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Sir Edmond Halley: His dog was even better at astronomy than him (Wikimedia Commons) In 1682, the astronomer Sir Edmond Halley correctly predicted that the great comet now bearing his name would return to the skies in 1758. He was right. But unfortunately he didn’t live to see his prediction come true, and died in 1742, at the age of 85, some sixteen years before its return. But if you think that’s an unfortunate story, in 2013 a team of researchers at Birkbeck University, Lo

The Machs Factor: a sonic boom (Pixabay) In February 1964, NASA and the US Federal Aviation Administration began conducting what they knew as “Operation Bongo II”. Alas, no, this was nothing to do with learning to play the drums. Nor resurrecting Oingo Boingo. Instead, with an eye to investigating the implications of transcontinental supersonic air travel, NASA and the FAA began investigating the effects of sonic booms on urban areas, their buildings and other structures, and

13,000 miles long and built continuously over a period of more than 1,800 years, the Great Wall of China is the world’s largest military structure. It’s also stuck together with rice. In 2010, Chinese scientists at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou discovered that the mortar used to stick the main body of the wall’s Ming Dynasty bricks together was made from a mixture of slaked lime (a standard ingredient of builders’ mortar) and amylopectin, an organic compound made from a sti

The new Google Maps update was next to useless. (Pixabay) Here’s a quick trivia question to kick things off: what do Russia, Turkey and Egypt all have in common? Have a think. I’ll wait. If you know your world geography then you’ll doubtless have worked out that these are the world’s three “transcontinental” countries—nations that straddle the traditional boundaries between the continents. So with the Ural Mountains taken as the boundary between Europe and Asia, Russia falls

Good old Guam, getting its second shoutout here on the Yes or BS blog. One more and we might have to think about giving it its own category tag. But what makes Guam worthy of two blogposts in six months? Well, everyone’s favourite western Pacific island is a lot more interesting than you might think. For one, it has no railways. Two, it has no motorways. And three, it has no sand. Yep, the “sand” on all those beautiful, tropical Guamanian beaches is actually mostly hundreds o