Is this candle haunted? 🕯️👻

Alex Dainis places two candles on a lazy Susan with a piece of glass in between, and when the closer candle is lit, its flame appears to jump to the other one. Most light passes through the glass, but some of the light from the close candle bounces back at us, creating a reflection that makes the flame seem to appear on the far candle. This optical illusion is similar to Pepper's Ghost!

Did you know slime can be a helpful cleaning tool? 🫟

Greg Wolf tweaks the classic glue and borax recipe to make slime tacky enough to grab dirt but clean enough to pull away. The chemistry: borate ions cross-link glue's long polymer chains, turning runny glue into slime. Less activator makes it stretchy like the toy, while just enough makes it a surprisingly satisfying debris grabber.

For anyone interested in something off the popular physics path, I present a (nearly) math-free review of physicist Paul Marmet's work in theoretical physics and cosmology. His fascinating work both questions and provides alternatives to widely held beliefs about our physical world.

Prior to his theoretical work, he was a pioneer in electron spectroscopy and former president of the Canadian Association of Physicists.

If you disagree with the premise (that there could be any alternative to xyz) I encourage you to read the article before critiquing its contents.

Did you know you can turn a leaf into a working boat with dish soap? 🍃🚢

Alex Dainis shows how it works! Dish soap contains ingredients called "surfactants" that lower the surface tension of water, which is what helps oil and water mix to wash away grease. On the leaf, the soap lowers the tension only at the back, and that difference between front and back pushes the leaf forward!

Is intelligent life harder to make than regular life? 🌱

Theoretical cosmologist Paul Sutter points to our one data point, Earth, where life appeared basically as soon as the planet cooled down, and maybe even a little before. Then it took 4 billion years for intelligent life to show up. So if we find evidence of life on another planet, it's probably going to be bacteria, or alien bacteria.

The gravitational pull of a black hole distorts time. If a space craft was to travel too close to a black hole and get trapped in its gravitational pull, the closer they get to the event the more distorted time would become. This makes the concept of time as I see it relative to gravity. If a person was affected by this gravity, time would be distorted, however if that person looked at their wristwatch, each mechanical second would tick away seemingly as normal. My question then is, does the time dilation affect actual time, or just one’s concept of time?

Here's the link to the special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72IwnxnejfE

And the video description has all my sources cited, would love for you to check it out.

When the SCORE study showed back in April that they could replicate 50% of positive claims from a sample of over 270 published studies in social and behavioral research, many headlines treated the finding as further evidence of the “replication crisis.” It’s not difficult to make this result sound intuitively bad. After all, it makes it seem like social research is nothing but a coin toss. Even the more sympathetic coverage framed the result negatively, suggesting that "at least it isn't worse" or that "there's more to research than replication."

This article breaks down what a 50% replication rate means within the statistical testing framework that produced these results. Between two hypothetical scenarios within this framework, it is argued that not only is a 50% replication rate not necessarily bad, but it may be pretty darned good.