On June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew its top in an eruption of staggering proportions. It sent an ash cloud 28 miles high, filling surrounding valleys with deposits 660 feet thick and destroying almost every bridge within 18 miles. Over 800 people lost their lives. The volcano also ended up affecting humans all over the world. Its aerosols circled the Earth, reducing direct sunlight by 21 percent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 13, 2018•6 min
At a glance, a single worker of the genus Macrotermes is not a very complex creature—less than half an inch long, eyeless, wingless, with an abdomen so transparent you can spot the dead grass it ate for lunch. Put it in a group, though, and it may pile up pinhead-sized balls of mud, one after the other, until a complex mound takes shape. By the time that mound is 17 feet tall, it will be equivalent in scale to the Burj Khalifa. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 13, 2018•4 min
Early Saturday morning, the skies above Cape Canaveral will light up with the launch of the Parker Solar Probe. Its mission? To sweep through the sun’s infernal outer atmosphere, studying the gaseous fireball at the center of the solar system at closer range than any man-made object ever before. Despite being the nearest star to Earth, the sun’s extreme environment has stymied scientists for decades. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 10, 2018•8 min
Sometimes Vikki Preston is inching her way through the forest when she comes across a grove of tan oak trees that feels special. The plants are healthy, the trees are old, and their trunks are nicely spaced out on the forest floor. “You can feel that the grove has been taken care of,” she says. “There’s been a lot of love and thoughtfulness. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 10, 2018•8 min
Disease X n. A dire contagion requiring immediate attention—but which we don’t yet know about. In 2013 a virus jumped from an animal to a child in a remote Guinean village. Three years later, more than 11,000 people in six countries were dead. Devastating—and Ebola was a well-studied disease. What may strike next, the World Health Organization fears, is something no doctor has ever heard of, let alone knows how to treat. It’s come to be known as Disease X. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.p...
Aug 09, 2018•2 min
The distant future of designer babies might not seem so distant after all. The last year has been full of news about genetic engineering—much of it driven by the the cut-and-paste technique called Crispr. And at the top of the list: news that Crispr could modify human embryos, correcting a relatively common, often deadly mutation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 09, 2018•8 min
I've seen several quotes that say something like this. Everything I learned in college can now be found online for free. Is this true or false? Well, it of course depends on what you did in college—but I hope it's false. Let's start with some examples that seem to support this idea. I will use the area of physics since I'm a physics professor. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 08, 2018•5 min
This isn't actually a real Iron Man suit. But it does fly. It's a flying suit made by Gravity Industries, a young British startup that builds what they call 'jet suits.' The system uses six kerosene-powered jet thrusters to let a human fly around. Honestly, it just looks cool. This tweet states that it takes 1,000 horsepower to fly—how about an estimation to check this number? The Physics of Flight Let's start off with some fundamental physics. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-ch...
Aug 08, 2018•6 min
Kamita Gray and her mom have spent a lot of time volunteering at Brandywine Elementary School, helping kindergarteners learn to write their names and making sure everyone has a turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Every time they’re at the Maryland school, they’re struck by the heavy black smoke from diesel trucks roaring by, en route from construction sites or delivering mining waste to dumps. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 07, 2018•6 min
The insects appeared at my Chicago doorstep in swarms. Crickets, grasshoppers, locusts, mealworms, ants—all of them dead on arrival, entombed in resealable bags and glass jars. Before long, my apartment was overrun with bugs, and soon all of my meals would be too. I had summoned this infestation, ranging from whole dried insects to bug-based chips, granola, and protein bars, for the greater good. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 07, 2018•7 min
First the phones gave. They gave connection and communication. Then they gave music and movies and maps. Then came the apps, and with the apps came… well... everything. And we took it all gladly. But somewhere along the way, the phones began to take, too. They took our attention, distracting us from dates and family dinners. They took our time, devouring hours of our days a few minutes at a time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 06, 2018•5 min
SpaceX and Boeing are preparing to face off in an epic game of capture the flag. The winner not only wins bragging rights as the first private company to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station, but gets to bring home a piece of history: a small American flag that flew on both the first and last shuttle missions. That tiny patch of red, white, and blue is more than a piece of cloth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 06, 2018•5 min
Maybe you like your Airbnb to come with a nice big living room, or lots of light, or his-and-her sinks. If you’re a robot, though, you just want a little variety. A carpet here, a hardwood floor there. Because you’re a pioneer, not just a tourist. At least, if you’re a very special robot from a team at Carnegie Mellon University. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 03, 2018•5 min
For the Inuit of Labrador in Canada, climate disaster has already arrived. These indigenous people form an intense bond with their land, hunting for food and fur. “People like to go out on the land to feel good,” says Noah Nochasak in the documentary Lament for the Land. “If they can’t go out on the land, travel a long ways to feel good, they don’t feel like people. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 03, 2018•6 min
Subtract out the conspiracists and the willfully ignorant and the argument marshaled by skeptics against global warming, roughly restated, assumes that scientists vastly overstate the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Uncertainties in their calculations, the skeptics say, make it impossible to determine with confidence how bad the future was going to be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 02, 2018•7 min
Welcome to another chapter in my ongoing saga entitled "big things are not small things." In this edition of big vs. small, let's look at hot stuff. Here I have three aluminum objects. A large block, a small block, and a heat sink. Just for reference, the big block is about 14 centimeters long and the smaller block is almost 4 centimeters long (with the heat sink a little bit bigger than that). Of course none of these objects are cubes—but that's OK. So here's what I did. Learn about your ad cho...
Aug 02, 2018•8 min
This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a choppy voyage to Antarctica in 1928, the crew of the ship that would eventually be rechristened as the Vamar bestowed upon their vessel an optimistic nickname: “Evermore Rolling.” It proved to be a bit of a misnomer. Far from slicing through cresting waves forever, the ship sank near Florida in 1942, 3. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 01, 2018•10 min
When Melissa Moore was tinkering around with RNA in the early 90s, the young biochemist had to painstakingly construct the genetic molecules by micropipette, just a few building blocks at a time. Inside the MIT lab of Nobel laureate Phil Sharp, it could take days to make just a few drops of RNA, which ferries a cell’s genetic source code to its protein-making machinery. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 01, 2018•9 min
Elon Musk is kinda worried about AI. (“AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” as he put it in 2017.) So he helped found a research nonprofit, OpenAI, to help cut a path to “safe” artificial general intelligence, as opposed to machines that pop our civilization like a pimple. Yes, Musk’s very public fears may distract from other more real problems in AI. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 31, 2018•8 min
Listen, I get it. You want to go to Mars. I want to go to Mars. (Sort of.) And the plan—it’s good. A rocket with people. A base on the moon. Then more rockets and more people. Start making fuel on the surface, maybe depot it along the way. An outpost becomes a base becomes a domed city. And then: terraforming. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 31, 2018•8 min
Sometime next month, underground miners will dig Germany’s last ton of black coal, load it onto a conveyor belt, and whisk it a mile to the surface of the Ibbenbüren mining facility. From there, the high-energy anthracite will be tossed into a high-combustion chamber in an adjacent power plant, where it will be converted into electricity to light up this northwest corner of Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia state. It’s been a good run at the Ibbenbüren mine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Jul 30, 2018•6 min
Like a lot of people, you probably spend a fair bit of time worrying about how much time you spend on your phone. Who doesn't these days? But what really concerns you is the youth. What is all that swiping and snapping and gramming doing to their still-developing brains? Surely somebody's studied this—the effect of all this screen time. So what have they found? Well, to be honest: nothing conclusive. At least not yet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 30, 2018•6 min
Cannabis strain names can get a bit … quirky (Lamb’s Bread, anyone?). But without them, patients that rely on marijuana to treat ailments like pain would be lost. If you want to treat seizures, you might want ACDC—a strain that expresses almost zero THC and very high CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid—and stay away from the potentially panic-inducing Ghost OG, which verges on 25 percent THC. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 27, 2018•7 min
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Back in 2009, Simon Irish, an investment manager in New York, found the kind of opportunity that he thought could transform the world while — in the process — transforming dollars into riches. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 27, 2018•16 min
Earlier this year, a three-year-old video of researchers extracting a long, twisted tube from a reptile’s bleeding nostril went viral. To date, it has accumulated more than 30 million views and set off a moral panic. The straw that broke the turtle’s beak also did a number on the camel’s back. Companies like Starbucks, Ikea, and Hilton hotels have announced policies reducing or eliminating single-use slurping devices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 26, 2018•7 min
For decades Mars has teased scientists with whispers of water's presence. Valleys and basins and rivers long dry point to the planet's hydrous past. The accumulation of condensation on surface landers and the detection of vast subterranean ice deposits suggest the stuff still lingers in gaseous and solid states. But liquid water has proved more elusive. Evidence to date suggests it flows seasonally, descending steep slopes in transient trickles every Martian summer. Learn about your ad choices: ...
Jul 26, 2018•7 min
Brad Settlemyer had a supercomputing solution in search of a problem. Los Alamos National Lab, where Settlemyer works as a research scientist, hosts the Trinity supercomputer—a machine that regularly makes the internet’s (ever-evolving) Top 10 Fastest lists. As large as a Midwestern McMansion, Trinity’s main job is to ensure that the cache of US nuclear weapons works when it’s supposed to, and doesn’t when it’s not. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 25, 2018•5 min
This weekend, SpaceX began what is slated to be its busiest week ever by successfully launching its largest payload to date: a communications satellite dubbed TelStar 19V. Perched atop the company’s Cape Canaveral launch pad, a shiny new Falcon 9 rocket roared to life at 1:50 am Eastern on Sunday morning, lighting up the predawn sky. It was the 13th launch so far this year for SpaceX—and, notably, the first of three Falcon 9 Block 5 booster launches scheduled for the next 12 days. Learn about yo...
Jul 25, 2018•6 min
I first heard about Colorado’s Spring Fire on July 1, when I was driving back from a camping trip. My mom texted me from her home in Florida: “How close are these fires?” I pulled over to a rest stop, called up the federal disaster website Inciweb, and sent her back a screenshot of the wildfire’s perimeter. It seemed far away from my house on the Huerfano County line, like it would have to cross impossible acres to even come close. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 24, 2018•11 min
In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since. One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Learn about your ad choic...
Jul 24, 2018•14 min
