“How can hot water freeze faster than cold? In order to freeze, hot water has to lose more heat than cold, so why would that happen faster? Even if the cooling of hot water somehow catches up with that of the colder water, why should it then overtake, if the two have at that point the same temperature? Yet this effect has been attested since antiquity. Aristotle mentions it, as do two of the fathers of modern science, Francis Bacon and René Descartes in the 17th century. The effect is today named after a Tanzanian schoolboy, Erasto Mpemba, who was set the project of making ice cream from milk in the 1960s.” (m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/)

“Proving the cause of something is notoriously difficult. A new test claims to be able to find such causes, and it might end up in the courtroom very quickly…” (New Scientist)

“You are 200 miles directly above the Martian surface — looking down. This image was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Jan. 27, 2010. (The color was added later.) What do we see? Well, sand, mostly. As you scroll down, there’s a ridge crossing through the image, then a plain, then dunes, but keep looking. You will notice, when you get to the dunes, there are little black flecks dotting the ridges, mostly on the sunny side, like sunbathing spiders sitting in rows. Can you see them?”

“What are those things? They were  first seen in 1998; they don’t look like anything we have here on Earth. To this day, no one is sure what they are, but we now know this: They come, then they go. Every Martian spring, they appear out of nowhere, showing up — 70 percent of the time — where they were the year before. They pop up suddenly, sometimes overnight. When winter comes, they vanish.” (Krulwich Wonders…)

Related articles

• The weird, black, spidery things of Mars
• Where did the Mars ‘spider’ formations come from?
• Mars Rover Checks In on Foursquare

‘The “neuroscience” shelves in bookshops are groaning. But are the works of authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer just self-help books dressed up in a lab coat?‘ (New Statesman)