When you have an itch, you scratch it. What could be more simple than that? Scratching itches is one of our most basic instincts, one which we share with many other animals. Have you ever stopped to wonder, mid-scratch, exactly why scratching is so e...
Don: It's time once again to go to the A Moment of Science Mailbag . . . Ya?l: A listener writers in: Dear AMOS: Why does it seem like guys are into video games way more than women? Is there a scientific explanation for this? D: Great question. And i...
The star, Will Smith, is sprawled on a Los Angeles bench. Dirty, disheveled, in full distressed costume and character, he looks lost and alone, much like the bums in every city that go unnoticed. But there's no ignoring Hancock, who has amazing power...
One of the birthplaces of cinema, Germany today possesses huge film archives crammed with 150,000 movies found on 1 million rolls of film. The film heritage is preserved by the Federal Film Archives, which operates from Berlin and six other cities. O...
We keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the earth keeps warming. Climate scientists have predicted that the consequences of unchecked warming could result in everything from catastrophic flooding to larger and more deadly hurricanes. S...
Ya?l: Today on A Moment of Science, global warming . . . D: Uhm, right . . . Y: That's your cue, Don. D: I know, Ya?l . . . but . . . Y: What's wrong? D: Well, we're a science program, right? And I know that the accepted scientific wisdom is that hum...
Boy or girl? That's the first question we ask about new babies, new puppies and newly-found fossils. Fossils? Yep. Experts can tell if an ancient Egyptian mummy or a prehistoric human was a boy or a girl just by looking at the skeleton. Here's how th...
Conscious, human-like machines are so popular in science fiction that it may come as a surprise to learn Artificial Intelligence researchers aren't even sure what it means to ask whether a computer will ever think. In the middle of the last century,...
Dear Annie: My wife has been having an affair and I have filed for divorce. Our children do not know about the infidelity yet, but I'm sure it will come out. I am the husband who cooks, cleans and cares for our children. I massaged her feet. I sent f...
On our last program we discussed a simple experiment run by an Alexandrian named Eratosthenes in the third century B.C. By noting that, at the same time of day, sticks in the ground cast different-length shadows depending on whether they were in a no...
