science - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Science: CEOs Are Such Bullshit
“CEO” is a term for someone who is paid more money than you because they are able to project a large degree of confidence about their wrong ideas. Don’t take my word for it—it’s science!...
Man Creates 80-Foot-Long Whip Apparently Good Only For Hurting Himself
Via Reddit, here is a comically long bullwhip. But thanks to physics, the whipper necessarily becomes the whippee....
Science! Shows That Roger Federer's Backhand In Fact Defeated Rafael Nadal
Yesterday we argued that Federer’s unusually strong backhand anchored his Australian Open win over Rafael Nadal, and today we found a startling statistical basis for that claim. It comes courtesy of the always helpful Jeff Sackmann at TennisAbstract. Relative to other sports, tennis remains fairly d...
Animal Watch: Have Animals Escaped Our Control?
You can scarcely turn on the news these days without being confronted by the troubling question: What are animals doing now? ...
These Mammals Are Just Straight-Up Murdering Each Other All The Time
One of the more disturbing nature documentaries I’ve ever seen shows a dozen chimpanzees punching, kicking, biting a member of their own troop, chasing him up a tree and leaving him there to slowly die of his wounds over a span of three painful days....
National Parks, Ranked
This is a barren time in the sports calendar. We are in a desolate trough between the international intrigue of the Olympics and the drama and nonsense of football season. I’m goddamn bored. Coincidentally, the National Parks Service turns 100 years old today. Unlike late August, the National Parks ...
Counterpoint: Dying Is (Probably) Okay
My smart colleague George Dvorsky over at Gizmodo published a defense of “radical life extension” this morning. This is a largely pseudo- or quasi-scientific pursuit favored by billionaire parasite Peter Thiel (among others), based upon the idea that, essentially, death is a pathology rather than a ...
Go Ahead And Keep Not Flossing, Dirty Scoundrels
Is there anyone more reliably smug than a person who actually flosses the recommended amount? Somehow, routinely dredging up unidentifiable morsels of past meals from between their teeth gives people a sense of self-righteousness that they feel find about lording over the rest of us more casual, shi...
Just How Bullshit Are AccuWeather's Long-Range Forecasts? (Very)
When AccuWeather announced they would begin issuing 90-day forecasts in April, science writers, and the meteorologists they interviewed, were notably dubious. Sort of like how they were when AccuWeather debuted a 45-day forecast in 2013....
Watch A Man Hit A Frozen Dildo With A Baseball Bat
Wired’s Brent Rose dipped a few objects, including a big dildo, in liquid nitrogen and destroyed them. He also explained the science behind why some of the items broke, and why others didn’t. It’s a worthwhile use of your time....
Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 Hour" Rule Is Essentially Meaningless
In his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell culled a memorable and marketable tip from a 1993 study of violinists at a music academy in Berlin. The study’s authors, he said, found that the most talented and accomplished 20-year-old violinists at the school had practiced an ave...
Is It Normal For Me To Hiccup So Damn Much?
Hiccups are, by nature, pretty normal. Everyone gets them and the only really worrisome side effect is the possibility that they won’t automatically dissipate in a timely fashion. If they don’t? Even hiccups that last for months or years or record-setting decades typically don’t keep the inflicted f...