1. Most substances make a clean break between their liquid and solid states. But liquid crystals straddle the boundary: They flow smoothly, like water, while maintaining a crystalline structure. A tiny jolt of electricity aligns the molecules in the same direction and allows them to rotate light—an effect you see when the pixels in your LCD television or smartphone flip on and off to form pretty images. 2. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 21, 2019•2 min
In January 2018, Rocket Lab sent a surprise to orbit. Along with its normal payloads, the launch company deployed a shiny object it dubbed the Humanity Star—basically a 3-foot-wide disco ball. Its reflective surface would shine down on Earth’s inhabitants, visible to the naked eye for a few months. “No matter where you are in the world, or what is happening in your life, everyone will be able to see the Humanity Star in the night sky,” founder Peter Beck said in a statement. Learn about your ad ...
Jan 21, 2019•12 min
Two billion people can’t be wrong—at least, not about the nearly 2,000 species of insects that make for good eatin’ around the world. But nobody has to pitch you on the benefits of insectivory, right? Easier on the environment, full of weird nutrients, and whoa, check out that feed conversion ratio: It takes half as much food as you’d give to pigs and chickens and a twelfth as much as cattle to get the same amount of cricket protein on the far side of the abattoir. Learn about your ad choices: d...
Jan 18, 2019•8 min
Nearly 300 million years ago, a curious creature called Orobates pabsti walked the land. Animals had just begun pulling themselves out of the water and exploring the big, dry world, and here was the plant-eating tetrapod Orobates, making its way on four legs. Paleontologists know it did so because one particularly well-preserved fossil has, well, four legs. And luckily enough, scientists also discovered fossilized footprints, or trackways, to match. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Jan 18, 2019•9 min
Actions have consequences, as our parents likely told us as kids. But inaction has consequences, too. Life or death consequences, in the case of California’s new normal of massive, climate-change-driven wildfires. After a series of devastating fires over the last few years, critics have turned their ire toward PG&E, a utility that brings electricity to 5.4 million households and businesses in Northern California. Its equipment has been blamed for 17 of 21 major fires in 2017 alone. Learn abo...
Jan 17, 2019•6 min
When you wish upon a star (or an asteroid or a comet) you are wishing on plasma, ice, dust, rock, on an object that exists, for real, so far away and moving so fast that no living human will likely ever have direct contact with it. (Well, generally.) But you’re also wishing on a metaphor. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 16, 2019•10 min
In nearly two dozen underground laboratories scattered all over the earth, using vats of liquid or blocks of metal and semiconductors, scientists are looking for evidence of dark matter. Their experiments are getting more complicated, and the search is getting more precise, yet aside from a much-contested signal coming from a lab in Italy, nobody has found direct evidence of the mysterious material that is thought to make up 84 percent of the matter in the universe. Learn about your ad choices: ...
Jan 16, 2019•11 min
For doctors and medical researchers repairing the human body, a 3D printer has become almost as valuable as an x-ray machine, microscope, or a sharp scalpel. Bioengineers are using 3D printers to make more durable hip and knee joints, prosthetic limbs and, recently, to produce living tissue attached to a scaffold of printed material. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 15, 2019•6 min
When President Trump first announced he would deliver a primetime address about the border wall, people objected. They argued that the networks shouldn’t run it, given Trump’s record of lying about immigration issues and the precedent of not airing presidential speeches deemed purely political. Misinformation experts warned that if news organizations do air the speech, they should fact-check it live. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 14, 2019•7 min
A group of apes is called a shrewdness; a group of ferrets is called a business; a group of small satellites is called a constellation. And Spire is the name of one shrewd business with a constellation of small satellites. More than 60 of its sats are up in orbit, collecting information about the weather, as well as the movements of ships and air traffic. Inside Spire’s Boulder office, a conference-room computer beams those satellites’ knowledge from space to a screen. Learn about your ad choice...
Jan 11, 2019•12 min
Nestled in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains is the quaint Gold Rush town of Nevada City. Surrounded by unkempt brush, the old, highly flammable city is in danger: with California’s wildfires raging with unprecedented ferocity in recent years, one spark could doom Nevada City to the same fate that neighboring Paradise met in November. But not if the goats get there first. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 10, 2019•6 min
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On January 3, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the release of ShakeAlertLA, a new earthquake-warning app for residents of Los Angeles County. The app—the first of its kind in the United States—promises to “save lives by giving precious seconds to you and to your family to take action and to protect yourselves,” Garcetti told reporters at a launch event at City Hall. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Jan 10, 2019•5 min
Bad news from the high seas: the Ocean Cleanup’s 600-meter-long floating tube, which was supposed to catch plastic whilst somehow surviving the relentless forces of the ocean, has done neither. In November, the organization—which has raised $40 million from donors and companies—announced that the thing wasn’t really catching plastic, and last week it said the giant tube had snapped in two. It's now being towed to Hawaii for repairs and upgrades. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...
Jan 09, 2019•6 min
It’s easy to watch a baby finally learn to walk after hours upon hours of trial and error and think, OK, good work, but do you want a medal or something? Well, maybe only a childless person like me would think that, so credit where credit is due: It’s supremely difficult for animals like ourselves to manage something as everyday as putting one foot in front of the other. It’s even more difficult to get robots to do the same. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 09, 2019•6 min
Instead of figuring out how many Pacific hake fishermen can catch sustainably, as his job demands, scientist Ian Taylor is at home with his four-month old daughter, biding his time through the partial government shutdown. Taylor’s task is to assess the size and age of hake and other commercially harvested fish species in the productive grounds from Baja California to the Gulf of Alaska. These stock assessments are then used by federal managers to approve permits to West Coast fishing boats. Lear...
Jan 08, 2019•6 min
You, like me, may sometimes (or all the time!) feel that the world is spiraling out of control—trade wars and political strife. And, oh right, climate change, arguably the greatest threat our species has ever faced. Or maybe artificial intelligence and robots will put us all out of work before the world actually ends. “A dirty little secret about autonomous vehicles,” says Edelman, “is there won't be enough people to service them because these are trade skill programs. Learn about your ad choice...
Jan 04, 2019•8 min
Researchers at the University of Maryland recently announced a potential breakthrough in the fight against "neuropathic" pain—that is, pain that results from malfunctioning or damaged nerves.Neuropathic pain afflicts 100 million Americans and costs the nation over half a trillion dollars every year. WIRED OPINION ABOUT KurtAmsler, Ph.D., is a professor of biomedical sciences at the New York Institute of Technology's College of Osteopathic Medicine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Jan 04, 2019•6 min
The red imported fire ant is one of the world’s most invasive species. Its sting delivers a burning poison that kills living tissue. Together groups of ants devour deer fawns, baby birds, reptiles, and almost any other source of protein they can get their mandibles on. They form acres of crisscrossing tunnels with thousands of cooperative workers. And their territory has steadily been spreading. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 02, 2019•7 min
For the past 13 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been bolting away from the sun at speeds in excess of 31,000 miles per hour, charting a course for the fringes of our solar system. In 2015, it made a close pass of Pluto, returning the highest resolution images of the erstwhile planet the world has ever seen. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 01, 2019•6 min
Depending on your perspective, 2018 either brought us closer to salvation by way of robots, or closer to doom by way of robots: Where some see the end of meaningless work, others see the end of humanity, also meaningless. (We’re in the former camp, by the way. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 31, 2018•6 min
At the beginning of 2018, Elon Musk predicted that SpaceX would pull off 30 launches. The goal seemed far-fetched; among other reasons, some of those flights were planned for the Falcon Heavy, which at the time had yet to fly. Indeed, the company didn’t hit that figure. But the 21 launches it did pull off in 2018 still amount to a staggering achievement for the 16-year-old company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 31, 2018•7 min
Way, way out at the cold, dark edges of the solar system—past the rocky inner planets, beyond the gas giants, a billion miles more remote than Pluto—drifts a tiny frozen world so mysterious, scientists still aren't entirely sure if it's one world or two. Astronomers call it Ultima Thule, an old cartography term meaning "beyond the known world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 28, 2018•7 min
In a chilly warehouse just outside of Boston, the brute toils away. It’s 600 pounds of orange and black metal and whirring motors, a massive robotic arm that picks up car parts and places them on a table. Like its ancestors have done for decades, this industrial robot does the heavy lifting that no human worker could manage, and it does so with extreme speed and precision. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 27, 2018•6 min
In April, a citizen scientist named Barbara Rae-Venter used a little-known genealogy website called GEDMatch to help investigators find a man they’d been looking for for nearly 40 years: The Golden State Killer. In the months since, law enforcement agencies across the country have flocked to the technique, arresting a flurry of more than 20 people tied to some of the most notorious cold cases of the last five decades. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 26, 2018•14 min
Quantum computers are still a dream, but the era of quantum communication is here. A new experiment out of Paris has demonstrated, for the first time, that quantum communication is superior to classical ways of transmitting information. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 24, 2018•6 min
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Dec 21, 2018•7 min
After the historic announcement in February 2016 hailing the discovery of gravitational waves, it didn’t take long for skeptics to emerge. The detection of these feeble undulations in the fabric of space and time by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was said to have opened a new ear on the cosmos. But the following year, a group of physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen published a paper casting doubt on LIGO’s analysis. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
Dec 21, 2018•13 min
In 1995, New York City psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg logged onto PsyCom.net, then a popular message board for shrinks, to describe a new disease he called "internet addiction disorder," symptoms of which, he wrote, included giving up important social activities because of internet use and "voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers." It was supposed to be a joke. But to his surprise, many of his colleagues took him seriously. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 20, 2018•9 min
A bug’s life doesn’t seem half bad, if you can overlook the super-short lifespan or the threat of getting eaten by lizards or swatted at by humans. Flying is nice, as is being able to walk on ceilings. The versatility is enviable, which is why roboticists are on a quest to imbue machines with the power of the bug. But to harness the powers of nature, roboticists are resorting to very un-biological means. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 20, 2018•6 min
Physicists are remarkably frank: they don’t know what dark matter is made of. “We’re all scratching our heads,” says physicist Reina Maruyama of Yale University. “The gut feeling is that 80 percent of it is one thing, and 20 percent of it is something else,” says physicist Gray Rybka of the University of Washington. Why does he think this? It’s not because of science. “It’s a folk wisdom,” he says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 19, 2018•7 min
