May
20
As he does every year Adam Savage of Mythbuster fame made his grand appearance at the Maker Faire Bay Area, the great gathering of inventors, engineers, artists and other people who love to make things. This year Savage tackled why he and the 50,000 or so people who showed up at the faire spend time, …
May
18
If you’re anywhere in Japan, the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, or on the West Coast of the United States, you may be in for a visual treat on May 20th (or May 21st in the Eastern Hemisphere.) Residents on the West Coast in particular will enjoy the first solar eclipse since 1994 and the last …
May
16
This weekend on FORA.tv, we present one of our most popular live events: the Maker Faire Bay Area 2012. There really isn’t anything quite like it: Put together a bunch of mind-bending inventors, erudite, but slightly crazy, engineers, arts-and-crafts creative geniuses and people who consume technology the way the rest of us eat snacks, and …
May
14
Here’s a quick look at two events coming up on FORA.tv. Last week’s dramatic discovery of an Al-Qaeda plot to blow-up an airliner, and how it was foiled by an operative working with the CIA, MI6, and Saudi intelligence services, revealed how the terrorist organization is evolving in its methods. Though intelligence agencies have the …
May
11
A deep-sea submersible camera caught this “thing” on camera. What is it? It’s a Deepstaria enigmatica. Image courtesy of purpleslog
May
11
Seahorse sex wouldn’t be nearly as exciting without the human commentary: On to other matters of sperm. Undersea photographer Eric Cheng traveled to a little island 25 hours off the Tokyo coast to see sperm whales. Look for the giant bulge in the male’s head, which holds spermaceti–at one time used to lubricate machines. Jump …
May
11
How much water do we have on earth? In the grand scheme of things, not a whole lot according to this illustration from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute: The United States Geological Survey estimates the blue sphere in the photo would be about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) in diameter with a volume of about …
May
09
Using a trap camera, researchers have captured video of the rarest gorillas in the world, the Cross River gorillas, which are a subspecies of the western gorilla and are found on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon. In a National Geographic Live program, scientist Mireya Mayor describes an incident she witnessed while studying western lowland …
May
09
If you haven’t yet heard the latest on Colony Collapse Disorder, a sudden and mysterious disappearance of perfectly healthy honeybees from their hives, then read these rather chilling pieces from Boing Boing and Time. In short, the reason honeybees are dying off in droves has been linked to a certain pesticide used on corn plants. The fact that pesticides …
May
07
Last week we wrote on the strange connection between malaria and slavery, a subject highlighted in a lecture by science writer Charles Mann. In the program titled Living in the Homogenocene, Mann discusses the impact of European colonization in the 15th and 16th centuries and its later influence on the early American economy. The following …