At an age when most teenagers are focused on schoolwork and video games, Taylor Wilson was attempting something that even advanced laboratories struggle to achieve. Working from his parents’ garage in Reno, Nevada, the 14-year-old successfully built a functioning nuclear fusion device known as a fusor. Using vacuum chambers, high-voltage equipment, deuterium gas and self-taught…
There is a special kind of tyranny in being born into a world designed for somebody else’s hand. The scissors are wrong. The classroom desk is wrong. The ink smudges the wrong way. The handshake, the ritual, the factory machine, the spiral notebook, the cricket field, the guitar, the language itself, all seem to whisper…
Charles Darwin (Image: Wikipedia) People generally remember Charles Darwin as the man who transformed science. His name immediately brings thoughts of evolution, natural selection and discoveries that changed how human beings understand life itself. Most people imagine him surrounded by notebooks, specimens and scientific observations. The picture that often comes to mind is of someone…
For nearly a century, thousands of strange holes carved into a barren Peruvian hillside puzzled archaeologists, historians, and even conspiracy theorists. Stretching across the dry slopes of the Pisco Valley in southern Peru, the massive formation contains more than 5,000 carefully arranged pits that can only truly be appreciated from the air. Some believed they…
The Chemists were vapourising carbon and noticed a perfect 60-atom cage. Image credit – Gemini While conducting experiments on the vaporisation of carbon atoms in 1985, chemists Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley obtained surprising results that showed the stability of a cluster comprising only 60 carbon atoms. This molecular structure became famous by…
The world’s largest river delta is so massive that most people never guess it. Image credit – Wikimedia When people consider world-famous river deltas, the Nile often comes first due to its importance in the history of Egyptian civilisation. However, in terms of the size of the delta, lands are compared among experts and geographers,…
In 1940, a cracked silicon crystal at Bell Laboratories led Russell Ohl to discover the p-n junction, a pivotal moment for electronics. Strange current jump on a fractured piece of silicon opened the door to solar cells. Image credit – Wikimedia In 1940, a cracked silicon crystal at Bell Laboratories led Russell Ohl to discover…
Earthquake-resistant technology may soon become simpler, cheaper and far more reliable thanks to a newly patented steel sphere cylinder developed by researchers at the University of Sharjah. The passive seismic damping device, created by civil engineering professor Moussa Leblouba, uses friction generated by steel balls inside a hollow cylinder to absorb earthquake vibrations in buildings,…
When Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado returned to his family land in Brazil during the 1990s, he reportedly found a devastated landscape instead of the lush forest he remembered from childhood. Years of deforestation, cattle grazing and soil degradation had stripped the land of wildlife, water and greenery. Rivers had dried up and much of the…
Parakeets fluttering in and out of people’s houses, gardens and urban parks are becoming a regular occurrence in many places. However, experts suggest that the bright green parakeets might actually provide information on climate change, biodiversity, urban ecology, habitat shifts and the state of the environment. In fact, according to the research done on ring-necked…
