Cafe Science

Engineering tons of metal to fly straight up is no easy feat. Here's how helicopter blades make vertical flight a reality.

Why is the universe organized the way it is? And why is it so empty? From planets and stars to superclusters and galactic filaments, the universe's largest structures formed because of its smallest. In this special collaboration with PHD Comics, we'll learn how the earliest, quantumest blips seeded the structure of everything everywhere.

Can't sleep? Don't just lie there in bed and stress about it. These tricks will have you snoozing in no time.

4000 years ago, the ancient Sumerians made a surprising discovery: if they scraped the bark off a particular kind of tree and ate it, their pain disappeared. Little did they know that what they'd found was destined to influence the future course of medicine. Krishna Sudhir traces the history of aspirin.

Grits are better with syrup in them!

A new study might've found a possible cure for peanut allergies. How does it work?

During the warmer months, especially at night during the full moon, horseshoe crabs emerge from the sea to spawn. Waiting for them are teams of lab workers, who capture the horseshoe crabs by the hundreds of thousands, take them to labs, harvest their cerulean blood, then return them to the sea. Why? Elizabeth Cox illuminates the incredible properties of horseshoe crab blood.

What if we are not creators, but creations?

We live in an era of self driving cars, autonomous drones, deep learning algorithms, computers that beat humans at chess and go, and so on. So it's natural to ask, will artificial superintelligence replace humans, take our jobs, and destroy human civilization? Or will AI just become tools like regular computers. AI researcher Max Tegmark helps explain the myths and facts about superintelligence, the impending machine takeover, etc.

The universe is bustling with matter and energy. Even in the vast, apparent emptiness of intergalactic space, there's one hydrogen atom per cubic meter. But is there such thing as a total absence of everything? Is it possible to make a completely empty space? Rolf Landua and Anais Rassat explain the science behind vacuums.

Biology textbooks are full of drawings of DNA, but none of those show what DNA actually looks like. Sure, they're good models for understanding how DNA works, but inside of real cells, it's a whole lot more interesting. Learn why we can't look directly at DNA, and find out how DNA is actually packed inside cells.

What happens if we bring the sun to earth? No, seriously.

Scientists have discovered how to create a real life 'superlaser' using an ultra-pure diamond. How exactly does it work?2

The light from KIC 8462852 faded again, and scientists have some new theories about what's behind astronomy's most mysterious star.

The nose's olfactory receptors are stimulated when we smell food and other odors. But could the process of smelling cause weight gain?

This video is about why it's harder to successfully land spacecraft and landers and rovers on Mars than on Earth, or Venus, or the Moon, or Titan, or asteroids. It all comes down to atmospheric density! When there's no atmosphere, you can do a powered descent in a flimsy tinfoil spacecraft like the Lunar Module, and when there's plenty of atmosphere you can do an unpowered descent via heat shield and parachutes like the space shuttle, Apollo command module, Soyuz, Huygens, etc. But on Mars with its thin air, you have to do both powered & unpowered descent, getting the worst of both worlds.

Researchers at Stanford University developed a soft, squishy robot that "grows" like a vine and can squeeze through tight spaces. It can also lift heavy objects, which makes it potentially ideal for search-and-rescue operations.