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Professional athletes make artistic synchronized swimming look effortless. Yet it is an incredibly demanding sport: it requires tremendous muscle power, endurance, and control to tread water and perform an elaborate dance simultaneously. On top of that, swimmers need to simultaneously keep in perfect sequence with a group in the water.

In 1830, the Swedish Navy was reeling after a major continental war. Their fleet was decimated, with many of their wooden sailing ships lost or badly needing repair. Securing wood to rebuild and maintain their fleet in the future was a top priority. The Navy estimated they would eventually need

Being invisible makes a lot of sense if you want to avoid predators. Many animals that live deep in the sea use this strategy. One example is the Glass Squid, which is almost entirely transparent. Almost. The big problem is that it’s impossible to be completely invisible. Eyes absorb light

Aerobraking can work well on paper in spaceflight dynamics, but if you’re not careful, it can end in disaster. Aerobraking is when a spacecraft deliberately flies through a planet’s atmosphere to adjust its trajectory. It’s not science fiction, either – the Venus Express spacecraft completed experimental aerobraking maneuvers in 2014.

Even though the Sargassum fish lives in the middle of the sea, it spends a lot of time crawling around. This is possible because its habitat is the tangled morass of Sargassum seaweed that floats in large patches in the ocean. These fish are highly adapted to live in this

IKEA makes furniture. Not a little bit, either. They’ve been the world’s largest furniture retailer since 2008. What do you think their best-selling item is? At over 1 billion units sold, it’s head and shoulders above anything else they make. Here’s a hint: you eat it. That’s right: their best

It was Christmas time, but I didn’t expect to get a haircut as a present. On this particular holiday, one of my young son’s presents was a small automatic flying drone. It was a seemingly harmless small toy that merely hovers and slowly drifts around indoors automatically, without the need

The longest continuously running experiment started in 1930 and is still going right now. The Pitch Drop Experiment looks like an hourglass filled with a thick, black substance called pitch. Pitch is a resin that is so thick it looks and acts like a solid. It is so much like

The first time I started running for exercise, it was a disaster. It was a disaster because there are pitfalls that aren’t obvious to people who are new to running. My problem was I just jumped right in without a detailed plan. I had a general idea that I needed