Stem cell biologists are basically modern day witches. While they’re not exactly taking a creepy fetal Lord Voldemort and turning him into noseless Ralph Fiennes, these scientists can use tinctures and concoctions to grow incredible things from just a few human skin cells. One of those things is a brain ball, a collection of stem cells that biologists have coaxed into a bobbing tangle of living neurons. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
May 02, 2017•7 min
The genome of barley—the grain that’s the soul of beer and whiskey—is weird. The commodity crop has just seven pairs of chromosomes (compared to your 23, assuming you are a human being) but twice the size of your genome overall, with the vast majority of the sequences repeating themselves. And you care because (making the same assumption again) you care about beer and whiskey, even just in the abstract. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
May 01, 2017•10 min
You might look at an overhead power line and see an engineering problem. After all, those transmission towers are impressively huge. But if you've ever seen those cables, you probably noticed they seem to hang fairly low. Why they hang low is a great physics question that can be modeled with masses and springs. Basic Model For a Hanging Cable Let's start by creating a model. Suppose I string a cable between two points so it is supported horizontally from theends. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
Apr 28, 2017•7 min
Peaceful, orderly, rational, and with a lot of signs too clever by half (actually, 0.56932 according to our measurements)—that’s how scientists march on Washington. It’s also how they march in more than 600 of them all over the world on Saturday, with even a few wintering-over researchers in Antarctica signaling their support. The movement covered all seven continents. The March for Science was controversial almost from its inception. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 27, 2017•7 min
This week, a kilometer-wide asteroid whizzed by within about a million miles of this planet—about four and half times the distance between the Earth and the moon. A near miss? Not really. The odds of 2014 JO25 actually hitting Earth were around one in a million. The safer bet is on science. As in, how much of it astronomers were able to gather from the close pass of such a huge space rock. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 26, 2017•6 min
Ugh, you’re not going sign up for Project: Baseline, are you? That new, 10,000-person health study Google’s putting together? Well, OK, not Google, but Verily. Which used to be Google Life Sciences, and is part of Alphabet, the company that used to be called Google but now owns Google. (So, Google. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 25, 2017•9 min
That image above, depending on what your job is, could well be considered not safe for work. What you’re looking at is a giant shipworm—a scientific legend that can grow to over five feet long. It’s actually a super-elongated mollusk, one that grows vertically in sediment, excreting a thick shell and poking two siphons out of the muck. It is, as biologists note, really weird. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 21, 2017•6 min
Steve Wozniak is one half of Silicon Valley’s most prototypical founder’s myth. But whereas Steve Jobs went on to define what it meant to be a modern founder—the turtleneck uniform, the keynote showmanship, the scorn for formal education and steamrolling managerial style—Woz just became a wealthier version of his former self. That is, a gigantic nerd. In case you clicked this article out of blind curiosity, here’s a quick recap on Woz. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 20, 2017•6 min
Radioactive material gets a bad rap, what with radiation and fallout and nuclear waste and all. But it offers some practical uses. One of the coolest (OK, maybe the coolest) is using radioactive carbon to determinethe age of old bones or plants. To understand this, you mustfirst understand radioactivity and decay. When an element undergoes radioactive decay, it creates radiation and turns into some other element. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 19, 2017•9 min
As part of WIRED’s exclusive look at Breaking2, Nike’s attempt to break the two-hour marathon mark next month in Monza, Italy, our writer is using the same training regime, apparel, and expertise as Nike’s three elite athletes to try to achieve his own personal milestone: a sub-90-minute half-marathon. This is the fourth in a series of monthly updates on his progress. Last week, I travelled for work to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
Apr 18, 2017•10 min
This storyoriginally appeared on Gristand is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. What Jonathan Sanderman really wanted was some old dirt. He called everyone he could think of who might know where he could get some. He emailed colleagues and read through old studies looking for clues, but he kept coming up empty. Sanderman was looking for old dirt because it would let him test a plan to save the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 17, 2017•12 min
I can’t imagine a blockbuster movie about superheroes without some cool physics. After all, these aren’t dramas, but action movies with jumping and flying and punching. Of course, the point of the jumping and flying and punching is to advance the story, not provide a physics lesson. But nothing says they can’t do both. The firsttrailer for Thor: Ragnarokprovides a great chance to do this. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 14, 2017•4 min
On a plate, a single banana seems whimsical—yellow and sweet, contained in its own easy-to-open peel. It is a charming breakfast luxury as silly as it is delicious and ever-present. Yet when you eat a banana the flavor on your tongue has complex roots, equal parts sweetness and tragedy. In 1950, most bananas were exported from Central America. Guatemala in particular was a key piece of a vast empire of banana plantations run by the American-owned United Fruit Company. Learn about your ad choices...
Apr 13, 2017•6 min
I know you've all seen lists like this before: what is the "world's most dangerous volcano"? Most of the time, that discuss devolves quickly into something about "supervolcanoes", which is very exciting and all because they can generate massive eruptions. However, they are far from being the "most dangerous" volcano. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 12, 2017•6 min
Some people just want to die. Not because they are trapped by depression, anxiety, public embarrassment, or financial ruin. No, these poor few have terminal illnesses. Faced with six months to live, and the knowledge that the majorityof those 180 days will be bad ones,theyseek a doctor’s prescription for an early death. Soon, terminal patients in California will have that option. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 11, 2017•6 min
Travel just few miles west of bustling Cheyenne, Wyoming, a you’ll find yourself in big-sky country. Tall-grass plains line the highway, snow-packed peaks pierce the sky, and round-edged granite formations jut out of the ground. But in this bucolic scene sits an alien building: a blocky, almost pre-fab structure with a white rotunda, speckled with dozens of windows that look out onto the grounds. Inside, it’s home to two supercomputers that focus on the vast landscape above. Learn about your ad ...
Apr 10, 2017•8 min
In Miami Beach, they call it “sunny-day flooding.” You’ll be hanging out downtown under clear blue skies—only to see, whoa, the streets slowly filling with water. Miami Beach, Florida, is a coastal city built on porous limestone, so as climate change melts polar ice into the oceans, water is literally pushed up out of the ground. “It’s an eerie, scary, unnerving feeling, like something out of a sci-fi movie,” says Philip Levine, mayor of the city of 90,000. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Apr 07, 2017•5 min
Computers used to require entire buildings to operate. Now they fit in our pockets. Similarly, factory-size electronics manufacturing is approaching a contraction. Want proof? Look at that $50 printer on your desk and imagine, instead of using it to spit out a hard copy of that thank-you note, that you used it to print some digital memory. Not enough memory to power a laptop. Think smaller, like smart tags to inventory all the crap in your workshop. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Apr 06, 2017•4 min
Elon Musk wants to merge the computer with the human brain, build a “neural lace,” create a “direct cortical interface,” whatever that might look like. In recent months, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI has repeatedly hinted at these ambitions, and then, earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk has now launched a company called Neuralink that aims to implant tiny electrodes in the brain “that may one day upload and download thoughts. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Apr 05, 2017•7 min
Bennett Schwartz is one of the nation’s leading memory experts, and when I visited him in his office at Florida International University, he was standing at his desk. A soft sunlight crowded the room. Large windows framed the palm tree-lined quad outside. Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and slacks, Schwartz appeared to be quietly talking to himself, with hushed, mumbled words, and for a long moment, it seemed as if he was some sort of monk, living in another, more esoteric world. Learn about yo...
Apr 04, 2017•15 min
Not unlike the ant-decapitating fly and the satanic leaf-tailed gecko, the fang blenny’s name does not disappoint. This tiny fish wields two massive teeth that it uses to gouge chunks out of much larger fish and, in a bind, scrap its way out of the grasp of a predator. And one particular group of fang blenny even injects venom, just like a snake, to give its attackers that extra what-for. That’s all very, very bizarre behavior for a fish—behavior that today gets even more bizarre. Learn about yo...
Apr 03, 2017•5 min
This weekend saw a new eruption from Kambalny in southern Kamchatka. Now, the Kamchatka Peninsula is a very volcanically active area, with multiple eruptions going on simultaneously much of the time. There are certain volcanoes that are in almost-constant unrest, like Shiveluch, Kliuchevskoi, and Karymsky. However, Kambalny is not one of the usual suspects for activity. This changed when a dark grey ash plume was spotted by Earth-observing satellites on March 25. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
Mar 31, 2017•5 min
I teach an introductory physics course to elementary education majors, but my lessons aren't really about physics. At first glance, it might seem that they are, but it's a trick. The course examinesthe nature of science. That's what makes it so awesome. When I talk about the nature of science, I don't mean the list of steps outlined on thatposter in your fourth grade classroom-that's not howscience works. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 30, 2017•6 min
Last week, Anheuser-Busch announced a plan to sponsor research aboard the International Space Station to learn how to someday serve beer to astronauts on Mars. This is a dumb plan—not because beer is bad, or because astronauts responsible for settling the red planet won’t deserve a brewski at the end of a sol. It’s just, why beer? Distilled spirits—liquor—has always been a better fuel for exploration, or at least for explorers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 29, 2017•8 min
The last thing twenty-one-year-old Pat Fletcher saw before the explosion was the chemical-filled steel tank beside her suddenly ballooning outward. With alarm she realized the plastic hose in her hand had grown unusually hot. Then the world flashed blindingly bright and turned a brilliant blue, the color of the flames engulfing her body. When she awoke, Pat thought she might be dreaming. The world around her was featureless and dark, as though she were lost in a gray, smoky fog. Learn about your...
Mar 28, 2017•7 min
Two hundred and twenty miles above Earth flies the International Space Station, a $70 billion1 engineering marvel that no onehas any idea what to do with. Short term, sure: astronauts, science, zero-gravity viral videos. Longer term, spending $3 billion to $4 billion annually to keep the ISS running conflicts with NASA’s other ambitions, like visiting Mars. Congress holds NASA’s purse strings, so ultimately the decision lies with that august body. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad...
Mar 27, 2017•7 min
Tom Steyer isn't your average California tree hugger. The former hedge fund manager—number 1,121 on Forbes' wealthiest people list, with $1.61 billion—was once best known for turning $15million into $30billion in about two decades. But then he went hiking. Steyer and environmental activist and author Bill McKibben spent a day trudging through the Adirondacks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 24, 2017•11 min
The feline approaches its prey. Slowly at first, then crescendoing to a pounce that lands near, but not on the unmoving target. The cat bats an investigatory paw, then claws its target and yanks it faceward. But the cat does not bare its fangs; it does not bite. It closes its eyes and rubs the prey—a sock flecked with bits of dried herb—across its whiskers, then falls to the ground, its body humming with purrs that oscillate into soft meows. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Mar 23, 2017•6 min
Imagine yourself running the vacuum cleaner over the carpet when all of sudden—a sock. Boom. It’s stuck in the hose, the whine of the vacuum getting higher andhigher, louder andlouder. It sounds like overload is imminent, like the motor is working way too hard. But is it? To know, let’s look at some cool physics principles. Vacuum cleaners don’t actually suck. They blow. No, really. They use a fan that blows air out of a hole. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 22, 2017•5 min
For years, Facebook has been investing in artificial intelligence fields like machine learning and deep neural nets to build its core business—selling you things better than anyone else in the world. But earlier this month, the company began turning some of those AI tools to a more noble goal: stopping people from taking their own lives. Admittedly, this isn’t entirely altruistic. Having people broadcast their suicides from Facebook Live isn’t good for the brand. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
Mar 21, 2017•8 min
