Where is 'sea level' and how far above sea level is a particular place located? 

Quite a lot of things may go wrong in bridge building and the inhabitants of the German and the Swiss parts of Laufenburg were looking forward to a new bridge over the Rhine, the High Rhine Bridge, when they were taken aback by an embarrassing error: The heights of the two bridge parts growing towards each other differed by 54 centimeters.

Researchers have managed to measure the internal pressure that enables the herpes virus to infect cells in the human body, a discovery which paves the way for the development of new medicines to combat viral infections and indicates ways to stop herpes infections in the future.

Are you on Team Quantum Dots or Team Nanowires when the topic of future nanoscale energy-harvesting technology in solar panels comes up?

10 percent of the US is left handed and that is a similar ratio to many populations around the world so it would seem to be biological.

But a new paper in the journal Heredity has ruled out a 'strong genetic determinant' in influencing handedness. 

Professor John Armour, Dr. Angus Davison (both The University of Nottingham) and Professor Chris McManus (University College London) conducted a twin study examining the whole genome of nearly 4,000 subjects from the London Twin Research Unit to compare left and right handed participants. 

Knocking on wood is a common superstition in Western culture, mostly used to prevent bad luck after talking about good fortune, but sometimes to reverse bad fortune or undo a "jinx."

Other cultures maintain similar practices, like spitting or throwing salt, after someone has tempted fate. Even people who aren't superstitious often participate in these practices.  And since this baseball playoffs start today, don't even get one of them going about their crazy superstitions and rituals. 

Because an uninterrupted sequence of fossilized pollen from flowers begins in the Early Cretaceous, approximately 140 million years ago, it is generally assumed that flowering plants first evolved around that time. 

A new study documents flowering plant-like pollen that is 100 million years older, implying that flowering plants may have originated in the Early Triassic (between 252 to 247 million years ago) or even earlier.  Flowering plants evolved from extinct plants related to conifers, ginkgos, cycads, and seed ferns.  

Here is a (partial) overview of (some of) the recent academic literature on the subject of 'Humming'

Security

Humming-based human verification and identification

“The experimental results show that linear prediction cepstral coefficients and perceptually linear prediction coefficients are conducive to verification and identification, respectively.”

Medicine

A recent article discussed the question of causation versus statistical association in cross-sectional epidemiology studies that evaluate the pote

As an Applied Mathematician, I like to use mathematical modeling and computational techniques to try to better understand how things work in the world around me. One application I have studied over a number of years is how to compute the number of runs (and their distribution) for a team of baseball players with realistic data.

In Antarctica's Vestfold Hills, Deep Lake has been isolated from the ocean for the last 3,500 years ago, a result of Antarctic continent rising that has left a saltwater ecosystem that remains liquid, even in extreme cold.