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Yanny or Laurel—could the secret to which word you hear be in your DNA? It’s a notion someone pitched at 23andMe headquarters Thursday, during the consumer genetics outfit’s annual Genome Research Day. (Spoiler: The company is not going to roll out a survey to see if the latest meme has a genetic component. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
This is pretty cool—an electric car pulling a full size commercial aircraft, apparently for the first time ever. In particular, it is a Tesla Model X pulling a Quantas Boeing 787. There are a million reasons this is cool, but I think we should just jump to the coolest ones: the physics questions. Does the mass of the plane matter? The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner has a maximum takeoff weight of 254,000 kg—but this one was empty and had a mass of 130,000 kg. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.o...
Some people heard the word “laurel” in a short audio clip that became internet-famous this week, while others heard the not-word “yanny.” This proves that we will all die alone. Thanks to some sleuthing by my colleague Louise Matsakis, people interested in following up can learn that regardless of what they heard in the clip, the person speaking was, in fact, saying the word “laurel. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Don't even worry about Dyret the robot. At first glance, the scrawny quadruped looks pathetic, as it struggles to walk without collapsing. But keep watching, and you’ll see it start to improve—walking slowly, yet ever more proficiently. Dyret the robot is teaching itself to walk. Or even, according to a new class of robotics researchers, evolving. Machines like Cassie the biped or SpotMini the robot dog are quickly mastering locomotion, thanks to line after line of meticulous code. Learn about y...
Modern robots are not unlike toddlers: It’s hilarious to watch them fall over, but deep down we know that if we laugh too hard, they might develop a complex and grow up to start World War III. None of humanity’s creations inspires such a confusing mix of awe, admiration, and fear: We want robots to make our lives easier and safer, yet we can’t quite bring ourselves to trust them. We’re crafting them in our own image, yet we are terrified they’ll supplant us. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail...
For some people, summer means warmer weather and outdoor activities. But what about the kids that are out of school? What will they do all summer? For most parents, they just want their kids to do something other than video games or watching endless videos. So for you, I'm going to give a few suggestions for summer activities—some of my favorites. These are just suggestions, this is not a to-do list. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sending a rover to Mars is cool—but sending one to Mars along with a helicopter is even better. Yes, that is the plan for the next NASA Mars rover, scheduled for 2020. The idea is to have a driving rover that brings along a small coaxial helicopter. The helicopter will be self-powered and fly for a few minutes a day. The main advantage of the helicopter is that it can scout ahead of the rover and take pictures and stuff—maybe some epic rover selfies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org...
Among the more modern anxieties of parents today is how virtual assistants will train their children to act. The fear is that kids who habitually order Amazon's Alexa to read them a story or command Google's Assistant to tell them a joke are learning to communicate not as polite, considerate citizens, but as demanding little twerps. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
In recent years, scientists have suggested that images from the Hubble telescope show plumes of icy water spewing from the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Others have doubted the claim—which is fair enough, because the images are kind of fuzzy and the satellite's instrument couldn’t always capture them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
In 1989, two MIT artificial intelligence researchers made a terrifying prediction. “Within a few years,” wrote Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn, “it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots.” Their paper “Fast, Cheap and out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System,”, argued that small, autonomous “gnat robots” would soon become cheap enough to solve problems en masse. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
I can’t sit here and guarantee you a robot won’t take your job one day—capitalism kind of has a thing for automation. What I can tell you is that in the near future, robots will be doing jobs that no one wants to do. For instance, risking your life doing rescue operations after mining disasters. Which is why for its next robotics competition, Darpa is going underground, with the Darpa Subterranean Challenge. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
This storyoriginally appeared on CityLaband is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. In Russia, buildings are sagging and crumbling. In Greenland, a wildfire broke out last year. And in Alaska, entire villages may be relocated because the land upon which they’re built is no long trustworthy. All across the North, the very ground is changing, and the buildings and roads built upon the thawing permafrost are shifting and cracking. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
On March 11, 2011, Kazuya Yoshida’s lab at Tohoku University in Japan started shaking. Things fell from the ceiling. The bookshelves collapsed. Off the coast of the city of Sendai, the ocean floor had ruptured, triggering a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami waves that inundated inland regions. Although it only lasted minutes, time seemed to dilate. When it was finally over, nearly 16,000 people were dead. For many of those left, there was no water, no power, no phone connection. Learn about you...
I have a problem: I can't stop analyzing Star Wars movies. On top of that, there is another issue. I've stated that the physics of a movie doesn't have to be absolutely correct—and I still believe that. And now, I am going to complain about some physics in Star Wars: The Last Jedi even though I said you shouldn't. But first, let me give you a couple of examples of bad physics that doesn't bother me. Consider an x-wing fighter flying near the Death Star. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....
In 1935, lava from an eruption of the volcano Mauna Loa, on the Big Island of Hawai’i, started oozing toward the Wailuku River, main source of water for the city of Hilo. This danger to the more than 15,000 residents of Hilo was exactly the opportunity that Thomas Jaggar, founder of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, had been waiting for: to blow up a volcano. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Actually, no, it was crazy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
If you go to a doctor and ask them to recommend you medical marijuana, don’t expect them to fully understand how the drug works, both for you as an individual patient and in general as a therapy. Because no one really does. With more and more states legalizing marijuana for medical or recreational use, cannabis is shedding its stigma and entering the mainstream. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Google wants to help its users take back their time. On Tuesday at its annual developers conference, the company announced several new features designed to help people monitor and manage the time they spend on their devices. The goal: Help users understand their habits, control the demands technology places on their attention, and focus on what matters. "Helping people with their digital well-being is more important to us than ever," said vice president of product management Sameer Samat. Learn ...
Occasionally there are physics lab demonstrations that I think are pretty awesome but that my students just think are "meh." This is one of those cases. The basic idea in this demo, which I used in my class at Southeastern Louisiana University, is to swing a mass around in a horizontal circle. But wait! There's a cooler part: By running the string through a vertical tube and attaching it to another mass, we can control the tension in the string. It's loads of fun. Learn about your ad choices: do...
Miguel Zumalacárregui knows what it feels like when theories die. In September 2017, he was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Saclay, near Paris, to speak at a meeting about dark energy and modified gravity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Along with the roar of a grizzly bear and a crack of lightning, the sound of a tornado is among the most terrifying natural sounds on Earth. Depending on the twister and where you’re standing, it can sound like a hiss, a buzz, a rumble, or even a freight train. It’s the auditory manifestation of trouble. But tornadoes also seem to emit low-frequency sound waves called infrasound that the human ear can’t hear. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Last month, cancer researcher Amit Verma found himself in a bit of a bind. His lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York had just received feedback on a new paper about how genes get turned on and off when healthy pancreas cells develop into tumors. The journal’s reviewers asked his team to do some additional experiments, including a type of whole genome sequencing that reveals DNA modification patterns. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
In 1950 Edward Nelson, then a student at the University of Chicago, asked the kind of deceptively simple question that can give mathematicians fits for decades. Imagine, he said, a graph—a collection of points connected by lines. Ensure that all of the lines are exactly the same length, and that everything lies on the plane. Now color all the points, ensuring that no two connected points have the same color. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
It’s spring and privacy concerns are in the air. Between the recent revelations that Facebook let Cambridge Analytica capture data from 87 million of its users to be improperly used to influence the US presidential election, and news that California investigators cracked the long-cold case of the Golden State Killer by running a genetic profile collected from crime scene DNA through a public genealogy website, people are feeling a bit...spooked. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...
How it used to go was, after some extreme weather event, reporters would ask Climate McScientist, PhD whether the flood/drought/hurricane/disease outbreak/wildfire/superstorm happened because of climate change. Dr. McScientist would pat the reporter on the head and say: Well, of course, one can never ascribe any single weather event to a changing global climate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Now that Star Wars: The Last Jedi is out on DVD (and digitally), I think it's safe to discuss one very interesting scene in the spirit of May the Fourth. However, there is a chance you haven't seen it—so this is your spoiler alert. In this scene, Leia's ship is attacked by the First Order. The attack knocks a hole in the bridge, which causes the air inside to push out most of the crew in that area—including Leia. So there she is ... just floating away from the spaceship. Learn about your ad choi...
For the dozen years between 1974 and 1986, he rained down terror across the state of California. He went by many names: the East Side Rapist, the Visalia Ransacker, the Original Night Stalker, the Golden State Killer. And on Wednesday, law enforcement officials announced they think they finally have his real name: Joseph James DeAngelo. Police arrested the 72-year-old Tuesday; he’s accused of committing more than 50 rapes and 12 murders. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
For the first time since launching the Curiosity rover in 2011, NASA is sending a spacecraft to the surface of Mars. Exciting! Surface missions are sexy missions: Everyone loves roving robots and panoramic imagery of other worlds. But the agency's latest interplanetary emissary won't be doing any traveling (it's a lander, not a rover). And while it might snap some pictures of dreamy Martian vistas, it's not the surface that it's targeting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
When I ask Bradley Worthington to tell me about that one time people in the southwest thought his trucking company, McCollister's, was moving a UFO across the country, he laughs. There’s not a “that one time.” “It happens frequently,” he says, “especially with oversized things.” And McCollister's hauls a lot of oversized things. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
The year 2004 was a simpler time to be an infectious disease doctor in the US. Zika and chikungunya hadn’t yet emerged. Mystery RNA viruses weren’t spreading by tick bite around America’s heartland, killing farmers and ranchers. Certainly no one was on the lookout for a meat allergy caused by a tick with a white splotch on its back the shape of Texas. But that was then. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
On a breezy evening this past weekend, I sat out on my patio, lit a sizable joint, and took little drags from it til the burn line singed my fingertips. When I stood up I was stoned, and I knew it; I rarely smoke pot, so when I do I really feel it. But how high was I, really? I reached for my phone, logged into an app called Druid, and took a five minute test. When I finished it gave me my results, which appeared in red: Your DRUID impairment score is 50.3. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
