This Friday will be the 132nd official Groundhog Day in the United States. Celebrated in Canada, Germany, and the U.S., the holiday derives from a long-standing German-Dutch tradition, which we’ve been officially recording since 1886. The basic idea: if a groundhog emerges from his hole and sees his shadow, winter will last for six more… Read more »
How exactly does your “Maps” app know exactly where you are, any time of day? The “little blue dot” on your phone tells you where you are as the result of billions of dollars invested in the Global Positioning System (GPS), a network of 27 satellites currently orbiting the Earth. Each satellite sends microwaves constantly,… Read more »
In a world that looks more and more like a science fiction novel, it can be tempting to assume that a computer program or code can do all your tedious work for you. Algorithms suggest videos you might like to to watch on YouTube, plan your road trips to visit friends, and can even frost… Read more »
If you’ve ever taken a basic science class, you‘ve probably heard of the scientific method. Maybe you’ve even designed, conducted, and reflected upon your own experiment–inside or outside of the classroom. One thing you may be unfamiliar with, however, is how the millions of experiments done by scientists, students, and citizens get added together into… Read more »
On most weekends, you can find Indiana University graduate student Sam Cohen at Bloomington Animal Care and Control, a local animal shelter where she has volunteered for two years as a pet adoption counselor. She gets to know the dogs, talks with visitors, and helps them identify which dogs they might want to adopt. But,… Read more »
What is “change”? This might at first seem like an oddly philosophical question to encounter in a science blog. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once described change as the idea that “One cannot step into the same river twice” (paraphrased; Graham 2015). However, this more existential definition for change differs in important ways from the one… Read more »
My research is dependent on migratory birds being present on their wintering grounds in the Appalachian Mountains in the month of March. But this year it was an unseasonably warm winter, and it was not possible to know when migrants would depart for their breeding grounds. Luckily, the temperatures dropped again and the migrants hung… Read more »
In the famous Milgram Experiment, it only took commands from a purported authority figure to get people to subject another study participant to electric shocks up to 450 volts (about a quarter of the voltage used to execute people in the electric chair). In reality, the other participant was an actor, and there were no actual… Read more »
When we look around the world, we see order and symmetry. It’s evident in snowflakes, flowers, and beehives, just to name a few. Going beyond what the plain eye can see, we also know that several chemical structures consist of ordered atoms. For example, think of sodium chloride (more plainly known as table salt). Its… Read more »
This post is the second installment in a two part series. Check out last week’s post here. Thanks to modern technology, the field of cellular neuroscience has become illuminated with brightly colored images – tissue samples, cells, and individual molecules have been stained, photographed, colorized, and even reconstructed in three dimensions. A Google Image search… Read more »
