Our 3000th Episode – Scientific American

The Enduring Mystery of Earth’s Water

Share this on WhatsApp You have to go to extreme lengths to find places on Earth that don’t reveal that they’re part of a water-rich planet. Even the highest and driest deserts, like the Atacama Plateau in South America, still get a minimum of a couple of millimeters of annual precipitation on average (although there […]

How a Carnivorous Mushroom Poisons Its Prey

Share this on WhatsApp In the 1980s, scientists discovered that oyster mushrooms are carnivores. The delicious, inescapable inference is that they’re the only vegan food that can itself eat meat. The meat in question is definitely meat, too. Nematodes, also called roundworms, are little animals complete with guts, nerves, muscles and their own primitive form […]

Cape Canaveral Prepares for First Polar Launches in 60 Years  

Share this on WhatsApp Scientific American July 2020 Florida will soon reopen to launches for pole-orbiting spacecraft  Sixty years ago the U.S. Air Force repurposed its Thor missile as a launch vehicle to put small scientific, weather and military satellites into orbit. Or at least that was the plan. Many of those early satellites ended […]