SuppleMentally Blog

A multimedia supplement to the Mensa Bulletin’s SuppleMentally science column

By John Blinke

May 5, 2026

As gas prices rise, EVs look more attractive all the time. And used EVs seem even more attractive. You might wonder if the battery will last a long time, and “Engineering with Rosie” says it probably will. In this video, she breaks down how EV batteries actually age, what kind of degradation is normal, and why independent battery testing can help buyers feel more confident if they don’t fully trust the dealer.

April 28, 2026

CROW REVENGE

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. And if those enemies are crows, you are in deep doo-doo. They have multigenerational vendettas. So try to be nice …

This short video from University of Washington researchers shows why. It’s based on a now-famous field experiment in which scientists wearing distinctive masks captured and released wild crows. The birds didn’t forget. Years later, they still scolded and mobbed the “dangerous” face — and, more impressively, other crows who had never been captured joined in, having learned the grudge secondhand.

April 21, 2026

BRAINIACS

The Brainiacs come from Brainiac: Science Abuse, a British show that treats science less like a method and more like something you can set on fire.

In the clip, the Brainiacs drop alkali metals into water, moving down the column as the reactions intensify. What starts as fizzing builds to flashes and small explosions as each element sheds an electron more easily. By the end, it’s a simple escalation in how fast things get out of hand.

April 14, 2026

MICHIGAN THE CLIMATE REFUGE

We all know that the Great Lakes area is a great place to live. Here in Michigan, that’s easy to take for granted. The rest of the country is also realizing that it is nice to live near a lot of fresh water, so get ready for a bunch of water refugees. A video from Freshwater People looks at whether the Great Lakes could become a climate refuge, and what that might mean for the region.

April 7, 2026

BEFORE THE PYRAMIDS

The Great Ziggurat of Ur is older than the Egyptian pyramids and served a different purpose. In this video from History with Cy, it’s shown not as a tomb, but as an imitation mountain with a temple on top, built from mud brick in a region with little stone.

March 31, 2026

GRAND CANYON: A HUGE GAP

Science communicator Astro Alexandra points out something odd about the Grand Canyon: it’s not just what’s there — it’s what’s missing. A huge gap in the rock record represents more than a billion years of Earth’s history.

March 27, 2026

ELECTRIC SURGE, NUCLEAR STRAIN

In this episode of Everything Electric Tech, Robert Llewellyn tracks a split screen: EVs booming — even outselling petrol cars in parts of Europe — while France’s aging nuclear fleet faces mounting pressure from heat and time.

March 24, 2026

TANIS

What happened to the dinosaurs? Well, if you look at the Tanis site in North Dakota, you may be looking at the very day it happened. Fossils there appear to capture the chaotic minutes after the Chicxulub asteroid impact, when seismic waves and surging water buried fish and other animals as molten debris rained from the sky.

March 20, 2026

BAD AIR

I’m currently reading (well, listening to) a book called Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by science writer Carl Zimmer. It traces the long struggle to understand that disease can spread through the air.

For centuries many people believed in the “miasma” theory — that foul smells themselves carried disease. The idea that microscopic organisms drift through the atmosphere and infect us is surprisingly recent, and it took decades for scientists to convince others it was real.

That’s what engineers in Quintana Roo, Mexico, are doing with the massive seasonal blooms of sargassum that wash ashore across the Caribbean. Instead of burning or burying the piles, researchers are turning the dried seaweed into structural bricks. The material can be sun-dried with little energy input and may offer useful strength and thermal performance for construction.

Here is a lecture Zimmer gave at Harvard about the history behind the book.

March 17, 2026

SEAWEED BRICKS

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it dumps miles of seaweed on your beaches, make bricks.

Researchers say modern analytical techniques can now detect some of those molecular traces in fossil bones, revealing what animals ate and the environments they lived in — in some cases going back about 3 million years.

This video looks at how an environmental nuisance might become a useful building material.

March 13, 2026

THE BOOK OF BONES

When an animal dies, it leaves behind more than just a skeleton. As bones formed during life, blood carried metabolic byproducts from the creature’s diet and environment into the tissue.

This short video explains how scientists are reading those molecular clues in fossilized bone.

March 9, 2026

18650 BATTERIES

You probably own a few 18650 lithium batteries, whether you realize it or not. They power everything from laptops to flashlights and other portable gear.

In this video, Adam Savage looks at some surprising flaws in these common cells and explains why it’s safer to stick with well-known brands.

March 6, 2026

EV BATTERY LIFE

A common concern among people considering an electric vehicle is how long the battery will last. In this video, EV analyst The Electric Viking looks at data from real-world EV fleets and explains why the batteries will likely outlast the cars they’re installed in.

That matches my own experience.

Watch here.

March 3, 2026

MARS, IN LINES

Mars Guy flags something odd in recent rover imagery: a set of crisp, parallel striations that don’t immediately read as routine geology.

Natural process? Optical trick? Something we haven’t modeled well yet?

Take a look here and decide.

February 20, 2026

TOXIC LEAD

I’m reading American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice by Daniel Stone. It tells the story of the fight against lead poisoning, led in the early 20th century by Alice Hamilton, a University of Michigan graduate and a pioneer in occupational medicine.

In the 1920s, tetraethyl lead — marketed as “ethyl” gasoline (Boomers said, “Fill ’er up with ethyl!”) — was hailed as a miracle additive that allowed internal combustion engines to run more smoothly. The short-term effects on the public seemed minimal. Over time, though, lead exposure crippled and killed people, and at production facilities it drove some workers mad before they died. Industry resisted regulation, but researchers and activists eventually pushed leaded gasoline out of widespread use.

Hamilton wrote two books on toxicology, as well as her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, published in 1943.

Find American Poison here.

February 17, 2026

OH, POOP

This Podcast Will Kill You has released a multi-part show about something we are all intimately familiar with: poop. (Notice the scarab beetle T-shirts Erin and Erin are wearing — a little visual humor from the hosts.) As always, there’s more to learn than you ever thought.

The episode delves into the biology of digestion, what makes poop vary in color and smell, how it reflects health, and why it’s such a useful — and underappreciated — source of scientific insight.

Watch here.

February 6, 2026

INTEROCEPTION

Webster defines interoception as “the sensation arising from stimuli produced within an organism, especially in the gut and other internal organs; perception or awareness of the inner state of the body.” I’m just learning about it myself.

Scientists sometimes describe interoception as a kind of “hidden sixth sense,” and a new $14.2 million research project is investigating where this sense resides in the body and how it works. The effort is funded by the National Institutes of Health and with collaborators at Scripps Research and the Allen Institute. The goal is to better understand how we sense things like hunger, pain, heartbeat, and other internal signals we usually take for granted.

Read more at sciencedaily.com.

February 3, 2026

PYRAMID SCHEMES

How did Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty build the pyramids at Giza? There’s no shortage of ideas, and several of them come up in this video from Dami Lee, a licensed architect and design-focused YouTube creator. She lays out what may be the most plausible explanation so far, grounded in archaeology, engineering, and logistics, and also tackles a quieter but important question: Where did all the construction debris go?

January 27, 2026

ABOUT SLEEP

“This Podcast Will Kill You” is a scary title for a show that isn’t actually very scary. But it is very well researched. The podcast is hosted by two medical scientists, both named Erin, who do a careful job of explaining health and disease without hype.

This episode (part 2 of their sleep series) takes a deep dive into why we need sleep, what happens when we don’t get enough of it, and what science really knows — and doesn’t know — about how sleep works.

It’s thorough, clear, and surprisingly engaging for something most of us think we already understand.

You can also check out on YouTube.

January 23, 2026

YOUR KITCHEN'S PARTICLE ACCELERATOR

Most of us use microwave ovens every day without really knowing what’s happening inside. This video from Branch Education breaks down how a microwave oven works, from how microwaves are generated, to why they heat food the way they do, and why the oven is safe even though it’s full of radiation.

It’s a clear, satisfying explanation of a machine most of us take completely for granted.

John Blinke has been the Mensa Bulletin’s science editor since 1984 and is a two-time recipient of American Mensa’s National Service Award. He lives in the wilderness of Michigan and keeps busy with a wide range of hobbies, including astronomy, RC models, drones, photography, model rockets, and fooling around with microscopes and other scientific gear. John spent 50 years as an electrician with Ford Motor Company. He holds a BA in English from Wayne State University, completed the UAW-Ford electrical apprenticeship, is a certified Level II Thermographer, and has an Extra Class amateur radio license. Email him at BulletinSupplementally@us.mensa.org.