Human saliva contains a painkiller more powerful than morphine.

Amazon is building a massive biodome in downtown Seattle…

It has been an eventful 12 months for SpaceX. Many successful launches were interspersed with a high-profile test failure which led to the loss of the Spacecom satellite, AMOS 6, making headlines across the world, far beyond the traditional coverage of space publications. However, the launch service provider is dusting itself off and ready to go again with some hugely ambitious targets in 2017.

Mark Holmes

On September 1, 2016, at Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, SpaceX observed an anomaly about eight minutes in advance of a scheduled test firing of a Falcon 9 rocket. This resulted in the loss of Spacecom’s Amos 6 satellite. It was headline news around the world.

For those who can only speak one language, people who have the ability to speak multiple are often a source of fascination. What language do they think in? Can they switch mid-way through? Do they only dream in one language or both?

It turns out, these questions are not without merit as people who can speak two languages actually experience time in a different way.

A study from Lancaster University and Stockholm University, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that people who are bilingual think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.

Google Earth’s new feature brings the entire planet to life.

We try to separate the facts from fiction about the controversial cholesterol-buster

ByMirror.co.uk

This object, V838 Monocerotis, looks like it moved faster than the speed of light. We know what you’re going to say–nothing moves faster than light. Well, we didn’t say it did move faster…just that it looks like it did.

Full story at YouTube.

I came up with a neat idea for a multiplication grid visual the other day, and stuck it up on Twitter where it has been doing the rounds with unprecedented alacrity:

I’ve loved reading comments and seeing how people are using the grids already, with fellow teachers, students and your own kids (I’m making one on A1 squared paper for my son this weekend – here’s one 3-year-old who will know what multiplication means before he learns his tables, if I can manage it!) A few of you came up with ideas for variations I could do, including starting the grid from the bottom-left to mimic a Cartesian coordinate grid, and emphasizing square numbers. I’ve also done one with the prime factorization of numbers on one side of the diagonal, which I quite like. I’ve put all the images together into a single pdf document to make it easier to access. It’s on my website at www.thechalkface.net/resources/true_scale_multiplication_grid.pdf: