Last month, the US Department of Agriculture and FDA convened to debate meat: what it is and isn't, and if plant-based or lab-grown products like those made by Impossible Burger and Memphis Meats should be called meat. Lab-grown meat is still months from market, but vegetarian meats already have the poultry and cattle industries in a tizzy. Sales of meat analogues are growing at steady clip of 23 percent a year, nibbling out a decent market share. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad...
Nov 28, 2018•6 min
In the morning hours before NASA’s InSight spacecraft entered Mars’s atmosphere, roughly 30 employees of Lockheed Martin gathered in the company’s InSight Mission Support Area, in Denver. They all wore the same red button-down shirt adorned with a mission patch. Someone had taped red plastic over some of the fluorescent lights, to lend the room a martian ambience. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 27, 2018•8 min
Delaney Van Riper was exhausted. It was the summer of 2017 and she’d spent the previous day touring UC Santa Cruz’s cliffside campus, getting her student paperwork in order, and meeting some of her 4,000 fellow incoming Slugs. Now, dressed head-to-toe in sweats, she was ready to nap in the backseat for the ride to her family’s home three hours away in Sacramento. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 27, 2018•9 min
The Northern California city of Paradise is gone—the Camp Fire, by far the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, has reduced home after home to ashes. It conjures images of a tsunami of flame tearing through the town, destroying everything in its path. Curiously, though, trees still stand between burned-out homes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 26, 2018•7 min
There's really no way to rehearse landing on Mars. You can simulate it, sure, but the most valuable lessons are learned during actual attempts. When things go poorly, those lessons are also the most expensive. The fact is, most missions to Mars don't make it, though NASA has a better track record than most. The agency has executed seven successful touchdowns on the red planet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 26, 2018•7 min
The general rule when developing a new kind of solar technology is to expect progress to be slow. Take silicon solar cells, the most ubiquitous and recognizable form of photovoltaic generations today. When silicon panels were first built in the early 1950s, they could only turn about 6 percent of the light that hit them into electricity. More than 30 years later, that number had inched up to 20 percent, and today—30 years after that—they regularly perform in the mid 20s. Learn about your ad choi...
Nov 23, 2018•6 min
Electronics often don’t mesh well with flesh and blood. Cochlear implants can irritate the scalp; pacemaker wires dislodge; VR headsets weigh heavily on the face. That’s why, for the past six years, Michael McAlpine has been Frankensteining alternatives. A mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota, he creates prototypes of bionic body parts with nice, soft components—some of them alive. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 23, 2018•3 min
The twinkling of a starry night sky is romantic, sure. But for astronomer Dominika Wylezalek, “it’s a nightmare.” That’s because Wylezalek studies galaxies billions of light-years away, and all that finicky glimmering—she’d call it “turbulence”—gets in the way. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 22, 2018•2 min
To figure out how and when ancient fish first crawled from the ocean onto land, Neil Shubin is about to head to the mountains of Antarctica. Leaving behind family and friends for the upcoming holidays, he and a team of five other scientists and a mountain guide will be camping at the base of a remote mountain range that was a tropical river delta around 385 million years ago. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 22, 2018•7 min
In my family, Thanksgiving this year has turned into a week-long holiday. Not because we’re all so fanatical about celebrating the violent European colonization of North America, but because it will take us that long to figure out what on Earth to put on the table. In a party of 12 we’ve got a duo of vegetarians, one part-time pollotarian, the recently dairy-avoidant and the long-time spice-averse, plus the seasonal carb-watchers and the one insufferable celery-hater. Learn about your ad choices...
Nov 21, 2018•8 min
Let’s say you have a baby. Maybe you really do, maybe you don’t. But Dan Scolnic, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, does have one, and perhaps that's why a hypothetical baby helps him explain the universe. If you take this baby to the doctor, that doctor will weigh and measure the baby, plot those points on a growth chart, and predict how big they’ll be later. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 21, 2018•9 min
1. The five traditional senses keep us alert and alive: Hot pans burn, loud noises startle. Within our bodies, a sixth sense, known as interoception, perceives the state of—and threats to—our internal organs. From pangs and cramps to shortness of breath, it warns us when something is off. Hungover from a wild bender? Waves of nausea in the presence of alcohol are interoceptive warnings to lay off the juice. 2. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 20, 2018•2 min
In 2018, people started using the blockchain to battle deepfakes, track sushi-grade tuna from Fiji to Brooklyn, and even cast a (symbolic) vote. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to put all 6 billion bits of your genetic source code on the blockchain too. Starting this week, a startup called Nebula Genomics is doing just that, offering whole-genome sequencing for free, as a way to stock up for its real ploy: a blockchain-based genetic marketplace. Learn about your ad ch...
Nov 20, 2018•10 min
Here are a few things you can buy with $200: one bluetooth-controlled fire pit, 100 lab-grown Impossible White Castle sliders, access to the 3 billion base pairs that make up all the DNA coiled inside your cells. Well, at least for the next 48 hours. Starting today, Cambridge-based Veritas Genetics will be lowering its $999 whole genome sequencing and interpretation service for just $199 for two days, or to the first 1,000 people who buy spit kits. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Nov 19, 2018•10 min
On the morning of Friday, November 16, scientists and diplomats crammed into an auditorium in Versailles, a stone’s throw from the Sun King’s gilded chateau. Patrick Abbott, an American physicist, had flown into France for the long weekend. Forehead gleaming and blue suit jacket draped across his lap, Abbott watched from a packed balcony as a group of diplomats from 60 different countries voted unanimously on a treaty that intended to change global trade and technology forever. Learn about your ...
Nov 19, 2018•9 min
If you're a nefarious sort, you might use a commercial drone to smuggle drugs, carry explosives, or to just spy on your neighbors. Drones are appealing to criminals in part because they seem fairly anonymous, flitting through the sky with an invisible digital tether to its owner. But anonymity is no longer a safe bet. In the hands of crime investigators, a drone can reveal a range of personal and financial information about its owner. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 16, 2018•6 min
As a fan of science fiction and science, I have to say that The Expanse has a bunch of great science. It's not just the science in the show. The characters also seem to demonstrate an understanding of physics. One scene from the first season stands out in particular as a classic physics example. I guess I should give a spoiler alert, but I'm not really giving away any major plot elements. But you have been warned. OK, since you are still here let me describe the scene. Learn about your ad choice...
Nov 16, 2018•5 min
Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. On November 8, an almost unimaginable firestorm broke out in Northern California. Fed by dry vegetation, and fanned by northeasterly winds pouring off the Sierra Nevada Mountains, it rapidly descended on the community of Paradise, home to nearly 30,000 people. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 15, 2018•12 min
It wasn’t a whodunnit. Last year’s unprecedented rainfall and flooding in Houston were the proximate result of Hurricane Harvey, a massive storm born northeast of Venezuela and reborn in the Gulf of Mexico, where it rapidly intensified, made landfall over Houston, and then stayed—parked, as it were, for five days. LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Climate Change Harvey was, however, something of a whydunnit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 15, 2018•10 min
Tuesday’s midterm elections offered voters across the US the chance to move decisively to slow down the global ecological disaster of climate change. As the votes were tallied, however, one thing became clear: Americans remain as divided as ever on climate change. During his tenure, President Trump has moved to roll back Obama-era emissions standards, cripple renewable energy research, and pulled the US from global climate talks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 14, 2018•10 min
Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire and Woolsey Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. By at least one metric, we humans are dumber than frogs. The fable goes that if you toss a frog in a pot of hot water, it’ll leap right out. Put it in cold water, though, and bring it slowly to a boil, and the frog won’t notice before it’s too late. That turns out to be a myth—frogs are smarter than that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Nov 13, 2018•6 min
Ebola is one of those scourges where the mere mention of its name strikes fear: the virus, which kills about half of those it infects and gets passed on through body fluids, is notoriously hard to contain. Because of its long incubation period, healthy-looking people can spread the deadly disease for weeks before symptoms appear. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 13, 2018•8 min
Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire, Hill Fire, and Woolsey Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. In California three major fires—the Camp Fire in the north and Hill Fire and Woolsey Fire in the south—continue to rage on a scale the state has never seen before. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 12, 2018•7 min
Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire, Hill Fire, and Woolsey Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. At 6:30 Thursday morning, a wildfire of astounding proportions and speed broke out in Northern California. Dubbed the Camp Fire, it covered 11 miles in its first 11 hours of life. A mile an hour might not seem fast in human terms, but it’s an extreme rate of speed as far as fires are concerned. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Nov 12, 2018•7 min
On Wednesday night, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders shared an altered video of a press briefing with Donald Trump, in which CNN reporter Jim Acosta's hand makes brief contact with the arm of a White House Intern. The clip is of low quality and edited to dramatize the original footage; it's presented out of context, without sound, at slow speed with a close-crop zoom, and contains additional frames that appear to emphasize Acosta's contact with the intern. Learn about your ad c...
Nov 09, 2018•8 min
Science hasn’t been giving us a tremendous amount of good news these days. We’re speeding toward climate catastrophe, for one. We’ve screwed up the environment so badly, it’s hard to even call it an environment anymore. And that’s coming back to bite (or sting) us: Bee populations, which we rely on to pollinate our crops, are plummeting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 09, 2018•8 min
And so a few more dominoes fall. Michigan voted to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, while Utah and Missouri legalized it for medical use, according to projections made late Tuesday night. (A recreational measure in North Dakota failed, though medical cannabis remains legal there.) They join 31 other states that have already gone the medical route, and nine others that have gone fully recreational. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 08, 2018•6 min
Today, cannabis continues its slow march toward nationwide decriminalization with voters deciding whether to allow recreational use in Michigan and North Dakota, and for medical purposes in Utah and Missouri. As states keep chipping away at federal prohibition, more consumers will gain access, sure—but so will more researchers who can more easily study this astonishingly complex and still mysterious plant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 08, 2018•10 min
When a company called HawkEye360 wanted to test its wares, it gave an employee a strange, deceptive task. While the worker stood in Virginia, he held the kind of transceiver that ships carry to broadcast their GPS locations. Usually such a signal would reveal his true position to a radio receiver, but he’d altered the broadcast to spoof his GPS position, making it seem like he was in fact off the coast of Maine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 07, 2018•7 min
In 2013, Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page announced the formation of a new Alphabet entity dedicated to solving the pesky puzzle of mortality. Since then, the billion-dollar longevity lab known as Calico—short for California Life Company—has been trying to tease apart the fundamental biology of aging in the hopes of one day defeating death. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 07, 2018•8 min
