Can a chunk of dry ice make spooky fun AND carbonate your drink? 🧊🎃

Greg Wolf proves it does both, starting with how this -109°F solid carbon dioxide sublimates straight from a solid to a gas. That ghostly fog in the jack-o’-lantern isn’t CO2, which is invisible, but water droplets that form as the cold gas hits the surrounding air. Drop dry ice into your favorite beverage and the CO2 creates bubbles, but wait until every last piece disappears before you sip.

ClimateCentral: "Fastest-Warming U.S. Congressional Districts."

"Ahead of the 2026 midterms, a new Climate Central analysis shows how climate change has altered the voting landscape in the U.S." All 435 U.S. congressional districts have warmed since 1970—by 2.8°F on average. 

"The fastest-warming U.S. congressional districts are in the Southwest." Human-caused climate change is the leading cause—accounting for 91% of the warming in each district, on average. 

"Despite this widespread, human-caused warming, only 47% of U.S. adults believe that they have personally experienced the effects of global warming." 

"This Climate Matters analysis is based on open-access data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC)...though the YPCCC bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations of the data presented here."

You—yes, you—need to make the conscious decision to actively initiate conversations about the weirding climate with not just friends + acquaintances but also people you have just met. I know this is hard for most people to do, but since climate deterioration affects the whole world, we cant leave anybody behind 

And we need as high a proportion of the population as possible to participate. So—batten down the hatches—but all hands on deck, not hiding in steerage.

We’ve discovered more than 6,000 planets orbiting other stars, but we haven’t found another Earth.

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains that finding a planet is very different from finding a place we could survive. Some have no solid surface to stand on. Others are too hot or too cold and even a rocky planet could have an atmosphere we can’t breathe. For now, Earth is the only home we know.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

Your brain may have once been two separate organs! 🧠

Scientists long thought the whole brain grew from a single group of embryonic cells. But a new study of mouse embryos found it actually develops from two, one forming the forebrain and the other the hindbrain. Similar trends in chickens and zebrafish suggest that over 500 million years ago, evolution may have brought two separate nervous systems together to form the brain.

Is this candle haunted? 🕯️👻

Alex Dainis places two candles on a lazy Susan with a piece of glass in between, and when the closer candle is lit, its flame appears to jump to the other one. Most light passes through the glass, but some of the light from the close candle bounces back at us, creating a reflection that makes the flame seem to appear on the far candle. This optical illusion is similar to Pepper's Ghost!

Did you know slime can be a helpful cleaning tool? 🫟

Greg Wolf tweaks the classic glue and borax recipe to make slime tacky enough to grab dirt but clean enough to pull away. The chemistry: borate ions cross-link glue's long polymer chains, turning runny glue into slime. Less activator makes it stretchy like the toy, while just enough makes it a surprisingly satisfying debris grabber.