To be precise, bug bombs are ineffective at doing what they're supposed to do. Researchers conducted a study that measures the efficacy and risk of using these bug bombs to control cockroaches, and not only were they ineffective but they also put people at risk with the toxic residue.

"Bug bombs are not killing cockroaches; they're putting pesticides in places where the cockroaches aren't; they're not putting pesticides in places where cockroaches are and they're increasing pesticide levels in the home," DeVries said. "In a cost-benefit analysis, you're getting all costs and no benefits."

On the other hand, when the researchers used gel bait, they found it to be more effective.

In contrast to the bug bombs, these baits were effective, after two and four weeks, in eliminating cockroach populations in the 10 homes.

(Image credit: Matt Berone/Eurekalert)

One of the best ways to improve something is to fail at something and try to figure out what went wrong. Another is to just break something down and try to build it back up. For NASA, they blew up a jetliner.

It’s an experiment that an eight-year-old aviation fanatic might concoct: What if we crammed a remote-controlled jetliner with special fuel and crashed it into the ground—just so—in order to ignite its gas tanks?

That’s exactly what NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration did 35 years ago, in one of the most visually arresting safety tests ever performed. Spoiler alert: The test helped change the way we fly for the better, but not the way its architects envisioned.

(Image credit: NASA)

A British aristocrat had unknowingly bought stolen religious art which were sold off as "garden ornaments".

In 2004, two chunky limestone reliefs depicting Catholic saints were stolen from a medieval church in Burgos, Spain.

"The thieves wanted to sell [the reliefs] and make a lot of money, but soon found out they stole world heritage that would be extremely difficult to sell," Brand told the French news site AFP (Agence France-Presse). "So, they decided to sell them as garden ornaments."

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons via Dutch News)

We might have to reconsider our view on how prehistoric humans lived and survived. Of course, practicality is the most important quality in their tools and garments. But it wasn't the only thing they thought about. They were also concerned about aesthetics.

In a new study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, a team of researchers has pieced together what we know about prehistoric garment making using needle artifacts collected around the world, including from the site by the Inya River.

“Many of the needles we discovered were not simply used to manufacture clothes but for embroidery and ornaments. There was an aesthetic role,” says Francesco d’Errico, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France and a co-author of the study.

In other words, beauty and looking good had something to do with it as well.

(Image credit: Francesco d'Errico et al/Journal of Human Evolution)

Nowadays, many global brands understand the need for representation and breaking down stereotypes and prejudice of race and gender among other things. Though controversial ads aren't as rampant today, some of them are still as blatant as they were back in the 19th century.

After decades of presenting the archetypal American consumer as white and female, advertisers are slowly broadening their imagery to include more diversity. But, as the scholar Marilyn Maness Mehaffy writes, the history of race in American advertisements isn’t just about the absence of non-white buyers.

She argues that the creation of the ideal white, female consumer in the expanding consumer economy of the late nineteenth century depended on the inclusion of women of other races, particularly African-Americans, as a foil.

Mehaffy focuses on illustrated advertising cards. In the late nineteenth century, consumer brands printed the colorful cards to spread awareness of their products. Both children and adults saved the cards, leading to a collector’s craze.

Some cards simply depicted animals, flowers, or landscapes. But one archivist found up to forty percent of the cards in a typical museum collection invoked ethnic stereotypes. In particular, Mehaffy writes, a striking number of illustrated cards depicted a pair of women: one white and one black.

(Image credit: Boston Public Library/Flickr)

One of the greatest rescue missions in recent history has to be the Thai cave rescue. It was a near-impossible task to get 12 teenage boys and their adult coach out of a flooded cave. But they tried and succeeded. Here's the inside story.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A glacial paradise, an eternal winter wonderland, a land of white snow. These are things that can only be said and seen when we go closer up north or down south toward the poles. Places like them still exist but the threat of global warming might melt these landscapes after several thousands of years being covered in ice.

Glacial retreat in the Canadian Arctic has uncovered landscapes that haven't been ice-free in more than 40,000 years and the region may be experiencing its warmest century in 115,000 years, new University of Colorado Boulder research finds.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, uses radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of plants collected at the edges of 30 ice caps on Baffin Island, west of Greenland.

When compared against temperature data reconstructed from Baffin and Greenland ice cores, the findings suggest that modern temperatures represent the warmest century for the region in 115,000 years and that Baffin could be completely ice-free within the next few centuries.

(Image credit: University of Colorado Boulder)

For lay people like us, it is enough to say that magnets stick to some metals. What makes it happen is something far too complex for us to understand. Even physicists have been looking for a more detailed model of how magnets work.

But a group of graduate students from Johns Hopkins university found inspiration from the mathematical principles behind the 15-puzzle to gain insight on the physics of ferromagnetism.

“Itinerant ferromagnetism is actually one of the hardest problems in theoretical condensed matter physics,” said Yi Li, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University.

But Li and two graduate students, Eric Bobrow and Keaton Stubis, may be just a bit closer to solving the problem. Using the mathematics of the 15-puzzle, they expanded a well-known theorem that describes an idealized case of itinerant ferromagnetism.

In their new analysis, published in the journal Physical Review B, they extend the theorem to explain a broader and more realistic system, potentially leading to a more rigorous model of how magnets work.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Before Stephen Hawking, the concept of black holes seemed to contradict one of the laws holding modern physics together, though we cannot deny the existence of these massive objects in space.

For many years, the existence of black holes seemed to threaten a fundamental tenet of modern physics called the second law of thermodynamics. This law helps us to distinguish the past from the future, thus defining an “arrow of time.”

Basically, with the concept of entropy, we establish that time moves forward and not in reverse because the entropy of any matter can only increase and not decrease. The way black holes were understood is that when something is sucked into it, the thing is lost forever. But Stephen Hawking changed our perspective on black holes.

(Image credit: Yong Chuan/Unsplash)

Scientists have been able to capture through the Hubble telescope one such galaxy that has lost its spiral arms and died.

That’s what happened to a galaxy called D100 in the massive, Coma galaxy cluster, starting roughly 300 million years ago. Images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope allowed researchers to see the phenomenon in unprecedented detail.

“This galaxy stands out as a particularly extreme example of processes common in massive clusters, where a galaxy goes from being a healthy spiral full of star formation to a ‘red and dead’ galaxy. The spiral arms disappear and the galaxy is left with no gas and only old stars,” said William Cramer, a graduate student in Yale’s Department of Astronomy who led the new research.

“This phenomenon has been known about for several decades, but Hubble provides the best imagery of galaxies undergoing this process.”

(Image credit: NASA/ESA/University of Alabama/Yale University)

We have all thought about what it feels like to become immortal or at least, to live to be over 100 years old. Though the thing about being human is that we age and decay so even if we do live until the ripe old age of 100, we won't necessarily be able to enjoy life.

However, there is one man who longs to live beyond 100 and he is doing everything he can to achieve that: Dave Asprey.

As he’s fond of saying, he has no interest in being average. Asprey, who is 45, has made the widely publicized claim that he expects to live to 180. To that end, he plans to get his own stem cells injected into him every six months, take 100 supplements a day, follow a strict diet, bathe in infrared light, hang out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wear goofy yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane.

Currently, Asprey is best known as the founder of Bulletproof Coffee; he’s the reason everyone started slipping a pat of butter into their coffee a few years back. At least one of the Kardashians is a fan, and Jimmy Fallon has extolled the virtues of the high-fat beverage on The Tonight Show: “It’s the most delicious thing ever. But it’s actually good for you. It’s good for your brain.”

(Image credit: Ian Allen/Men's Health)

It might sound too coincidental to believe but we don't know how things and circumstances will turn out so we just have to ride along with it and hope for the best.

For Vesna Vulovic, getting her schedule mixed up allowed her to see a foreign country and stay in a luxurious hotel was a dream come true. Only, the circumstances surrounding the incident were not so fortunate.

(Image credit: Medium)

So many tasks are becoming automated nowadays that we might find ourselves losing more jobs to robots than anything else. But that's not necessarily a bad thing because the more we source out seemingly mundane jobs, the more time we have to do other more productive things.

If there’s one driving job I think I’d be fine with giving up to a robot, it’s finding a place to park in a colossal, jam-packed parking lot or parking deck. That’s not really where driving enjoyment lives.

And while autonomous cars really aren’t available yet to do the task, there are other eager, hungry robots that could be. Robots like this mechanical go-getter named Stan, who will be valet parking cars at London’s Gatwick airport this summer.

(Image credit: Jalopnik)

Dr. Conteh (white polo, third from right) stands with his staff at the Lassa Ward. Ross Donaldson (far right) would later write up the experience in a book.

In the midst of civil strife, the Lassa fever research program run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was turned over to the host government of Sierra Leone and the researchers left. Except for one man, Dr. Aniru Sahib Sahib Conteh.

With few resources and a skeleton crew, Conteh would spend the next 11 years treating Lassa patients in the middle of one of his country’s—heck, history’s—most horrific war zones.

Decades later, it’s clear Conteh’s work helped revolutionize the way Lassa is diagnosed and treated, and his persistence amidst civil unrest and human rights violations provided a framework for others battling hemorrhagic fevers and emerging diseases in some of the world’s most in-need environments. By one estimate, Conteh’s work reduced Lassa mortality by 20 percent. He saved countless lives. He even housed refugees in his own home.

However, not long after the war finally ended, an accidental needle prick led to Conteh’s own Lassa infection. He eventually succumbed to the disease that he had dedicated his life to fighting. But while Conteh and the virus that killed him are widely unknown, his example continues to inspire others and shape the approach to fighting devastating viral outbreaks in Africa and beyond.

(Image credit: Ross Donaldson/Ars Technica)

Our bodies have been equipped with an immune system that should be capable of defending us against a whole host of diseases. There are certain mutations that make it difficult for the immune system alone to fight and that's why we use medical technologies to aid it. The same thing is true for cancer.

As our understanding of the immune system has evolved, its role in the fight against cancer has become increasingly apparent. There have been some monumental milestones that helped shape cancer treatment as it stands today, including Steven Rosenberg’s trials of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in the 1980s, Hans Kolb’s cure of leukemia with donor T cells in the 1990s, and the discovery of checkpoint blockade, which led to Jim Allison’s recent Nobel Prize and the explosion of the field of immunotherapy.

(Image credit: ぺムスカ/Pinterest)