Billiard balls were once made of ivory. Building on earlier work by English inventor Alexander Parkes, Hyatt used photographic film bases to reproduce ivory’s look and feel. By the 1870s, his company ...

Utility crews on Monday dumped the first batch of about three million plastic balls into Ivanhoe Reservoir in Silver Lake. KPCC's Frank Stoltze says the balls will help prevent the development of a ...

What is the most space-efficient way to pack tennis balls or oranges? Mathematicians have studied this “sphere-packing” problem for centuries, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to ...

At the Manhattan convention of the American Chemical Society (18,000 chemists), Dr. James Bryant Conant, chemist and president of Harvard, looked into his crystal ball (a plastic one, he explained, in ...