Surprising Science — December 20, 2010

2010’s Popular Science Stories

ScienceNOW’s Top 10 list of its favorite and most popular stories of 2010 is an eclectic mix. It includes its most popular story of all time: “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?”

bigthinkeditor

ScienceNOW’s Top 10 list of its favorite stories of 2010 is an eclectic mix including its most popular story of all time: “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” Also featured are reports on why running shoes are bad for you, experiments with ultraprecise clocks, robots trained to lie, atmospheric geo-engineering, pessimistic dogs and irresistible dance moves. The Wormhole story looked at a theoretical physicist’s theory that a long time ago, in a universe much larger than our own, a giant star collapsed. Its implosion crammed so much mass and energy together that it created a wormhole inside which our universe was born.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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