A bicycle is a good example of something that is commonplace and yet quite extraordinary. It seems such an unlikely mode of transportation. One has to wonder how someone came up with the bizarre idea that by sitting astride a bar that connects two wheels one behind the other, one could propel oneself forward without falling. And yet everyone who has ridden a bike knows that it feels remarkably stable and as long as it is moving, it stays upright and seems to almost ride itself. ‘Look, no hands’ is the common exultation expressed by new learners as they discover for themselves that the bike can be ridden with minimal action on their part other than to keep it moving. [Read more…]

In a document obtained by Al Jazeera under the Freedom of Information Act, the NSA urges its officials to use 9/11 as a sound bite to deflect any questions about their snooping programs, giving them explicit language to use. And sure enough, NSA director Keith Alexander used it in his congressional testimony. [Read more…]

On Science Friday last week, I heard a segment about Cotard’s Syndrome, also known as the Walking Corpse syndrome. This is where some people are convinced that they are dead and actually tell other people so, saying things like “It is no use talking to me. I am dead.” [Read more…]

Carl Zimmer has an interesting article about attempts to estimate how many cells the average human body contains. It depends on how you do it and previous estimates over the past few centuries have ranged widely from two billion to 200 million trillion cells. [Read more…]

Developments in robotics that mimic living things are quite amazing. Here’s one robot designed to look and work like a pack mule that can go over rough terrain. [Read more…]

The practice of snake handling as a test of faith is popular in certain rural Pentecostal churches in the US. There is even a TV series called Snake Salvation about this practice on the National Geographic channel. It is highly dangerous to handle poisonous snakes and this has resulted in some of the people being fatally bitten. [Read more…]

The Mythbusters look at how hard it is to separate two phone books whose pages have been interwoven together so that it is just paper-on-paper friction that binds them.

Jonathan Turley has an interesting story of someone who was caught urinating into an open reservoir that served as the source for a city’s drinking water supply. While authorities are looking into whether the man should be prosecuted, the more interesting fact is that the city decided to dump all the stored water, nearly 8 million gallons of it, as a result. [Read more…]

Malcolm Gladwell has made a good career out of taking a few research findings, buttressing them with a few stories from here and there, and creating sweeping, plausible, and appealingly counter-intuitive theories about human behavior, while ignoring anything that disagrees with his thesis. As someone once said, the facts agree with Gladwell’s theories except when they don’t but you’ll have to find those on your own. [Read more…]