01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100001 Those ones and zeros might not look like anything to you, but in binary code the numbers are actually saying “Hello!” Any code that uses just two symbols to represent information is considered binary code. Different versions of binary code have been around for centuries, and have been used […]
This article is part of a spotlight on silk. Check out “The Medical Wonders of Worm Spit,” part of SciFri’s Macroscope video series, and this activity involving a silkworm cocoon dissection. There’s a glass cabinet of curiosities that stands in the corner of a windowed room of the silklab at Tufts University in Boston. Among […]
This photograph captures a sliver in time—1/10,000th of a second, to be exact—when a drop of milk splashes and curves upwards to form an opalescent crown. The photographer spent two decades trying to capture the perfect milk coronet, until he snapped this color shot in 1957. He was Harold “Doc” Edgerton, a professor of electrical […]
A limpet’s life is an arduous one. Clinging to rocks with a muscular foot, these little mollusks brace against crashing waves that deliver the food they need to survive. Using a long, tongue-like appendage studded with tiny teeth, limpets scrape against the hard rock surface, gathering algae and pulling it toward their mouth. Talk about […]
The following is excerpted from The Undersea Network, by Nicole Starosielski. Listen to SciFri on Friday, April 10, to hear Starosielski discuss the history of undersea cable networks. Undersea fiber-optic cables are critical infrastructures that support our global network society. They transport 99 percent of all transoceanic digital communications, including phone calls, text and e-mail […]
Tune in to Science Friday on April 10, 2015, for a discussion about robots and why we should (or shouldn't) fear their imminent rise. This Friday on the show, we'll spend time looking at the fears people have about artificial intelligence run amok. How can it get out of hand? What about it […]