Book a night at LAX’s Residence Inn and you may be fortunate enough to meet an employee named Wally. His gig is relatively pedestrian—bring you room service, navigate around the hotel's clientele in the lobby and halls—but Wally’s life is far more difficult than it seems. If you put a tray out in front of your door, for instance, he can’t get to you. If a cart is blocking the hall, he can’t push it out of the way. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 16, 2018•8 min
You have instant communication, on-demand entertainment, and dial-up transportation—why should you have to wait nine months to see what kind of baby you’re going to have? Now there’s an app for that. In a modern-day reboot of Lindsay Bluth’s “Mommy What Will I Look Like” business venture, Denver-based startup HumanCode has introduced BabyGlimpse. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 16, 2018•6 min
For one dizzying, schmooze and booze-filled week every January, thousands of tech execs, VCs, and investment bankers grind their way through a four-day slog of panel sessions, poster presentations, networking meetings, and cocktail-drenched after-hours parties in their industry’s premier orgiastic dealmaking event. And no, we’re not talking about CES. On Monday, the Westin St. Francis hotel in downtown San Francisco opened its doors to the 36th annual J.P. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.p...
Jan 15, 2018•7 min
Locked away beneath the surface of Mars are vast quantities of water ice. But the properties of that ice—how pure it is, how deep it goes, what shape it takes—remain a mystery to planetary geologists. Those things matter to mission planners, too: Future visitors to Mars, be they short-term sojourners or long-term settlers, will need to understand the planet's subsurface ice reserves if they want to mine it for drinking, growing crops, or converting into hydrogen for fuel. Learn about your ad cho...
Jan 12, 2018•7 min
If you want to build and run a $70 million dark matter detector, you're going to have a hefty shopping list. You'll need to buy hundreds of photomultiplier tubes, set up elaborate electronics, and pay graduate students, for starters. And 20 percent of your cash is going to go to just one thing: xenon gas. You'll need 200 steel bottles of the stuff, purified from the Earth’s atmosphere, at a price that can fluctuate wildly around $100,000 a bottle. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad...
Jan 11, 2018•7 min
The pig looks like any other pig, only it's been wearing a backpack for a week—in the name of science. Just behind its head sits a control box, with a battery and processor, from which runs a cable that enters through the pig’s flank. Once inside, the cable attaches to a very special robot clamped onto the pig's esophagus, the pathway to the stomach. Little by little, the robot lengthens, in turn lengthening the tube. The robot attached to a segment of esophagus.Damian et al. Learn about your ad...
Jan 11, 2018•6 min
In a recent episode of Mythbusters, Brian and Jon (the new MythBusters) wanted to see what happens when you shoot an arrow straight up into the air. It will obviously come back down—but would it still be moving fast enough to kill you? If you are a MythBuster, the best option is to actually shoot an arrow straight up into the air and measure its velocity on impact. But for normal people, it might be better to just calculate the final arrow speed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-...
Jan 10, 2018•8 min
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Jan 10, 2018•7 min
For the past several years, Nenad Bursac has been trying to make muscles from scratch. A biological engineer at Duke, Bursac came close in 2015, when his lab became the first to grow functional human skeletal muscle in culture. "Functional" being the operative word. Like the muscle fibers in, say, your bicep, the tissues could contract and generate forces in response to things like electrical pulses and shots of chemicals. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 09, 2018•5 min
When it comes to tackling the opioid crisis, public health workers start with the drugs: fentanyl, morphine, heroin. But biochemists have a different focus: Not the opioids, but opioid receptors—the proteins the drugs latch onto within the body. These receptors embed themselves in the walls of cells throughout the brain and peripheral nervous system. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 09, 2018•6 min
On August 2, synthetic organic chemist Ryan Shenvi stood before 300 people at the Natural Products and Bioactive Compounds conference and told them something he knew was sacrilegious: He’d synthesized salvinorin A, the active ingredient in the wildly intense hallucinogen salvia, and he hadn’t just copied a molecule, as synthetic organic chemists are wont to do. He had subtly changed its molecular structure, as synthetic organic chemists are not wont to do. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.p...
Jan 08, 2018•10 min
Next December, there'll be a new entrant into the end-of-year, blockbuster science fiction movie category: the Peter Jackson film Mortal Engines. A teaser trailer for it dropped just before the holidays, and there's really only one thing you need to know about it. Driving cities. Driving cities! Now, I know the movie is based on a book series, which probably has a lot of detail about these giant ambulatory dwellings. But I like to try and see what I can figure out just from the trailer itself. L...
Jan 08, 2018•7 min
At 2:39 am Thursday morning, millions of Bay Area residents from Sacramento to San Jose were shaken awake by the rolling tremble of a 4.4 magnitude earthquake. The eight-mile deep tremor struck along the Hayward fault, two miles southeast of Berkeley. From my apartment just 20 blocks from the epicenter, I woke with the rest of the neighborhood and rode out the wake from bed for about 10 seconds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 05, 2018•6 min
Oh, the poor humanoid robots. After decades of development, they're still less sprinty Terminator and more … octogenarian on sedatives. While these robots may look like us, they aren’t built like us—electric motors in their joints drive their herky-jerky movements, whereas our muscles give us more precise control over our bodies. Well, unless we’re on sedatives. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 05, 2018•6 min
Now, the first thing you should know about a bomb cyclone is it’s just a name—and unlike a sharknado, it’s not a literal one. The very real scientific term describes a storm that suddenly intensifies following a rapid drop in atmospheric pressure. Bombing out, or “bombogenesis,” is when a cyclone’s central pressure drops 24 millibars or more in 24 hours, bringing furious winds that can quickly create blizzard conditions and coastal flooding. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Jan 04, 2018•9 min
When you wander around the internet, sometimes you can find some crazy stuff. Check this out: It's an old account of a weird phenomena created by giant plastic sheets at 3M Corporation. In short, these fast-moving, electrically-charged plastic sheets created some type of effect that prevented humans from passing through an invisible wall. It sounds a lot like some type of force field, right? I'm honestly skeptical that this is real, but let's just assume that it actually happened. Learn about yo...
Jan 04, 2018•8 min
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Jan 03, 2018•7 min
Back at the start of the summer, WIRED science writer Megan Molteni dropped a bomb: "The Tick That Gives People Meat Allergies Is Spreading." The story went viral, (probably because we published the the words "meat allergies" during peak grilling season), but the piece was more than a clicky headline: Molteni dove deep into the molecular science behind what causes the adverse reaction. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 02, 2018•8 min
Artificial intelligence used to mean something. Now, everything has AI. That app that delivers you late-night egg rolls? AI. The chatbot that pops up when you’re buying new kicks? AI. Tweets, stories, posts in your feed, the search results you return, even the people you swipe right or left; artificial intelligence had an invisible hand in what (and who) you see on the internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 01, 2018•7 min
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Jan 01, 2018•10 min
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Dec 29, 2017•10 min
This past year, 2017, was the worst fire season in American history. Over 9.5 million acres burned across North America. Firefighting efforts cost $2 billion. This past year, 2017, was the seventh-worst Atlantic hurricane season on record and the worst since 2005. There were six major storms. Early estimates put the costs at more than $180 billion. As the preventable disease hepatitis A spread through homeless populations in California cities in 2017, 1 million Yemenis contracted cholera amid a ...
Dec 28, 2017•7 min
Academics have been cast in a slow-motion horror movie for the past couple of years, as superstar scientist after superstar scientist has been pushed from his pedestal for allegations of sexual harassment. Societies and universities have tried to determine what to do—academe-style fixes like panels, workshops, and policies. None of that ivory-tower work cued the public crescendo that this year’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein did. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 27, 2017•10 min
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Dec 27, 2017•10 min
In fewer than five years, the gene-editing technology known as Crispr has revolutionized the face and pace of modern biology. Since its ability to find, remove, and replace genetic material was first reported in 2012, scientists have published more than 5,000 papers mentioning Crispr. Biomedical researchers are embracing it to create better models of disease. And countless companies have spun up to commercialize new drugs, therapies, foods, chemicals, and materials based on the technology. Learn...
Dec 26, 2017•9 min
Kelly Brunt won’t be home for the holidays, nor will she be ringing in the New Year at a fabulous party or watching Ryan Seacrest schmooze B-list celebrities on TV. Instead, between December 21 and January 11, she’ll be leading a four-person expedition around the South Pole, sleeping in a small tent mounted on a plastic sled that is pulled by a snowcat. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 25, 2017•8 min
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Dec 22, 2017•6 min
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Dec 22, 2017•7 min
This year, for the first time in my life, I’ll be hosting my family for the holidays. And to their deep disgruntlement, we’ll be celebrating it without a Christmas tree. No, this isn’t some principled stance against the yuletide-industrial complex or a personal front in the war on Christmas. I’m just much more interested in an indoor evergreen interloper when its needles fall in someone else’s home. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 21, 2017•8 min
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Dec 21, 2017•6 min
