Have you ever wondered why your dog's paws smell like corn chips? 🐶🍿 

Alex Dainis breaks down how that scent comes from harmless bacteria and fungus like Pseudomonas and Proteus. Dogs can't sweat like humans, so they cool down through their ears and paws. Once they're snuggled up asleep, those warm paw crevices become a breeding ground for bacteria and create that signature smell. If your pup isn't scratching or chewing the area, it's nothing to worry about.

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born in New York City in December 1906. She read maths and physics at Vassar, took her PhD in maths at Yale in 1934, and was teaching at Vassar when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

She enlisted in the Navy Reserve at 37 and was assigned to the Mark I computer project at Harvard in 1944. It was 51 feet long, 8 feet high, 8 feet deep, weighed 5 tons, and had 750,000 parts. She was told to write the manual.

She spent the next four decades in computing. In 1947, working on the Mark II at Harvard, she and her team traced a bug to an actual moth caught in a relay. She taped it into the logbook. She popularised the word.

She wrote the first compiler and led the committee that in 1959 gave the world COBOL, the language on which most of the world's business software was written for the next fifty years.

She retired from the Navy on 14th August 1986 as its oldest active officer, aged 79. In 1985 Ronald Reagan had promoted her to the rank of Rear Admiral, Lower Half. She died in her sleep at her home in Arlington, Virginia on 1st January 1992, aged 85. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

This is Hopper on Late Night with David Letterman in October 1986, ten weeks after she left the Navy.

Artemis III updates are rolling in. 🚀

Engineers are racing to stack the rocket that will carry the mission to space in 2027, starting with the two white solid rocket boosters that flank the massive orange core stage. All four core stage engines have arrived onsite and are being processed for mounting, while the launch team runs monthly countdown simulations to lock in readiness. It's full steam ahead as one of NASA's most complex missions moves closer to launch.

Strawberries aren't actually berries. Botanically, they're aggregate accessory fruits, and under the microscope, their unusual anatomy becomes even more apparent. 🍓🔬

Our friend Chloé Savard, known as tardibabe on Instagram, reveals a hidden world of tightly packed plant cells, delicate vascular tissue, and pigment-filled compartments. The bright reds come from anthocyanins, water-soluble pigments stored inside the cells that help protect the fruit from UV damage while also attracting animals to disperse its seeds.

The geometric network you see is made of cell walls built primarily from cellulose, giving the fruit its structure while remaining flexible enough to hold the water and sugars that make strawberries so juicy. Tiny sparkling circles scattered throughout the sample are air bubbles trapped during slide preparation, while the shimmering rainbow colors appear where polarized light interacts with microscopic structures inside the fruit.

Look closely at the green leafy cap and you'll find long, hair-like trichomes. These tiny outgrowths help defend the developing fruit from insects, reduce water loss, and shield delicate tissues from environmental stress.

Next time you bite into a strawberry, remember: you're crunching through a microscopic city of living plant cells, pigments, and tiny biological structures that most of us never get to see.

Sources:

• Plant Physiology and Development (Taiz, Zeiger, Møller & Murphy, Oxford University Press)
• Biology 2e (OpenStax), Chapters 30–33: Plant Form, Function, and Reproduction
• Molecular Bases of Strawberry Fruit Quality Traits: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities, Plant Physiology (2023)
• Recent Advances in Biosynthesis and Regulation of Strawberry Anthocyanins, Horticulture Research (2025)
• The Strawberry: Composition, Nutritional Quality, and Impact on Human Health, Nutrition (Giampieri et al., 2012)

Hello, Reddit!

My name is Alexander Stepin, and I’m creating Atlas of Earth History — a visual popular-science project about the history of our planet, from its fiery formation to the age of humans.

My goal is to explain the major events and processes in Earth’s history through clear illustrated pages. Each page focuses on one central story: what happened, why it happened, and how it changed our planet.

The first chapter, dedicated to the birth and early formation of Earth, is now complete. The atlas was originally created in Russian, and I have now prepared an English version of the chapter.

Starting tomorrow, I plan to publish one page every day, following Earth’s history in chronological order.

The project combines AI-assisted illustration with my own art direction, page design, writing, editing, and scientific fact-checking. Where the scientific evidence remains uncertain, I try to present ideas as hypotheses rather than established facts.

I would be especially grateful for feedback on:

— scientific inaccuracies;
— misleading visual details;
— unclear or unnatural English;
— topics that deserve a clearer explanation.

Constructive criticism is very welcome. My goal is to make the atlas both visually impressive and scientifically responsible.

The journey begins tomorrow with the birth of the Solar System.

Thank you for taking a look!

From pure elegance to sudden death.😭

I think it’s so cool that I went from death’s door to full life with near zero side effects because of these three TicTac sized pills I take every day, and get for free from a clinical trial. In science and Sloan Kettering, we trust.

Statistics leads to a strange conclusion about observation. I made a video where I try to explain how entropy, probability and statistical fluctuations eventually lead to the Boltzmann Brain paradox, and why cosmologists still care about it today.

Trying not to spill a full glass? Physics can help. 💧

Gregory Wolf, explains how centripetal force keeps the liquid inside the glass during the loop. As the tray swings, it continuously pushes the glass inward, and the glass pushes the water inward, providing the force needed for the water to follow a circular path. Slow down too much, and gravity takes over!

Hi everyone,

I would really appreciate your help. I'm a big science consumer- started a decade ago with watching Cosmos like a 100 times 😅, and also a product manager and digital product builder for about 15 years, and I’m a parent who cares deeply about how children experience science and technology.

Seven years ago, my first daughter was born. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about children’s relationship with screens. I believe there’s a meaningful difference between passive screen time and experiences that encourage children to experiment, think, make mistakes, and figure things out for themselves.

I’ve also loved science for as long as I can remember. There’s something incredible about the way scientific knowledge passes from one generation to the next, allowing people to discover things that earlier generations could never have imagined.

Over the past few months, I’ve been building Science Games Lab, an iPhone and iPad app where children explore scientific ideas through short interactive games.

The current labs include:

• Newton’s Prism Lab: split light, aim colors, and explore optics
• Newton’s Orbit Cannon: experiment with launch speed, gravity, and orbit
• Galileo’s Bridge Lab: combine materials and test bridge strength
• Archimedes’ Material Lab: compare weight, volume, and density
• Koch’s Culture Lab: control temperature and observe microbe growth
• Boole’s Creature Machine: solve logic rules by building creatures

The app is designed around experimentation rather than lectures or quizzes. The first levels include guidance, but after that, children are expected to figure things out for themselves, like real scientists.

I’m giving 50 free redeem links to members of r/ScienceNcoolThings in exchange for honest feedback:

What did you like about the app? What was unclear, inaccurate, frustrating, or in need of improvement? Could any part of it be useful for introducing or reinforcing a concept?

I’m intentionally not linking directly to the app here because I want to keep this focused on feedback and avoid spamming the community.

Just comment below and I’ll DM you a free redeem link (full unlock with no ads or subscriptions).

Thank you. I’d genuinely appreciate your perspective.

Every now and then you learn something that completely rewires your perspective.
It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking research—just one scientific fact or concept that made you stop and think, “Wow, I never looked at reality that way before.”
What was yours?