Latest posts from the blog
Do seedless watermelons really come from parents crossed every year? We check how watermelon is re-bred each season, how bananas and potatoes are cloned instead, and whether any of it counts as GMO.
Every pharmacy counter has a version of the same warning: don't take that antibiotic with milk. We check FDA drug labels and clinical guidelines to see which drugs actually require a strict timing window — and it turns out the real minute-counted '30-minute rule' belongs to drugs taken *before* eating, like alendronate and levothyroxine, not after. Korea's blanket '30 minutes after meals' habit turns out to be about something else entirely, and 'never mix antibiotics with milk' overstates the problem: only specific drug classes actually bind to calcium.
Line up mandu, gyoza, dim sum, and samosa and it feels natural to ask what separates them. But the names don't point at the same level to begin with — one is a whole style of eating, another a specific item, and the same written character can mean different foods depending on the country. We check what each of these words actually refers to.
Wrapping something in a wet cloth and pointing a fan at it is a genuinely good way to cool a warm drink — and one of the fastest ways to ruin a frozen one. Evaporative cooling bottoms out at the wet-bulb temperature, and a damp cloth conducts heat far better than still air even while sitting cooler than the room. We check what it actually takes to hold a low temperature without a refrigerator.
The vacuum of space is popularly imagined as cold enough to flash-freeze anything exposed to it. But a vacuum has no air or water to carry heat away, so conduction and convection simply don't happen there — only radiation does, and radiation is slow. That's why the ISS carries a 70 kW ammonia cooling loop, why spacesuits are built to fight overheating rather than frostbite, and why Google named cooling as its hardest problem in putting AI data centers in orbit. We check the Stefan-Boltzmann law against the real engineering, and against the one detail *2001: A Space Odyssey* got backward.