Ocean explorers and entrepreneurs have been thinking about how to scoop up mineral-laden deposits on the seafloor since the HMS Challenger dragged a few up in a bucket during its globe-trotting scientific voyage in the 1870s. A century later, the CIA used deep sea mining as a cover story for a secretive plan to recover a sunken Russian nuclear sub. Now, it’s a serious engineering proposition. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 20, 2017•9 min
I can't decide if this looks like something from a super hero movie or from a video game. In this compilation video of crazy stunts, a guy somehow finds a way to bound up between two walls by jumping from one to the other. "Somehow," of course, means with physics: This move is based on the momentum principle and friction. Could you pull it off? Probably not. But you can at least do the math. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 20, 2017•6 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 19, 2017•7 min
If you’ve been putting off your flu shot until the season really gets going, wait no longer. It’s already here—and it’s looking like it’s going to be a doozy. Influenza viruses quietly circulate year-round in the US, but every winter they go big, triggering a seasonal epidemic of sniffles, sweats, and sore throats. And this year it’s come earlier than usual, just in time for a potential peak over the holidays. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 18, 2017•7 min
Saturn's rings sure are pretty, and Matt Damon’s been to Mars, but our eight-planet solar system may not be that special after all. Today, scientists using data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft announced they’d discovered an eighth planet orbiting a star 2,500 light years away. They’ve named the planet Kepler-90i after the star it orbits, Kepler-90, which is slightly hotter and more massive than our sun. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 18, 2017•6 min
Let me freak you out for a second. You know what bitcoin is, right? I mean, no, but quickly, it’s a “cryptocurrency” that’s basically secret computer money. One bitcoin, which doesn’t actually have a real, physical form, is worth at this moment upwards of $16,000. But to get one, you either have to buy them from online exchanges or use specialized computing hardware to “mine” it. That last bit is where the freak-out comes in. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 15, 2017•16 min
Neill Stollman has been called the Tupac of poop transplants. The Oakland-based, board-certified gastroenterologist didn’t invent the treatment. But he did bring it to the west coast. His first patient was a woman in her 80s with a horrible case of Clostridium difficile, a gut infection that can strike patients after a course of antibiotics clears out their existing bacterial community. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 15, 2017•8 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 14, 2017•5 min
In late 2012, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier approached a handful of American scientists about starting a company, a Crispr company. They included UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, George Church at Harvard University, and his former postdoc Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute—the brightest stars in the then-tiny field of Crispr research. Back then barely 100 papers had been published on the little-known guided DNA-cutting system. It certainly hadn’t attracted any money. Learn about your...
Dec 14, 2017•8 min
Figuring out how human beings do human things is one of the most exciting things that science—psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology—can do. It’s also one of the hardest. Reliable, meaningful methods that distill real-world behavior into experimental variables have been, let’s say, elusive. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 13, 2017•15 min
Sometimes, when I'm proctoring an exam, I end up with a little too much time on my hands. So I play with stuff—whatever I've got on hand. In this case, it was one of those clicky pens. It had stopped writing, so I assumed it was out of ink. Of course it might not be out of ink, so I took it apart to look at the ink cartridge and check. That's when I discovered the fun stuff: If I push the empty ink cartridge down into the top of the pen, it compresses a spring. Learn about your ad choices: dovet...
Dec 13, 2017•6 min
Humans have gotten pretty good at launching stuff into space—but way less good at getting stuff back down. Up in lower Earth orbit, along with a thousand-plus productive satellites, there are many more slackers: space junk, cosmic trash, garbage of the highest-orbiting order. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 12, 2017•7 min
Big offshore wind farms power Europe’s drive for a carbon-free society, while rows of spinning turbines across America’s heartland churn enough energy to power 25 million US homes. But a new study predicts that a changing climate will weaken winds that blow across much of the Northern hemisphere, possibly leading to big drops in clean wind energy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 12, 2017•6 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 11, 2017•7 min
Today, a teaspoon of spit and a hundred bucks is all you need to get a snapshot of your DNA. But getting the full picture—all 3 billion base pairs of your genome—requires a much more laborious process. One that, even with the aid of sophisticated statistics, scientists still struggle over. It’s exactly the kind of problem that makes sense to outsource to artificial intelligence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 08, 2017•12 min
Humans dance. It's what they do. Everyone always wants to get some cool new dance move. First there was the electric slide. Yeah, that was cool—but then there was the moonwalk. That was really cool. And now we have the invisible box. OK, maybe it's not exactly a dance move, but more like a trick. The basic idea of this move is to make it seem like the dancer is stepping on a block—a block that's invisible. It's an impressive move, but how does it work? https://twitter. Learn about your ad choice...
Dec 08, 2017•4 min
The Thomas Fire spread through the hills above Ventura, in the northern greater Los Angeles megalopolis, with the speed of a hurricane. Driven by 50 mph Santa Ana winds—bone-dry katabatic air moving at freeway speeds out of the Mojave desert—the fire transformed overnight from a 5,000-acre burn in a charming chaparral-lined canyon to an inferno the size of Orlando, Florida, that only stopped spreading because it reached the Pacific. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 07, 2017•8 min
It took a while, but Russia finally got body-checked out of the Olympic Games. The road to ruin began in 2015, when two Russian track athletes-turned-whistleblowers raised suspicion about widespread state-sponsored doping at the 2012 London Games, followed by an independent report about problems at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 07, 2017•7 min
At HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, materials scientist Hunter Martin and his team load a grey powder as fine as confectioner’s sugar into a machine. They’ve curated the powder recipe—mostly aluminum, blended with some other elements—down to the atom. The machine, a 3-D metal printer, lays the powder down a single dusting at time, while a laser overhead welds the layers together. Over several hours, the machine prints a small block the size of brownie. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Dec 06, 2017•8 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 05, 2017•7 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 05, 2017•15 min
Every year in December, a makeshift hangar at the NASA Ames Research Center pops up for one night, transforming the austere airfield into a glitzy, paparazzi’d, black velvet-roped Nerd Prom. At the Breakthrough Prizes—where on December 3, a total of $22 million was handed out to pioneers in math, physics, and the life sciences—researchers traded lab coats and latex gloves for floor-length gowns and bow-tied tuxedos. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 04, 2017•8 min
This holiday season, more people than ever before are giving the gift of spit. Well, what’s in your spit, to be precise. Want to know where your ancestors once walked or whether you’re at risk for a genetic disease? There’s a spit tube kit for that. And customers are buying them in record numbers. Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, leading personal genomics company AncestryDNA sold about 1. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 01, 2017•8 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 01, 2017•5 min
Hunter Williams used to be an English teacher. Then, three years into that job, he started reading the book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The 1966 novel by Robert Heinlein takes place in the 2070s, on the moon, which, in this future, hosts a subterranean penal colony. Like all good sci-fi, the plot hinges on a rebellion and a computer that gains self-awareness. But more important to Williams were two basic fictional facts: First, people lived on the moon. Second, they mined the moon. Learn about...
Nov 30, 2017•9 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 30, 2017•6 min
In 1891, a New York doctor named William B. Coley injected a mixture of beef broth and Streptococcus bacteria into the arm of a 40-year-old Italian man with an inoperable neck tumor. The patient got terribly sick—developing a fever, chills, and vomiting. But a month later, his cancer had shrunk drastically. Coley would go on to repeat the procedure in more than a thousand patients, with wildly varying degrees of success, before the US Food and Drug Administration shut him down. Learn about your ...
Nov 29, 2017•15 min
For the first time, humans have detected an interstellar asteroid—a space rock they're calling 'Oumuamua, which is a Hawaiian word meaning "scout." It's the only object we've ever seen that entered the solar system from beyond our little collection of planets. That's a pretty big deal on its own. But on top of that, this asteroid has a really interesting shape: It's very long and skinny, with a width to length ratio of about 1 to 10. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 29, 2017•9 min
Behind the Scenes as NASA Tests the Most Powerful Rocket Ever NASA wants to send a human to Mars in the next two decades. And that means making the most powerful rocket ever. In 2019, NASA will send a capsule called Orion on an elaborate 25-day trajectory. First, the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, will blast it into the ether. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 28, 2017•9 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 28, 2017•5 min
