Chlorophyll is the green pigmentation on plants that help them filter air to absorb nutriets and sunlight. But we all know that from 3rd grade science class. But in the 1950s, scientists tried to dig deeper into it and caused such a hype.

There are two researchers we need to thank for the success of chlorophyll, the mass-market dynamo: Dr. Benjamin Gruskin and Dr. F. Howard Westcott.

Dr. Gruskin, a Temple University researcher, got started first, experimenting with chlorophyll for roughly a decade starting in 1930 on a wide variety of different things, including the fast healing of burns and wounds. Gruskin’s work led him to patent the use of chlorophyll in water soluble solutions in the late 1930s.

Apparently, after Dr. Gruskin's research, Dr. Westcott also conducted tests and took notice of the pigment's ability to reduce odors.

An article from Time Magazine dating to 1950 noted that Westcott first noticed the pigment’s apparent deodorizing abilities related to Vitamin B and asparagus, two nutritious things that happen to have a pretty bad smell.

After this Eureka moment, he then did a small test involving a doctor and four nurses, giving them a dose of chlorophyll, then having them measure their underarm odor over a daylong period. Somehow, taking chlorophyll appeared to cut their B.O. in half. Later, he expanded the test to a larger group college students, with similar results.

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Facing the elements of nature every day, wildlife have their own ways to combat the weather, predators, and other threats they encounter. However, despite their natural defenses, that doesn't make them invulnerable from the harsh forces of nature, especially during winter.

In fact, wildlife can succumb to frostbite and hypothermia, just like people and pets. In the northern United States, the unfurred tails of opossums are a common casualty of cold exposure. Every so often an unusual cold snap in Florida results in iguanas falling from trees and manatees dying from cold stress.

Avoiding the cold is important for preserving life or limb (or, in the opossum’s case, tail) and the opportunity to reproduce. These biological imperatives mean that wildlife must be able to feel cold, in order to try to avoid the damaging effects of its extremes.

Animal species have their own equivalent to what human beings experience as that unpleasant biting mixed with pins-and-needles sensation that urges us to warm up soon or suffer the consequences. In fact, the nervous system mechanisms for sensing a range of temperatures are pretty much the same among all vertebrates.

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Last August, the redditor Stephen Zerance posted the Mark Jackson trading card he bought on eBay showing that the Menendez brothers had been on courtside watching the Knicks at the Madison Square Garden. But it wasn't because he was a big fan of the Knicks.

In fact, Stephen Zerance doesn’t even watch the NBA. He was just trying to find photographic proof that Lyle and Erik Menendez did all the outlandish stuff that court documents claim they did in the months between murdering their parents and getting caught.

“My friend and I, who is also a true-crime head, knew that the brothers went on a lavish spending spree after they got an insurance payout from their parents’ death,” Zerance said. “They bought a lot of things: tennis lessons, Rolexes, clothes, businesses, restaurants, cars.”

As they continued doing their research, they tried to look for evidence of all the things that the Menendez brothers did. One of these, they noticed, was buying courtside tickets to a Knicks game.

Zerance, who writes crime novels, began looking at old photo archives for proof. Nothing. Maybe someone had uploaded a picture or video somewhere else? No luck.

Zerance looked up cards on eBay from 1989 and 1990 and zeroed in until he found a match. He bought a bunch for about 10 cents apiece.

The story continues further, with Zerance's post not garnering much attention until December of the same year when somebody tweeted about the post.

(Image credit: Stephen Zerance)

We haven't completely figured out everything about the brain and how each part or region of it works. However, the field of neuroscience continues to make great strides in helping us understand how our brain works. Recently, some researchers have turned their attention to the cerebellum.

For the longest time the cerebellum, a dense, fist-size formation located at the base of the brain, never got much respect from neuroscientists.

For about two centuries the scientific community believed the cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”), which contains approximately half of the brain’s neurons, was dedicated solely to the control of movement. In recent decades, however, the tide has started to turn, as researchers have revealed details of the structure’s role in cognition, emotional processing and social behavior.

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Though there are ergonomically designed airports which seem futuristic in their efforts to maximize efficiency and get passengers where they need to be on time, a lot of airports still struggle with the age-old problem of congestion.

Increasing demand could not be simply solved by making airports bigger without sorting out the dynamics happening within the airport itself, from the moment passengers step inside the gates to the time they take off.

Even at the dawn of the jet age, airlines had trouble moving people and bags through airports – and they still do. It’s unclear that bigger airports serving ever more passengers will have an easier time than their smaller, less crowded predecessors.

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If you're curious about how big the streaming giant has grown, then look at some of its audience numbers, some of which they have recently shared.

At the end of December, Netflix said that 45 million people had watched Bird Box, a Netflix-owned thriller starring Sandra Bullock that came out just before Christmas. Now the company is using its quarterly earnings letter to share more numbers about viewership of some of its other shows — as well as a sense of how much of your TV screen the streaming video company really owns.

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Have you ever seen a dauncy person? Or look up at the sky and thought, it is going to be a flenched day? Perhaps, you have met someone who has the habit of parwhobbling, something which you consider very polrumptious?

Those are just some of the words in Joseph Wright's The English Dialect Dictionary which contains 70,000 entries of local British words and phrases from the 18th and 19th centuries.

You may see a selection of other words like them here.

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The life of a professional spy is nothing like the movies. Sure, it's fun to put on disguises but when your life is always hanging on the balance, sometimes you have to go to dire measures in tight situations.

For some spies, the difference between life and death was sticking this tube where the sun don't shine.

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Just as the Industrial Revolution set the gears of progress in motion, so did the rapid destruction of the environment. And where it all began, Europe, has been heavily affected, not least in London. In 1952, the whole city became shrouded in deadly smoke killing thousands.

After the shock of the Great Smog, the UK cleaned up its act, legislating to replace open coal fires with less polluting alternatives. London Mayor Sadiq Khan is hoping for a repeat of the movement that eradicated London's smog epidemic, but now for its invisible variety.

The air in London is "filthy, toxic," says Khan. In fact, poor air quality in the British capital is a "public health crisis". The city's poor air quality is linked not just to thousands of premature deaths each year, but also to a range of illnesses including asthma, heart disease and dementia.

So what are the most polluted spaces? Check them out on Big Think.

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The Mona Lisa effect is the phenomenon in certain works of art where the eyes of the portrait would follow viewers as they move around the artwork. But researchers say that this phenomenon doesn't apply to the Mona Lisa at all, where it originated.

"There is no doubt about the existence of the Mona Lisa effect," the authors wrote. "It just does not occur with the Mona Lisa herself."

The study grew out of ongoing research at Bielefeld University in Germany on human communication with robots and avatars. Directional gaze is key when designing gaming avatars or virtual agents, for instance. That's one way an avatar/agent can indicate attention, perhaps directing a player/user toward objects that are relevant to the task at hand.

In the case of the Mona Lisa, the gaze of the portrait is actually just looking at the right-hand side of her audience.

(Image credit: CITEC/Bielefeld University via Ars Technica)

From our perspective on Earth, space seems like a vastly unlimited horizon that stretches from one to the other end of the universe. We don't know if there are even any bounds or limits that holds the universe or if the universe itself holds everything else in it. In that case, where is the edge of space?

In this paper I revisit proposed definitions of the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space, considering orbital and suborbital trajectories used by space vehicles. In particular, I investigate the inner edge of outer space from historical, physical and technological viewpoints and propose 80 kilometers as a more appropriate boundary than the currently popular 100 km Von Kármán line.

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When planning your next meal, there are a few things you consider but scientists have recently been looking into how our memory affects what we will eat next.

To date, the scientific effort to understand how the brain controls eating has focused primarily on brain areas involved in hunger, fullness and pleasure. To be better armed in the fight against obesity, neuroscientists, including me, are starting to expand our investigation to other parts of the brain associated with different functions. My lab’s recent research focuses on one that’s been relatively overlooked: memory.

For many people, decisions about whether to eat now, what to eat and how much to eat are often influenced by memories of what they ate recently. For instance, in addition to my scale and tight clothes, my memory of overeating pizza yesterday played a pivotal role in my decision to eat salad for lunch today.

Memories of recently eaten foods can serve as a powerful mechanism for controlling eating behavior because they provide you with a record of your recent intake that likely outlasts most of the hormonal and brain signals generated by your meal. But surprisingly, the brain regions that allow memory to control future eating behavior are largely unknown.

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Before Charles Bittinger, there was Maria Clara Eimmart who had made illustrations of the planets in the solar system as well as other celestial objects.

Born in Germany in an era when no woman could obtain a formal education in science anywhere in the world, Maria Clara Eimmart (May 27, 1676–October 29, 1707) predated Caroline Herschel — the world’s first professional woman astronomer — by a century.

She went on to become an artist, engraver, and astronomer who produced some of the most striking astronomical art since the invention of the telescope, in a time when humanity had no idea that the universe contained galaxies other than our own.

Like Margaret Fuller, Eimmart benefitted from the love and intellectual generosity of a father who equipped her with a rigorous foundation of French, Latin, mathematics, and art.

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In college, I never really had a strong drive to ace all my tests but I also didn't want to fail. I just wanted to be in the "right" zone, not too high but not too low. You could say I wanted to be perfectly average. But there are just some exams that are either too difficult or too easy. And researchers have shown that the optimal difficulty level would have the average score of a test-taker at around 85 percent.

Wilson and his colleagues derive the number from experiments in machine learning. Under loose assumptions, they show that the optimal error rate for training a broad class of deep learning algorithms is 15 percent. The fastest learning progress occurs when the error rate hits this sweet spot. They show that this number is also in line with previous work on learning in humans and animals.

The implications of the 85 percent rule in the classroom are straightforward. If you’re a teacher, your tests should be difficult enough that the average score is 85 percent. If you’re a student, the optimal level of challenge is about a B or a B+ average. An A might look nice on your transcript, but you could have stood to learn more from a class that was harder.

Outside the classroom, the implications of the 85 percent rule are similar. If you are learning a new language, say on Duolingo, then you should be getting about 15 percent of the answers wrong. Otherwise, you’re not being challenged at the right level to consistently improve in picking up your new language.

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The Moai statues of Easter Island tell a tragic tale that caused the destruction of the peoples living in the island. But before they inevitably fell to ruin, why did the Rapa Nui people build these statues in the first place? Researchers may have an answer.

Researchers say they have analysed the locations of the megalithic platforms, or ahu, on which many of the statues known as moai sit, as well as scrutinising sites of the island’s resources, and have discovered the structures are typically found close to sources of fresh water.

“What is important about it is that it demonstrates the statue locations themselves are not a weird ritual place – [the ahu and moai] represent ritual in a sense of there is symbolic meaning to them, but they are integrated into the lives of the community,” said Prof Carl Lipo from Binghamton University in New York, who was co-author of the research.

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