Lightsabers – Star Wars An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.” Whether your particular brand comes in badass red, noble hero blue, or Samuel L. Jedi purple, the lightsaber is such an intimidator, it can even make a two-foot Muppet seem tough. You don’t even have to use it, just flick...

1. Bioluminescent Bay Located in Puerto Rico, on Vieques Island, there is a shallow body of water with a narrow inlet known as Mosquito Bay. In each gallon of the bay there are 720,000 phosphorescent single-celled organisms that glow when they are agitated. It is a defense mechanism — the glowing...

In our modern, scientific world it is sometimes easy to forget that human progress often comes attached to some spectacular intellectual clashes between different ways of looking at things and differing interpretations of what is seen. There have been some notable intellectual mind-fights over the millennia,...

Surgery: Crude, blunt and horribly painful Surgery in the Middle Ages was crude and blunt and … PAINFUL! Surgeons had a very poor understanding of human anatomy, anesthetics and antiseptic techniques to keep wounds and incisions from infection. It was not a pleasant time to be a patient, but if you...

We investigated some of the most puzzling anomalies of modern science, those intractable problems that refuse to conform to the theories. Here he counts down the 13 strangest. 1. MOST OF THE UNIVERSE IS MISSING We can only account for 4 per cent of the cosmos If you’re wondering what the LHC might...

Since day one, at least day one of human existence, we’ve looked to the stars and beyond, and in them we’ve found faith, dreams, inspiration, direction, and love. From our scriptures to NASA and from the moon to Mars, we’ve searched for answers about ourselves and things far greater. Unfortunately,...

We might not have jet packs, flying cars and food in a pill yet, but we do have the internet, HDTV and the iPod — solid technologies that make 21st-century living pretty cool. So where is the future coming from? Amazingly, it’s being created by a select group of cities that have strong research and...