Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.
Christine Corbett Moran was in Antarctica when she got the news: NASA wanted to interview her, in person, for the next class of astronauts. Moran is a coder and theoretical astrophysicist, and she'd been holed up in the southernmost part of the world for 10 months, studying the echoes of the Big Bang. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Like many people, I enjoy gettinga nice cup of coffee. Not that silly sugary stuff like a double-whip, non-fat, vanilla bean, espresso, iced with a twist of lime. No, I get plain old boring black coffee. But there's a problem: It's almost always too hot to drink right away. When life gives you coffee that's too hot, you must find the best way to cool it. I have two methods to cool off my coffee. Method No.1 is to remove the lid (coffee usually comes with a lidso you don't spill it). Learn about ...
What generates voltage when you warm it up, push on it, or blow on it? Get your mind out of the gutter. The correct answer is polyvinylidene fluoride, a material NASA researchers have refined for use in morphing aircraft that shapeshift in response to their environment. But wait! There’s more: It can also kickstart the human body’s healing process. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
The protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota are, on the surface, about water quality. The pipeline’s planned route—which closely mirrors the path of the would-be Keystone XL pipeline—goes right through the tribe’s water source. And like Keystone XL (which President Obama vetoed this February), the Dakota Access Pipeline has taken on larger significance as a conduit for worsened global climate change. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Imagine a Where’s Waldo book with nothing butblack and white pictures. Good luck using his candy-stripesweater as a visual cue. Now you know what it’s like trying to find a virus on a greyscale microscopic image. Microbiologists have dealt with this problem for decades, because when things get small, things go dark. Photons, bits of light essential to discerning color, are too clunky to resolve anything much smaller than say, a synapse connecting two neurons. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Last summer, as it sped through the Pluto system, the New Horizons spacecraft only had a few hours to pack its memory banks with as much data about the dwarf planetary system as possible. On October 25, the last few hundred bits of that data finally arrived in one of NASA‘s deep space radio dishes. For posterity’s sake, take a moment and remember that before the flyby—a mere 15 months ago—the dwarf planet was a pixellated blur. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
If we get our way and really put humans on Mars in the coming decades, they’re going to need power. NASA has had concrete plants to send people to the Red Planet since 2010—with target dates in the 2030s, while Elon Musk thinks SpaceX can make it to Mars faster. But no matter who gets there first, the power problem remains. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Volcanoes have been a persistent feature on Earth since the planet condensed out of the primordial nebula of our solar system. The scale and style of that volcanism has changed dramatically over that 4.5 billion years—heck, after Thera bumped into proto-Earth to form the Moon, we probably had a planet-wide lava lake as the molten Earth coalesced and cooled from the collision. However, we lack much of a record of that tumultuous time beyond a few zircon found in younger sediments. Learn about you...
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Last week, Tanzania planted its first ever genetically modified crop—a drought-resistant white corn hybrid. Government researchers will spend the next two to three years monitoring the plants for safety and effectiveness at growing in perilously dry conditions. It’s a notable milestone, given the nation’s longstanding lack of enthusiasm towards biotechnology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
When Nathan Copeland got into a car accident in 2004, he suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed in both arms and both legs. Eventually, Copeland got a prosthetic-but one that is very different from most anyone else's out there. Copeland is the first person in the world to use a system created by DARPA and the National Science Foundation, which allows him to "experience" the sensation of touch via a special robotic prosthesis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choice...
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's announcement in September that they will pour $3 billion into research, mainly at elite universities in California, with expressed interest to "cure all disease" within a century, was an endearing move from new money billionaires who have pledged to devote their phenomenal wealth to supporting biomedical research. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Everyone knows MacGyver. He's the guy who gets out of sticky situations by cobbling stuff together. Here he is in the reboot, maybe four floors up, with a sudden need to jump from a window. Solution? Use a fire extinguisher and body bag to create an impromptu cushion. Could that really work? First, a disclosure. I'm the technical consultant for MacGyver, which means I check if MacGyver's hacks are legit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
At their core, data tell stories. They reveal patterns, show changes over time, and confirm or challenge our theories. And in cities across the country, mayors, police chiefs, and other local leaders are turning to data to help them understand and address gun violence, one of the most persistent crises they face. Innovative, data-driven programs are showing encouraging results. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
The odds are stacked against Haiti. Geologically, it's wedged between tectonic plates, where earthquakes happen. Meteorologically, it's in the center of hurricane alley, where massive storms roil. And historically, the country is forever fighting a colonial legacy that left it largely incapable of recovering from natural disasters. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
It's been a busy week or so in the world of volcanoes. Japan's Mount Aso had its largest eruption in recent memory. Canada's Mount Meager might be rumbling to life. And the USGS and Global Volcanism Program released a great animation of 50 years of earthquakes and eruptions. Japan Mount Aso in Japan had a large explosive eruption last week (10/8), sending ash over 11 kilometers (36,000 feet) upwards. Although eruptions aren't rare at Aso, the scale of this one was larger than usual. Learn about ...
People aren't doodling sea monsters over blank spots on the map anymore, but that doesn't mean scientists have Earth all figured out. Plenty of geological features have yet to be discovered and understood-especially where things get watery, or subterranean, or both. Case in point: a team of seismologists recently discovered what they believe is a fault line running along the the eastern shore of the Salton Sea in southern California. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Hurricane Matthew is already a tragedy. It killed hundreds battering through the Caribbean, and knocked out power, forced evacuations, and flooded beaches as it scoured the Florida coastline. But thinking long-term, the storm is a punctuation mark in the creeping erosion narrative playing out on many southeastern shorelines. Erosion is nothing new. Shorelines experience seasonal ebbing from winter, and typically regrow in the summer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
In the back of Indigo's Boston headquarters-past the gleaming new desks, past empty rooms awaiting new employees after a $100 million fundraising round-is a giant elevator. The elevator has one main purpose: to haul dirt up by the pallet load. Indigo is an agriculture company. But it doesn't sell seeds or fertilizer or pesticides or any of the typical products agriculture companies have made billions selling in the past century. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
This morning, Jeff Bezos had predicted an explosion: His hard working little rocket, the New Shepard, would go up in flames during its fifth-and final-launch. That's because this launch, unlike previous ones testing the rocket's ability to land, was an experiment of its escape system. The New Shepard is, like all rockets, a carefully contained catastrophe. It is also topped by a crew capsule, which needs a way to get clear of the booster should anything go wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
The Hawaiian coral reefs you know-the brilliant blue waters and rainbow fishes and the occasional sea turtle-are just a facade. Sorry, but it's true: Science says so. Dive past these upper-ocean paradises, deeper and deeper, and you'll find even more incredible reefs-ones that, shrouded in near-total darkness, shouldn't exist at all. Hundreds of feet below the ocean's surface, the so-called deep reef-also known as the twilight zone-is just coming into view. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Today, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will engage its thrusters for one final maneuver: a suicidal plunge toward the comet it has been orbiting for two years and chasing for a decade. After Rosetta collides with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, its systems will go dark. Scientists will never hear from it again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
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