If you want to survive the robot apocalypse—the nerd joke goes—just close the door. For all that they’re great at (precision, speed, consistency), robots still suck at manipulating door handles, among other basic tasks. Part of the problem is that they have to navigate a world built for humans, designed for hands like ours. And those are among the most complex mechanical structures in nature. Relief for the machines, though, is in sight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Sep 04, 2018•5 min
Few drugs are as two-faced as ketamine. By day, it works as a legitimate anesthetic, sitting comfortably on the World Health Organization’s list of Essential Medicines. By night, though, it moonlights as a party drug, sending users into an intense dissociative state (read: not in touch with reality) known as a K-hole. Of late, ketamine has also been finding work as a novel antidepressant, administered intravenously in not-illegal-but-also-not-mainstream clinics. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Sep 04, 2018•6 min
Before Californians use an electron, they like to swirl the glass a little, get some nose. You want a whiff of that subatomic particle’s terroir before pouring it into an air conditioner or a phone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 03, 2018•9 min
The next time you’ve got something to complain about, consider the plight of the intestinal worm. It not only has to figure out how to eat and breed in the confines of another creature, it has to prevent that creature’s body from dissolving the parasite into a mist of cells. That means dodging the immune system and inflammation, the body’s natural responses to invasion. Meaning, your late car payment ain’t got nothing on spending your entire life in an intestine. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
Sep 03, 2018•8 min
One of my part-time jobs is as an internet investigator. When crazy things happen, people want to know more about that crazy thing. In this case, the crazy thing is a Telsa driving super fast over a railroad crossing. It's going so fast that the car gets airborne before eventually losing control. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like anyone was seriously injured, and it is also fortunate that a security camera caught this motion on video. Boom. Now for some questions. Learn about your ad choices: do...
Aug 31, 2018•5 min
Taking a lice-grade comb to press coverage of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign can feel a little like relitigating, but in light of recent news about President Donald Trump, consider this article: “It Really Doesn’t Matter if Hillary Clinton Is Dishonest.” Published in the Washington Post just before the Iowa caucuses, it was one of many stories that took as stipulated the idea that voters saw Clinton as untrustworthy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 31, 2018•11 min
It's a brilliant idea. Put solar panels on a drone and it doesn't even need a battery. That's exactly what students made at the National University of Singapore. Without a battery, you could fly a drone like this as long as the sun keeps shining. It's awesome (assuming your motives are pure). But if you watch the video, you'll notice immediately that the drone is as thin as a sheet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 30, 2018•5 min
It’s been more than a century since Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for illustrating the way neurons allow you to walk, talk, think, and be. In the intervening hundred years, modern neuroscience hasn’t progressed that much in how it distinguishes one kind of neuron from another. Sure, the microscopes are better, but brain cells are still primarily defined by two labor-intensive characteristics: how they look and how they fire. Learn about your ad choices: doveta...
Aug 30, 2018•7 min
You wake up at 6 am feeling achy and chilled. Unsure if you’re sick or just sleep-deprived, you reach for a thermometer. It beeps at 99°F, so you groan and roll out of bed to get ready for work. Because that’s not a fever. Is it? Yes, it is. Forget everything you thought you knew about normal body temperature and fever, starting with 98.6. That’s an antiquated number based on a flawed study from 1868 (yes, 150 years ago). The facts about fever are a lot more complicated. Learn about your ad choi...
Aug 29, 2018•7 min
Starbucks has divided the world of coffee enthusiasts into two categories: those who actually want cake but feel bad about eating cake first thing in the morning so they drink dessert coffee instead, and those who want artisanal pour-overs (no room for cream). Still, even those who wouldn't be caught dead in a Starbucks in June can't get to one fast enough in the fall, when everyone drops their pretensions for the pumpkin spice latte. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 29, 2018•4 min
This storyoriginally appeared on Gristand is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. As wildfire smoke descended on Seattle last week, the sun turned an apocalyptic shade of red and the city breathed in some of the unhealthiest air in the world. A new word to describe this phenomenon graced the headlines: “smokestorm.” The person who coined the term is Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and revered Seattle meteorologist. Learn about your ad choices: dovet...
Aug 28, 2018•4 min
There was an art accident recently. A man fell into a black hole—OK, not that kind of black hole, but an art exhibit consisting of an 8-foot-deep circular hole painted black. The idea was to represent the feeling of a super deep, even endless hole. I guess the guy didn't realize it was a hole and fell. But this leads to some great physics ideas to discuss about vision and the color black. Let me start with one of my favorite party questions. It goes like this. Learn about your ad choices: doveta...
Aug 28, 2018•5 min
A large yet tidy refugee camp rises from the desert near the Syrian-Jordanian border. Most people wouldn’t think of this as a hub of innovation, but nevertheless, a science and technology show has arrived with cameras and microphones. They’re interviewing officials from UNICEF who describe the techniques they developed to safely remove sewage from the camp. Another week, and the cameras arrive in Stockholm to watch a new type of drone make its way through a dark tunnel. Learn about your ad choic...
Aug 27, 2018•5 min
The electric-blue chamber looks like a crowd of punk mohawks or the Night King’s jagged skull. In fact, this 4,306-square-foot room is where antennas are torture-tested before being launched into space. Called the Hybrid European Radio Frequency and Antenna Test Zone, or HERTZ, it’s located in Noordwijk, Netherlands. The 33-foot-high steel walls are studded with 18-inch foam pyramids that block external electromagnetic interference. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 27, 2018•2 min
They call it Herb2. It’s a dapper robot, wearing a bowtie even while it sits at home in its lab at the University of Washington. Its head is a camera, which it cranes up and down, taking in the view of a dimly lit corner where two computer monitors sit. All perfectly normal stuff for a robot—until the machine speaks: “Hello from the hackers.” Clear across the country at Brown University, researchers have compromised Herb2. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 24, 2018•7 min
This is sort of awesome. It's a concrete gravity battery. What? Yup. The idea is to even out the balance between power generation and power usage; like with any battery, this one allows you to store extra energy for use at a later time when demand is higher. Or maybe you could use solar power during the day to store energy in the battery to be used at night—you know, when the sun doesn't shine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 24, 2018•7 min
Heather Potters is trying to get to the point. On a stage at Denver's Air & Space museum, a 182,000 square-foot space filled with decommissioned aircraft, she stands in front of a PowerPoint and describes her company's no-needle syringes, which can deliver vaccines by accelerating the liquid into a superfast stream that punctures the skin. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 23, 2018•7 min
West Virginia is second only to Wyoming in both coal production and President Trump’s winning vote percentage in the 2016 general election. So it was no surprise that Trump flew to the Mountain State Tuesday to stump for his new plan to boost coal-fired power plants by cutting regulations on planet-warming carbon emissions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 23, 2018•7 min
As far as plant names go, the sleepy plant—or shy plant, or shameplant, known more formally as Mimosa pudica—is hard to beat. Touch one of its leaves and it curls up like it’s embarrassed, the leaflets folding in on each other. It’s hypnotic and, well, kind of a surprising response for an organism without a brain. Now, the shameplant is getting its very own robotic doppelganger. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 22, 2018•5 min
One of my favorite classes to teach is Physics for Elementary Education. It's a physics class designed to address the needs of future elementary school teachers—grades 1 through 6 or so. To guide the class, I've been using a version of Next Gen Physical Science and Everyday Thinking for a long time, maybe 13 years or so, and it is super awesome. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Aug 22, 2018•8 min
Bounding around on giant hind limbs, using its giant tail to balance, the well-named giant kangaroo rat of Southern California is half Pokemon, half Mighty Mouse. It emerges at night to forage on seeds, building up underground stores. When it’s not busy foraging, it’s busy scrapping with its peers to claim territory. It dominates these grasslands, outcompeting smaller rodents while doing its best to dodge foxes and snakes. But the giant kangaroo rat isn’t invincible. Learn about your ad choices:...
Aug 21, 2018•6 min
A river is a mercurial thing, running deep and fast in the rainy season, and low and slow when the rains fade. It can dry up completely one year, then turn into a raging flood the next. Every so often, a river disappears entirely, bringing down the communities it once nourished. You hear a lot about how climate change is fueling the rise of our seas, but not so much about how it will transform our rivers, the flooding of which currently affects almost 60 million people a year. Learn about your a...
Aug 21, 2018•6 min
On July 23, Dev Kumar Thapa and Anshu Pandey made an extraordinary claim online. It wasn’t your garden variety fake news: By cramming microscopic particles of gold and silver together into pellets, they said, they’d constructed the first ever room-temperature superconductor. In a 13-page PDF, the two chemists at the Indian Institute of Science laid out measurements that indicated the pellets could conduct electricity perfectly at temperatures as warm as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Learn about your a...
Aug 20, 2018•9 min
In a field at the edge of the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus, half a dozen students and lab technicians glance up at the darkening afternoon skies. The threatening rain storm might bring relief from the 90-degree August heat, but it won’t help harvest all this wheat. Moving between the short rows, they cut out about 100 spiky heads, put them in a plastic container, and bring them back to a growling Vogel thresher parked at the edge of the plot. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.pr...
Aug 20, 2018•8 min
I've never been surfing—but I'm willing to give it a try. I would not, however, be interested in attempting to surf a massive wave like this one off the coast of Portugal. That's a pass for me. Of course even if you don't surf, there is still some cool physics involved in the act of surfing (let alone all the physics of wave formation). So, how does a rider stay moving with a huge wave like this? As with all motions, the key is to look at forces. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-...
Aug 17, 2018•5 min
This storyoriginally appeared on High Country Newsand is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. At the end of July, Twitter user Alicia Santana posted a photo of a man sitting in a plastic folding chair in his yard. He’s looking away from the camera, towards a monstrous, orange cloud of smoke filling the sky beyond a wire fence. “My dad not wanting to leave his home,” Santana wrote, ending it with #MendocinoComplexFire. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 17, 2018•5 min
Everyone already knows that you are carrying around a computer in your pocket. But your smartphone is more than just a computer—it's also a data collector. I'm going to guess that yours can measure acceleration, magnetic field, sound, location, and maybe more. Many phones also can measure pressure. Oh, and some phones can even make phone calls. With all of those sensors available, I'm going to go over three fun experiments you can do with your phone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org...
Aug 17, 2018•6 min
Look at all the pretty drones. Hovering above sports stadiums from Houston to Pyeongchang, many hundreds of them have lately sparkled in artful murmuration. On a recent Time magazine cover, 958 drones pixelated the sky. The world record, 1,374 LED-bedazzled microbots, was set by Chinese company EHang UAV in May. So-called drone swarms—the phrase people have taken up with gusto—are having their biggest, buzziest year ever. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 15, 2018•4 min
America is on fire … again. More than a million and a half acres are burning in 15 states, from Arizona to Alaska. More than 3,000 firefighters are working to contain the Mendocino Complex Fire 100 miles north of San Francisco, now the largest in California history, and over the weekend, lightning strikes sparked dozens of new wildfires across the state of Washington. Near Mount Shasta, the deadly Carr Fire has so far incinerated 1,077 homes, forced mass evacuations, and killed eight. Learn abou...
Aug 14, 2018•6 min
Black holes, befitting their name and general vibe, are hard to find and harder to study. You can eavesdrop on small ones from the gravitational waves that echo through space when they collide—but that technique is new, and still rare. You can produce laborious maps of stars flitting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way or nearby galaxies. Or you can watch them gulp down gas clouds, which emit radiation as they fall. Now researchers have a new option. Learn about your ad choices:...
Aug 14, 2018•14 min
