

Ethan Trex
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Throwing rice at a newly married couple has been a tradition for thousands of years, possibly going back as far as the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians. Are birds suffering from our holy matrimonies?

Matt Soniak

Stockbyte/John FoxxBefore Curiosity landed on Mars, the main topic of discussion among amateur astronomers was the blue Moon that is scheduled to make an appearance on August 31. The widely accepted definition of a blue Moon is a full Moon that appears tw

Kara Kovalchik
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Eye floaters—or 'muscae volitantes,' Latin for 'hovering flies'—are those tiny, oddly shaped objects that sometimes appear in your vision, most often when you’re looking at the sky on a sunny day.

Matt Soniak
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The pyramid was supposed to serve as a lightning rod, and since Frishmuth had already done some plating work for the monument, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called on him to fashion the topper as well.

Matt Soniak
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