Posts by Jenifer Sako

You are a head of state. You get state dinners. You are received by royal families. Then it’s over and  you’re back to daily walks with the dog and eating meatloaf once a week. Not quite. Exiting United States presidents still get a perk or eight after they leave office. Scroll through these little presidential...

Ever notice how ants are always on the move? Their trails seem to go for miles–from an ant’s perspective anyway–but they’re never stalled or stuck waiting for traffic ahead to clear. They’re on a magical freeway where everyone is moving at the same speed with no bottlenecks or accidents. How does this work? And can...

13-year-old Caroline Crouchley, a student of Garden City Middle School, is proposing a better, safer hyperloop train, building on an idea pushed by Elon Musk in 2012. Currently, tech companies are working to get a hyperloop functioning in India, hoping to transport people between Mumbai and Pune in only half an hour. A trip like this...

Our solar system is pretty extreme as far as temperatures are concerned. At its core, our sun registers at around 27-million degrees Fahrenheit, but its surface is no slouch temperature-wise either: it’s clocks in at about 10,000 degrees. So is it kind of weird that in outer space, away from the sun and the mild...

A carbon dioxide filtering device that can capture carbon dioxide from the air at just 400 parts per million has been hailed as a “revolutionary” instrument for tackling our climate crisis. Sahag Voskian and T. Alan Hatton, chemical engineers at MIT, developed the method, which captures CO2 by passing air through special charged plates. Carbon...

She’s been an inventor since she was four. And in 2018, when she was only eight years old, Xóchitl Guadalupe Cruz López was celebrated for one of her inventions. It was the first year a child won Mexico’s prestigious National Autonomous University science prize, reports El Universal. The prize recognizes women’s achievements in science, and it was awarded...

As coal mines have shut down, many miners remain out of work in West Virginia. To combat jobless in coal territory, a new nonprofit has stepped in offering training in beekeeping and assistance in selling any resulting honey. It’s good income and good for the environment! The program is offered by the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective....

Good news! The “highest dumpster in the world” recently had a big clean out. More good news: the trash is getting upcycled into goods for homes and hotels all over Kathmandu. Everest had a serious trash problem – thousands of climbers were bringing stuff up that they weren’t taking down with them. Nepal recently forbid...

Some steppe eagles got into trouble with their researchers for sending text messages that resulted in huge cell phone bills. Bad, bad birds! Researchers at the Russian Raptors Research and Conservation Network were studying the steppe eagles to learn more about their summer migratory patterns. To track the eagles, researchers tagged the birds with GPS monitors...

Do the French cuss like sailors? Is it naturally French to let the F-bomb drop on a dime? Non! Yet, people have been saying “Pardon my French” for years when apologizing for their foul language. Kind of also makes you wonder what the French say when they let a “merde” slip out at the dinner...

Although we’ve had our eyes on the Mars prize for some time, a different team of researchers are actually working on getting to Venus. Venus gets closer to Earth in its orbit than any other planet, yet we have precious little information about the surface – except that it’s close to a living hell. In...

On October 11th, the evening before Typhoon Hagibis hit Japan, an unusual sunset painted the sky a vivid shade of purple. The violet sky may have been simply stunning under different circumstances, but for people in the typhoon’s path, it was an omen of the devastation – including the loss of at least 40 lives...

Vlookup is an Excel command allowing you to extract a value based on the position of another value. So, you can run a vlookup to tell a cell to look for a value in one column and retrieve another value from the same row. Okay, forget all that because now we have Xlookup, which Microsoft’s Joe...

Canned pumpkin is not something about which you normally give two hoots for nine months out of the year. But, boy howdy, around September or October, depending when temperatures where you live drop below 60 degrees…watch out! Pumpkin is EVERYWHERE and in EVERYTHING. We want it in our PSLs (pumpkin spice lattes), our pies, our...

Milkmen delivering the milk, cream and butter for the household early each morning was one of the more charming features of the 1950s. Then, like all cool things, milkmen fell out of favor. It somehow became more convenient and less expensive to buy our dairy at the grocery store. But here’s something else you can...