Superstition or wishful thinking could trick you into thinking you saw one of these mythical creatures.
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Mermaids are not real, but are meaningful to people around the world.
A tiger’s vertical stripes help it blend in with trees and grasses in its homelands in Asia.
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How do tigers – a top predator – successfully hunt their prey when they have bright orange fur? The secret’s in their stripes!
Geese fly day or night, depending on when conditions are best.
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Geese honk loudly and point their bills toward the sky when they’re ready to start the migration. Here’s how they know it’s time, how they navigate and how they conserve energy on the grueling trip.
A downpour or a drizzle: What causes the difference?
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Some rainstorms drench you in a second, while others drop rain in a nice peaceful drizzle. A meteorologist explains how rainstorms can be so different.
Don’t worry that your dog’s world is visually drab.
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Your faithful friend’s view of the world is different than yours, but maybe not in the way you imagine.
Lasers create colorful light shows at concerts, are used by doctors in surgeries – and are used in scientific laboratories.
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Physicists can use bright, hot lasers to slow atoms down so much that they measure -459 degrees Fahrenheit.
People in a special airplane flight get to float like there is no gravity – just like astronauts.
Steven Collicott
How do people in a special airplane flight get to float like there is no gravity – just like astronauts? An aerospace engineer explains.
Cookies taste so good. Smell tells us that before we even take a bite. How?
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June 1, 2020
Rakaia Kenney , University of Maryland, Baltimore County ; Kayla Lemons , University of Maryland, Baltimore County , and Weihong Lin , University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Mmmmmmm. That smells delicious. Wait, how do you know that?
They may look comfy to sit on but you’d plummet through and hit the ground.
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You might have already felt what it would be like inside a cloud made of condensed water vapor.
The spread of diseases is akin to a maze of toppling dominoes.
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Epidemiologists focus on diseases among groups of people. They also study the spread of disease among animals.
Dangerous winds batter the south coast of England.
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Wind travels all over the world. Where does it come from, and why?
Every known culture on Earth has special words for kids to call their parents.
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One anthropologist found 1,072 similar words for ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ in the world’s languages. It turns out a mix of biology, culture and encouragement from parents explains this phenomenon.
It would be fun to be able to shrink people and objects, but it’s something we can only imagine.
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The movies make it seem like someday we’ll be able to make people and objects grow really big or shrink really small. Whether this will be possible comes down to the smallest of things.
No one knows what kicked off the Big Bang that eventually allowed the stars to begin forming.
Adolf Schaller for STScI
The term ‘Big Bang’ might make you think of a massive explosion. Put the thought out of your head. Rather than an explosion, it was the start of everything in the universe.
Even in quarantine, people around the world have to walk their dogs.
AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis
Pets might not protect us from the coronavirus, but they can help us get better.
Cold and sweet in the heat.
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Have you ever felt a piercing pain in your head when you eat something cold?
Some wasps are social insects, meaning they live in groups and have a queen.
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Bees aren’t the only species that has a queen.
Depending on where you’re from, you say words like ‘basil’ a specific way.
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Accents differ depending on where we’re from, even in the same country.
Holey moley!
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When the holes – also called ‘eyes’ – don’t appear in a batch, cheesemakers say the cheese is ‘blind.’
It’s an age-old battle between parents and kids.
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Leaving your coat at home on a cold winter day doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to get sick. But it could make you more susceptible to germs.