This study is a chocolate mess! In a GOOD way… This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Chocolate – the miracle food! Like magic, chunks of fat, sugar, and cocoa solids become the treat we all love! But how does this combo produce LIQUID chocolate? Is
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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… an ion-plane? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Aircraft fly using thrust from a power source to generate lift with their wings. Usually, that power source is a gas guzzling engine, or a noisy propeller. City dwellers pay
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Hate crowds? Need your “personal space?” Negatively charged electrons do too! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. To understand electrons, scientists have developed a special technique called density functional theory – D-F-T for short. D-F-T is used to predict how electron crowds move in an
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A scientific storm is brewing … about the speed of rain. This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science, saying: According to physics, everything that falls has a terminal velocity. Apples, rain, people. Terminal velocity is a steady speed, where gravity and air resistance balance out. For
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There’s nothing like seabirds to. . . take a dive! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. It’s a beautiful sight: seabirds diving head first into the water to catch unsuspecting prey. A perfect ten! But the northern gannet (GA-nit) takes gold with its flawless, high-speed
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Slipping on a banana peel – Cartoon pratfall, or fascinating biology? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. What makes banana peels so slippery? That’s what Kiyoshi Mabuchi colleagues at Japan’s Kitasato University wondered. So they set up a scientific slip n’ slide! They placed a
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Moon walking: Not as easy as it looks! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. For astronauts, the moon’s weaker gravity can be disorienting. How do we know? Astronauts stumble! NASA has the blooper reels to prove it. That’s because gravity doesn’t just anchor us. It
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The sound of insomnia: cue the LEAKY FAUCET! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science, on the most annoying sound ever. What causes that DRIP DRIP of a leaky bathtub? It’s not what you think! Anurag Agarwal at the University of Cambridge discovered the cause —
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Unsure of when Mercury’s in retrograde? Blame Einstein! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Forwards, backwards – understanding Mercury’s kooky orbit has never been easy! Scientists were unable to do it for years. Then along came Einstein with his theory of relativity. In brief, the
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Am I tipsy, or are my beer bubbles….sinking?! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Fans of the Irish stout, Guinness, are perplexed. The bubbles in their pints seem to…. sink! William Lee, a mathematician at the University of Portsmouth has BURST this case wide open!
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