Rose Eveleth

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    Look Through This Microscope and Tell Us What You See

    As you look closer and closer at the world, you find more and more levels of organization. And at many of those steps, the view is fantastic. From butterfly wings to snowflakes, zooming in on the world around us can reveal incredible symmetries and patterns, and sometimes pure chaos. Seen at a microscopic level, things […]

  • Muybridge The Horse in Motion

    Time Trial: See If You Can Clock These Time-Warped GIFs

    When Eadweard Muybridge captured the movement of a galloping horse in individual frames in 1878, he managed to settle a long-running debate over how that animal runs—specifically, whether there was any moment when it had all four feet off the ground. His pioneering stop-motion photographs showed how slowing the world down provided a powerful way […]

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    The Curse of the Unlucky Mummy

    When science and fear collide, a supernatural story thrives.

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    How World of Warcraft Might Help Head Off the Next Pandemic

    Gamers are giving scientists insights into how people react to a plague.

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    How Does Flying Feel on the Other Side of the Cockpit Door?

    Turbulence in the wing vortex produced by an airplaneNASA Langley Research Center (NASA-LaRC) via Wikipedia In many of the times we encounter turbulence in our lives, it is preceded by a calmly worded warning from above. “Uh, folks, we may hit a few bumps,” a pilot announces over the plane’s PA system—or something to that […]

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    How Graphic Design Can Make Flying Just a Little Bit Safer

    The cause of aviation safety has had a terrible week. An Air Algérie flight crashed yesterday in Mali, reportedly killing all 116 on board. The day before, a TransAsia plane went down on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, leading to the deaths of at least 48 people. And, most notoriously, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was […]

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    The Most Symmetrical Objects in the World

    If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a haircut, you know just how hard it is to make something precisely symmetrical. We value symmetry so highly in part because it’s really hard to achieve. Here are five of the most symmetrical objects humans have ever crafted, and why they were so hard to make.1. Gravity […]

  • Eveleth_HERO.png

    The Curse of the Unlucky Mummy

    When science and fear collide, a supernatural story thrives.

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    Sparkly Mints May Help Explain Puzzling “Earthquake Lights”

    Agriculture inspector Jim Conacher photographed these earthquake lights over Tagish Lake, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, in 1972Jim Conacher For centuries, people have been reporting mysterious lights along the ground and in the sky soon before an earthquake hits. But it wasn’t until 1966 that there was some solid evidence of the lights, when one man […]

  • Istanbul

    Can You Identify These Cities From Their Light Signatures?

    The light that a city emits is like its glowing fingerprint. From the orderly grid of Manhattan, to the sprawling, snaking streets of Milan, to the bright contrast of Kuwait’s ring-roads, each city leaves its own pattern of tiny glowing dots. See if you can ID these cities based on the way they shine.   […]