After two years of work, Martin Molin of the Swedish band Wintergatan debuted a fully custom-made machine that plays music using 2,000 marbles. The marble machine features multiple instruments including a bass guitar, cymbals, and a vibraphone all played by falling marbles. Apart from the 11 mm steel ball bearing marbles, he made all the gears powering the machine by hand.

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The tough-yet-fragile physical properties of the tadpole-shaped pieces of glass known as Prince Rupert’s drops have puzzled physicists for as long as, well, there have been physicists. Bash the head with a hammer, and a drop gets barely a scratch. But break off its thin tail, and it shatters into fine powder.

Researchers long ago realized that the strength of the drops - named for Prince Rupert of Bavaria, who presented five of them to Britain’s King Charles II in 1660 - has something to do with stresses in the glass created when a drop is made by letting a blob of molten glass fall into water, so that it cools rapidly.

Twenty years ago, a pair of researchers took high-speed video of a drop disintegrating showing that, when the tail is brok ...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a recreational, psychedelic drug that alter awareness of the surroundings, perceptions, and feelings, as well as sensations and images that seem real though they are not.

LSD works by binding primarily to the dopamine receptors and adrenal receptors in the brain. It also binds to most of the serotonin receptors. The binding process is believed to overstimulate the natural neurotransmission process, activating the receptors and altering thought and perceptions.

Though medical researchers have not scientifically proven how this process alters consciousness, they are certain about the binding process which links hallucinogenic chemicals to receptors and disrupts neurotransmission between receptors and parts of ...

This might be painful to watch for some viewers, but as tattoos become more popular, you might need this done to you one day.

The rare Iranian spider-tailed viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) waggles a fake "spider" - actually a fleshy lure with leg-like scales at the tip of its tail - to tempt birds within striking distance. Until 2001, the viper was known only from a single misidentified specimen collected during a U.S. expedition to Iran in 1968. The weird structure on its tail was so unlike anything documented in other snakes that it was written off as a birth defect or an abnormal growth. While scientists had suspected its unique tail was used for luring prey, new observations of the dramatic bird captures now confirm this. The new study also revealed the viper starts growing its tail lure after birth, and that it isn’t complete until adulthood.  

This is Richard Feynman's take on a simple question, why do magnets repel each other?

A little more on Richard Feynman. He was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model.

As always: A scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, but one who asks the right questions. ...

From July 10 to September 30, a team from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) exploration ship, Okeanos Explorer, is going to be mapping the deep waters of the Hawaiian Archipelago in the North Pacific Ocean. This largely unknown deep-sea ecosystems will be explored for the first time using robotic submersibles, as shown in the video above.

This lion, named Will, spent his life with a traveling circus in Brazil. "For 13 long years, the lion had been confined to a cramped cage and denied any semblance of a normal existence," the Sao Paulo sanctuary wrote.