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5 Terrifying Animals That Could Save Your Life Someday. Just because humans have made it to the top of the food chain doesn't mean we don't wet our pants every time a spider looks at us funny.

5 Terrifying Animals That Could Save Your Life Someday

Deep down we know that we're just clawless animals, and if left alone in a room with anything not cute enough for an animated gif, we'd exit via human-shaped hole in the wall. Or the door. 11 Deep Space Photos You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped. It's hard to overstate the excitement back in 1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope left Earth.

11 Deep Space Photos You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped

Scientists had worked the public into a frenzy with this thing since the 1970s, promising that without the stupid atmosphere to hold it back, its vision would be so clear, you could peer right into the butthole of God. 5 Absurd Sci-Fi Scenarios Science is Actually Working On. It's no coincidence that so many of our modern gadgets seem to have come from Star Trek -- our inventors and engineers all grew up watching it.

5 Absurd Sci-Fi Scenarios Science is Actually Working On

In many ways, science fiction, not science, leads the way. But while it's easy to imagine watching the hopeful utopia of Star Trek and saying, "Let's make that real! " it's a little stranger to think the same after watching Blade Runner or Gattaca. Yet ... #5. The Sci-Fi Premise: Movies about a worldwide superplague seem to come along every few years (see: last year's Contagion), but within that genre is the more cynical and outlandish "Lab creates and accidentally releases a pandemic" subgenre, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Stephen King's The Stand. The premise is flawed from the start, as is typical of apocalyptic movies. Getty"Tyrannosaurs are the new house cats! " The Reality: And thankfully, for once, we're right! 10 Animals You Won't Believe Are Closely Related. Thanks to the know-it-all from second grade, we're all aware that dolphins and whales are mammals, not fish.

10 Animals You Won't Believe Are Closely Related

But it's probably been a while since you've pondered just how incredibly, mind-blowingly weird it is that you and whales were the same animal more recently than whales and sharks. Or to put it in chart form, you and whales split up somewhere in the big tangle of bio diversity up top labeled "Age of Mammals" while whales and fish haven't been the same animals since way the hell down ... ... here where you see the word Selacchi. So how is it that our evolutionary cousins ended up with flippers and fins exactly where fish have them and we ended up needing swimming lessons? Courtesy of Getty Images. " Turns out it's the same reason birds and bats both ended up flying around on wings: convergent evolution, the smarmy term for when completely unrelated species develop similar traits. 12 Pictures of Space You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped. Look, we all know that space is the final frontier, that space is cold and unforgiving and that in it, nobody can hear you scream.

12 Pictures of Space You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped

But what you might not know is that, when it thinks nobody is looking, space puts on a frilly dress, covers its forearms in honey and spins around until it falls over ... because space is just flat-out crazy as hell. Oh, don't take our word for it or anything; we have photographic evidence. #12. Jupiter in Motion. 5 Mind-Blowing Things Found in Our Own Solar System. One of our running themes here at Cracked is "Man, space is just weird as hell.

5 Mind-Blowing Things Found in Our Own Solar System

" It's easy to forget that, after mankind went to the moon and found out it was just a boring, dusty ghost town. Space is full of mysteries, and you don't have to go far to find them. #5. Saturn Has a Hexagon-Shaped Storm nasa.gov. 7 Theories on Time That Would Make Doc Brown's Head Explode. There are a few things in this world that we can always rely on as constants: The sun will always rise each morning, the seasons will always change and time will inevitably march forward at its predictable clip.

7 Theories on Time That Would Make Doc Brown's Head Explode

Except the sun doesn't actually rise, seasons are disappearing and time ... well, see, time is tricky, too. For example ... #7. We May Not Live in the Present. 7 Ridiculous Things People Believe About the 'God Particle' Here at Cracked Labs, we're working to make the world a better place.

7 Ridiculous Things People Believe About the 'God Particle'

The whole "website" thing was an accident resulting from early experiments on what too much Internet does to the human brain, and early court orders dictating that we were responsible for the tragic results. "Columnist" sounds so much nicer than "Extremely Failed Test Result. " Scientists at CERN recently announced the discovery of a Higgs-like particle, the culmination of decades of genius, but there's an empty spot in our cocktail cabinet, so we figured we'd scoop their Nobel Prize. Because we've already found a practical application for it. Interaction with the Higgs field is what gives particles mass; therefore, there will be more Higgs interactions near denser objects, so we can use Higgs particles as a tricorder for finding thick-skulled idiots.

. #7. In 1989, CERN invented the World Wide Web to transmit important information between smart people, and the world has been using it for the exact opposite ever since. 8 Sped Up Videos That Shatter Your Idea of Ordinary Things. I'm not the type of person who gets fascinated easily.

8 Sped Up Videos That Shatter Your Idea of Ordinary Things

My view of the natural world tends to lean toward the practical: a storm cloud means water for crops, a tree is something to piss behind if I'm not near a toilet, the sun is just a moon that God accidentally set on fire while drunk. But if you take even the most boring shit and view it in a time lapse video, suddenly it becomes awesome.

That's when you realize that absolutely everything is in a state of frenzied, sometimes terrifying activity -- it's just happening on a different time scale. Trust me, speeding things up will completely change your opinion of ... Warning: Some of these can be a bit gross and graphic. #8. 5 Reasons You Should Be Excited About Mars Today. Perhaps the most popular cosmic story of the past decade was that Pluto was no longer a planet.

5 Reasons You Should Be Excited About Mars Today

Everyone shared it, and everyone knew about it. However, on a list of the most important scientific discoveries of the past decade, "Pluto is no longer a planet" ranks just under "everything else" and just above nothing. This evening, however, at about 10:30 PST, something pretty incredible will likely occur, and it has nothing to do with the Olympics. Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory, is supposed to land on the red planet tonight or today, depending on where you happen to be on Earth. Now, I don't claim to be an astrophysicist. 5 Scientific Reasons You're Better Off Being Unattractive.

There is a day in everyone's childhood when they first learn what "natural selection" is, and then there is another day a few years after that when they see it in action, as all of the pretty girls gather around the virile star quarterback and spit on the chubby kids when they walk by. It's easy to spend the rest of your life thinking that your bad luck with the ladies is just evolution trying to filter your weird face and frail physique out of the gene pool. But that's not entirely true; a lot of what keeps the bouncers from letting you into the best clubs also gives you some important advantages. For instance ... #5. Tall People Make Good Models, but Short People Live Longer. The 5 Most Ingenious Worlds Ever Invented by Science Fiction. In no other genre is setting as important as it is in science fiction: No matter how intricate the book's plot, or how chisel-jawed that Hollywood manpile on the movie's poster might be, the universe is always going to be the real star.

If you strip out the setting from an action film, you'll still have bankable hunks kicking ethnic people in the throat. If you strip out the setting from a literary drama, you'll still have quirky protagonists exchanging meaningful looks while sharing a tragedy together. But if you strip out the setting in even the most classic and well-constructed science fiction properties, you'll wind up with a whole lot of nothing.

And if you guessed that this column was going to be just lousy -- absolutely filthy -- with thinly veiled plugs for my own sci-fi serial novel, Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, the second episode of which just came out this week, you get a gold star! * 7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes. People who doubt evolution tend to have one main argument: "If evolution is true, why do we still see monkeys running around today, all chimp-like? Where are all the monkey-men I was promised? " Well, if you or someone you know refuses to believe that organisms change over time without proof on a monkey-man level, here are a buttload of animals in the middle of getting their evolve on.

Well, seven anyway. 5 Ridiculous Medical Myths You Probably Believe. When somebody wants to make you feel OK about your shitty life, they'll usually say, "At least you have your health. " 7 Real Insect Superpowers That Put Spidey Sense to Shame. Insects and arachnids, like humans, have their superheroes with incredible powers. The only difference is that their superheroes are real, and consistently more impressive than the human version. 6 Real Planets That Put Science Fiction to Shame. George Lucas dreamed up planets with two suns and cloud cities, and Gene Roddenberry invented dozens of worlds that were all suspiciously similar to the Southern California desert. X Things that only look trippy under a microscope (ph)

Whoa. So deep down, every pina colada is like staring at peacock feathers after dropping, like, all the acid. 5 Scientific Explanations for Your Sexual Perversions. #2. We Kiss to Get Close Enough to Detect Pheromones. 5 Self-Destructive Ways People Accidentally Cured Themselves. Sometimes people do things that are less than brilliant. For every Joseph Lister developing important advances in sterile surgery, there is a Randy Quaid sticking lit firecrackers into his own urethra.

Not to mention jamming airplanes into the massive space urethras of alien invaders. But every now and then the fates grant those who flagrantly disregard their own well-being with a second chance. Suicide Cures Depression Meet The Major, a 55-year-old British army veteran and known asshole who, after returning to civilian life, became "bad-tempered and depressed" (which seems to indicate that he was probably Irish).

Then he cooked breakfast. 5 Mind-Blowing Ways That Science Has Done the Impossible. We see so many day-to-day advancements in science, from increasingly powerful smartphones to a potential AIDS cure, that we kind of get numb to it. The 5 Coolest Pets Humanity Has Bred into Existence. Scientists love themselves some genetic engineering. Like all uses of science, selectively breeding animals can result in creepiness -- we recently covered a handful of designer pets that seem specifically designed to haunt your dreams. 6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain.

We like to feel superior to the people who lived centuries ago, what with their shitty mud huts and curing colds by drilling a hole in their skulls. 6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly. 5 Insane Explanations for Stuff Your Body Does Every Day. 6 Pieces of Fan Art That Are Better Than the Original. If 37 percent of the Internet is porn, then the other 63 percent must be people complaining about stuff. 6 Historical Events Happening More Recently Than You Think. The 5 Most Ridiculous Drinking Myths You Probably Believe. 5 Things You Didn’t Know Could Make You Smarter.