No disrespect, but roboticists have got nothing on the animal kingdom. Birds cut through the air with ease, while our drones plummet out of the sky. Humans balance elegantly on two legs, while humanoid robots fall on their faces. It takes roboticists a whole lot of work to even begin to approach the wonders of evolution. But maybe if you can’t beat ‘em, hack ‘em. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 06, 2020•6 min
Inside a small metal box on a laboratory table in Vienna, physicist Markus Aspelmeyer and his team have engineered, perhaps, the quietest place on Earth. The area in question is a microscopic spot in the middle of the box. Here, levitating in midair—except there is no air because the box is in vacuum—is a tiny glass bead a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand. Aspelmeyer’s apparatus uses lasers to render this bead literally motionless. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choi...
Feb 05, 2020•7 min
Jonathan Read admits to being something of a dinosaur when it comes to publishing his work. An epidemiologist at Lancaster University in the UK, Read had always followed the old ways—submit to a journal, get accepted, get comments and edits from peer reviewers, revise the article, publish. But a few years ago, something started nagging at him. That process typically moves a lot slower than a disease outbreak. And even when it moves fast, it can involve considerations besides rigor. Learn about y...
Feb 04, 2020•8 min
Rocket ships are spinning and jellyfish are winning, but first: a cartoon about Instagram art. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Inside Spinlaunch, the space industry's best-kept secret A company called Spinlaunch is giving life to a decades-old idea for how to get rockets into space: spin them here on earth and hurl them into the cosmos. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
Feb 03, 2020•3 min
The Chinese government announced Wednesday that it would quarantine the city of Wuhan, the center of an outbreak of a new viral disease that has (officially) killed 17 people and infected more than 500. As of 10 AM Thursday morning in Wuhan—9 PM EST—no flights were leaving the airport. High-speed rail won’t depart for Shanghai, 500 miles to the east, or anywhere else. The bus terminals and roads are closed. Supposedly, it’s no one in or out. To be clear, that’s nuts. Learn about your ad choices:...
Jan 31, 2020•8 min
This autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding humans and opening doors for its pals, Boston Dynamics finally announced that the machine was hitting the market—for a select few early adopters, at least. BD’s people would be the first to tell you that they don’t fully know what the hypnotically agile robot will be best at. Things like patrolling job sites, sure. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 30, 2020•8 min
When asked what’s so special about Drosophila melanogaster, or the common fruit fly, Gerry Rubin quickly gets on a roll. Rubin has poked and prodded flies for decades, including as a leader of the effort to sequence their genome. So permit him to count their merits. They’re expert navigators, for one, zipping around without crashing into walls. They have great memories, too, he adds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 29, 2020•10 min
Hyundai is solving and robots are evolving, but first: a cartoon about parental phone tracking. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Spot the robot dog trots into the big, bad world You've probably seen the videos of Boston Dynamics' incredible (and creepy) robot dog Spot opening doors, trotting in parking lots, and fending off stick-wielding humans. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
Jan 28, 2020•3 min
On October 12, 2019, Eliud Kipchoge crossed under a pink finishing arch emblazoned with the time 1:59:40. He had just become the first person to run a marathon in under two hours. For a few hours, this achievement, long unthinkable, was celebrated across the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 27, 2020•9 min
Forgive baristas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 24, 2020•11 min
What began in mid-December as a mysterious cluster of respiratory illnesses has now killed at least six people, sickened hundreds more, and spread to five other countries, including the US. On Tuesday, American health officials confirmed the nation’s first case of the novel coronavirus: a Washington man hospitalized outside of Seattle last week with pneumonia-like symptoms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 23, 2020•7 min
We like to think modern culture moves at a dizzying pace, fueled by a relentless parade of new works of music, literature, and technological design. Change in nature, by contrast, seems to follow a slower trajectory as genetic mutations over generations give animals bigger teeth, say, or a better camouflage. But maybe the opposite is true, and human culture doesn’t move so fast and we consumers are less eager to embrace change than we realize. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-cho...
Jan 22, 2020•6 min
On the day Susan Gordon learned Venetucci Farm, in Colorado, was contaminated by toxins, the vegetables looked just as good as ever, the grass as green, and the cattle, hogs, chickens, and goats as healthy. The beauty of the community farm she and her husband managed made the revelation all the more tragic. Chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, invisible and insidious, had tainted the groundwater beneath her feet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 21, 2020•8 min
Under the watchful eye of a microscope, busy little blobs scoot around in a field of liquid—moving forward, turning around, sometimes spinning in circles. Drop cellular debris onto the plain and the blobs will herd them into piles. Flick any blob onto its back and it’ll lie there like a flipped-over turtle. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 20, 2020•6 min
Cats are in the rubble and snakes are causing trouble, but first: a cartoon about the internet frontier. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Cats are making Australia's bushfire tragedy even worse Animals trying to escape Australia's fires now face a new adversary: cats. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 17, 2020•4 min
Cats are scientifically, objectively, monumentally terrible for the planet. In the US alone, free-ranging domestic cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals a year, to say nothing of reptiles and amphibians. They are a scourge of the highest order. Now felines are poised to exacerbate the ecological crisis unfolding in Australia as an unprecedented fire season rips across the continent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 16, 2020•8 min
Australia’s wildfires are burning with such intensity that they’re sparking contained, small-scale weather systems. Thunderstorms triggered by atmospheric disturbance might at first seem to offer relief in the form of raindrops, but instead, bolts of lightning can strike nearby trees and spread the fire even further than before. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 15, 2020•7 min
Lithium-ion batteries have shaped the modern world. These power pouches are at the heart of most rechargeable electronics, from cell phones and laptops to vapes and electric cars. But while they’re great at holding charge and have a high energy density, lithium-ion batteries aren’t without their problems. Their reliance on toxic, flammable materials means the smallest defect can result in exploding gadgets. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 14, 2020•5 min
That burning feeling in your chest after you eat a heavy meal could be heartburn. Or it could be worry over the drugs you’ve taken to treat that heartburn. Among the top medical stories of 2019 was the discovery of contaminants in common medicines, and ranitidine—best known as Zantac—took up a large share of those headlines. A cancer-causing substance known as NDMA has been repeatedly found in one of the most popular antacid drugs in the United States. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.o...
Jan 13, 2020•10 min
Australians haven’t seen anything like the bushfires currently tearing through their country. The conflagrations are obliterating landscapes and their ecosystems, reshaping the continent in irreparable ways. Bushfires aren’t supposed to behave like this. In a normal world, every so often a lightning-sparked fire will roll through a landscape, clearing away old foliage to make way for the new. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 10, 2020•9 min
Dark energy, mysterious as it sounds, has become part of the furniture in cosmology. The evidence that this repulsive energy infuses space has stacked up since 1998. That was the year astronomers first discovered that the expansion of the universe has been speeding up over time, with dark energy acting as the accelerator. As space expands, new space arises, and with it more of this repulsive energy, causing space to expand even faster. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 09, 2020•9 min
For many of us, winter, with its chilly days and long nights, brings with it a general sense of malaise. It’s harder to peel ourselves out of bed in the half-light of morning, and hunched over our desks at work, we can feel our productivity draining away with the remnants of the afternoon sun. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 08, 2020•11 min
Babies love it, and Galileo supposedly tried it: Drop some objects from on high, and see how fast they fall. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, all objects in Earth’s gravity, regardless of mass, should descend at the same rate in the absence of air resistance. But there are plenty of reasons to believe this might not be true. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 07, 2020•7 min
There's a rare human trait that doesn't often make it into debates about what makes our species unique: menopause. Humans are among just a handful of species where females stop reproducing decades before the end of their lifespan. In evolutionary terms, menopause is intriguing: how could it be advantageous for reproductive ability to end before an individual's life is over? One possible answer: the power of the grandma's guidance and aid to her grandchildren. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Jan 06, 2020•6 min
Just about a year ago, SpaceX sent the rocketry equivalent of a clown car to space: A rocket crowded with more than 60 small satellites. Inside one of them, Excite, were even more. It was actually a satellite made of other satellites, all clones of each other, all capable of joining together and working together. It was one of the first in-space tests of such a contraption—but in the coming years, this modular approach is likely to show up on more and more missions. Learn about your ad choices: ...
Jan 03, 2020•9 min
This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From 2011 to 2016, California experienced five years of extreme drought, during which numerous high temperature records were broken. These hot, dry years were followed by the extremely wet winter of 2016 -2017, when, from October to March, an average of 31 inches of rain fell across the state, the second highest winter rainfall on record. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 02, 2020•11 min
At this very moment, you're a participant in one of the things that makes us human: the telling and consumption of stories. It's impossible to say when our species began telling each other stories—or when we first evolved the ability to use language to communicate not only simple, practical concepts but to share vivid accounts of events real or imagined. But by 43,900 years ago, people on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi had started painting some of their stories in images on cave walls. Learn ...
Jan 01, 2020•5 min
It’s a brisk December morning at Spaceport Tucson, America’s premiere (only?) dedicated launch pad for stratospheric balloons, and a small army of technicians in reflective vests is milling around on the concrete and dethawing after a long, cold night. Nearby, a white metal tripod the size of a smart car is tethered to two dozen solar panels and hundreds of feet of clear plastic that stretches across the pad. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 31, 2019•9 min
This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When most people conjure a forest, they imagine a dense network of trees, their crowns arching high above, with spots of sunshine flashing between the leaves. Some might also think of birdsong and insects, or summon thoughts of thick foliage in the understory, the crunch of leaves or pine needles underfoot, or overgrown trails meandering into the thicket. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Dec 30, 2019•15 min
The practice of science is about progress: Crafting knowledge out of hunches and experiments, finding life-saving remedies, informing sound policies. It doesn't always go as planned. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 27, 2019•12 min
