The internet is full of videos of thoughtful people setting things on fire. Here’s a perennial favorite: Cleave a grape in half, leaving a little skin connecting the two hemispheres. Blitz it in the microwave for five seconds. For one glorious moment, the grape halves will produce a fireball unfit for domestic life. Physicist Stephen Bosi tried the experiment back in 2011 for the YouTube channel Veritasium, in the physics department’s break room at the University of Sydney. Learn about your ad c...
Feb 19, 2019•6 min
Last night, NASA reached out one final time to the Opportunity rover on Mars, hoping the golf-cart-sized machine would phone home with good news. Since June, the robot has been unresponsive, likely because a planet-wide sandstorm coated its solar panels in dust. NASA has pinged it over 1,000 times in those gloomy eight months, to no avail. Last night’s attempt was no exception: NASA has announced that Opportunity is officially dead. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 18, 2019•5 min
Say this much for the “reproducibility crisis” in science: It’s poorly timed. At the same instant that a significant chunk of elected and appointed policymakers seem to disbelieve the science behind global warming, and a significant chunk of parents seem to disbelieve the science behind vaccines … a bunch of actual scientists come along and point out that vast swaths of the social sciences don’t stand up to scrutiny. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 18, 2019•7 min
The first alert came on January 27. Two small satellites, whirling through Earth's low orbits, had “the potential for a conjunction.” Those are the words Major Cody Chiles, spokesperson for the Joint Force Space Component Command, uses to mean "the chance of a collision." The satellites, one from a company called Capella Space and the other from Spire Global, could smack into each other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 14, 2019•7 min
In case you’ve been envying the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis lately, don’t. Skittering around the Sahara Desert, the insect endures temperatures so brutal, it can sometimes only manage foraging runs of 15 minutes before it burns to death. Making matters worse, the heat obliterates the pheromone chemical trails that ants typically lay for each other to navigate. Get lost out here, and you’re literally cooked. Accordingly, desert ants have evolved superpowers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Feb 14, 2019•7 min
The Monolithic black rectangle on stage with luminous, bouncing blue dots at eye level was not Project Debater, IBM’s argumentative artificial intelligence. It was just something for an audience to look at while a voice—is it redundant to call an AI’s synthesized voice “disembodied”?—projected over the sound system of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 13, 2019•9 min
On the third floor of a back building on Verily’s South San Francisco campus, ten white machines emit a low-pitched hum. Atop each one sits a plastic container so jammed with tubes and sensors it looks like a protein shake on life support. Inside, beige-colored broth bubbles away while tiny high-res cameras capture the frothy footage and stream it to the cloud. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 12, 2019•6 min
This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There might be no better monument to the limits of American environmentalism in the climate change era than a parking garage in Berkeley, California. It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture and water treatment features”—not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.pr...
Feb 12, 2019•10 min
If you want to watch sunrise from the national park at the top of Mount Haleakala, the volcano that makes up around 75 percent of the island of Maui, you have to make a reservation. Being at 10,023 feet, the summit provides a spectacular—and very popular, ticket-controlled—view. Just about a mile down the road from the visitors’ center sits “Science City,” where civilian and military telescopes curl around the road, their domes bubbling up toward the sky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.pr...
Feb 11, 2019•11 min
If it’s hard to imagine the sweeping changes proposed in the “Green New Deal” actually happening, don’t blame the Green New Deal. It’s just that it has been so long since any politician suggested something so grand. The wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and sea level rise that climate scientists have long promised are here, but we could get accustomed to that. We could forget that the world of five years ago or a decade ago was any different. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Feb 08, 2019•7 min
Given the choice between tossing back a dose of medicine and pushing it through your flesh inside a cold, steel needle, most people pick the pill. Convenience, portability, and lack of skin-stabbiness have made pills the most popular way to administer drugs for the better part of medical history. But not all drugs can survive the corrosive, churning trip from the stomach into the intestines and across to the bloodstream. Antibodies, proteins—these molecules are too fragile. Learn about your ad c...
Feb 08, 2019•8 min
Last Sunday, as much of the country tuned into the Super Bowl, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and a crew of engineers were gathered in McGregor, Texas, the small city where the company maintains a rocket test site. For a few seconds in the early evening, the sound of a new engine roared across the flatlands. "First firing of Starship Raptor flight engine!” Musk tweeted along with video footage of the test fire. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 07, 2019•6 min
We already know it’s chilly on the moon. A lunar night lasts 14 Earth days, and its temperatures can dip into a cold so punishing it makes the polar vortex look like a hot tub. But yesterday, China’s space agency announced that the frigidity of the lunar night is even more intense than we’d thought: The country’s Chang’e 4 spacecraft recorded an icy low of –310 degrees Fahrenheit (–190 degrees Celsius). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 07, 2019•6 min
This story originally appeared on Grist on Jan. 31 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. This January should be remembered for its unusual warmth, not its cold. Yes, it’s so cold right now that even hardy Minneapolis is shutting down schools, but even with these few days of extreme cold, Minnesota should end up with a near “normal” month thanks to weeks of unusual warmth. It was in the 70s and 80s as far north as Maryland on New Year’s Day. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Feb 05, 2019•4 min
This Sunday, the subreddit /r/superbowl will host a gathering of hoo-ligans. They’ll be fans of the Nocturnal Flying League. Real birds of a feather. Starting at 6 pm ET, the Superb Owl community will kick off an Ask Me Anything with biologist James Duncan, who has spent his entire adult life studying owls and a mere three weeks playing football. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 04, 2019•5 min
This is not a story about how the polar vortex is bad—bad for the human body, bad for public transportation, bad for virtually everything in its path. This is a story about how one being among us is actually taking advantage of the historic cold snap: Cassie the bipedal robot. While humans suffer through the chill, this trunkless pair of ostrich-like legs is braving the frozen grounds of the University of Michigan, for the good of science. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 04, 2019•5 min
What beer wants to know is, why do you hate America? How can you just sit in front of the game on Super Bowl Sunday, ice cold domestic lager close to hand, and not consider the future of that great institution? No, not the Super Bowl—the beer. Beer is America. Americans drank 2.9 billion cases in 2017, more than any other alcoholic beverage. It’s true, sales look to be going down, and prices look to be going up. But beer has an even more existential problem. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail...
Feb 01, 2019•8 min
Global thermonuclear war. The slight possibility that a massive asteroid could boop Earth. Jenga. These are a few of the things that give humans debilitating anxiety. Robots can’t solve any of these problems for us, but one machine can now brave the angst that is the crumbling tower of wooden blocks: Researchers at MIT report today in Science Robotics that they’ve engineered a robot to teach itself the complex physics of Jenga. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 01, 2019•7 min
Sports teams collect sweat to analyze athlete performance, while companies market sweat replacement drinks and sweat-removal clothing to help keep sprinters, cyclists and tennis players happy. But so far, swimmers have been left high and dry. Today a team of researchers announced they have built a small, flexible, wireless sensor that sticks to a swimmer’s skin, allowing athletes to measure how much they need to drink during a workout or race. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-cho...
Jan 30, 2019•5 min
Last Thursday, a shiny new SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sat perched atop NASA’s historic Pad 39A, at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, waiting to briefly fire its engines. The exercise was part of a routine pre-launch test. What wasn’t routine was the presence of a Crew Dragon capsule atop the slick black-and-white Falcon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 30, 2019•5 min
Depending on who you are and what you’re into, Earth isn’t particularly habitable. OK, sure, if you’re some kind of polyextremophile microorganism, the world is your oyster. Even oysters are your oyster. You can manage temperatures down to -10 degrees and up to 250 degrees, high salt levels, no light, and a local pH—a measurement of acidity—of zero. That is sour. But then, if you’re a polyextremophile microorganism, you’re probably not a reader. No offense. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Jan 29, 2019•7 min
Climate change is the most horrific threat our species has ever known: No matter how powerful you are or how much money you have, our transforming planet is a reckoning for every one of us. But there are degrees to this misery. If you’re perched in a Manhattan penthouse, the effects might not be immediately apparent (because you don’t care or aren’t paying attention, or both). If you’re a subsistence farmer in Kenya, the situation is already much more dire. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Jan 29, 2019•6 min
Friday morning began with delays at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. That’s not unusual—New York’s airports are famously balky. But this time, the cause wasn't something prosaic, like a blizzard. It was staffing. Because of the federal government shutdown, the airport didn’t have enough Transportation Security Administration agents and air traffic controllers; things slowed to a ground stop. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 28, 2019•6 min
To anyone reading this on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop (so, you know, basically all of you): We need to talk about how we talk about screen use. For too long the conversation’s been stuck on how much time we spend on our devices, and the effect that time has on our well-being. The more salient question for a society in which people’s lives increasingly revolve around screens is how we spend that time. But to answer that question, we need better data. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Jan 25, 2019•7 min
I get the feeling you don’t dislike rats enough. Because your struggles with the rodents chewing through your house pale in comparison to the problems wrought by rodents chewing through entire island ecosystems. Release just one pregnant rat on an island and soon enough the invasive predators will have decimated that pristine environment like an atom bomb. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 25, 2019•6 min
To help cure the planet’s ailments, Zhen Dai suggests antacid. In powdered form, calcium carbonate—often used to relieve upset stomachs—can reflect light; by peppering the sky with the shiny white particles, the Harvard researcher thinks it might be possible to block just enough sunlight to achieve some temperature control here on Earth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 24, 2019•3 min
Day after day, you pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, whether you’re driving or turning on lights or eating meat. You can’t help it, because really, no human can. But I bet you haven’t stopped to think about how the simple act of pooping is also part of the problem: Worldwide, wastewater treatment facilities account for 3 percent of electricity consumption and contribute 1.6 percent of emissions. A drop in the horrifying bucket that is climate change, you might say. Learn about your ad cho...
Jan 24, 2019•6 min
As flu season nears its annual peak, between eight and nine and a half million people in the US have already been sickened by various strains of the respiratory virus, according to new estimates released Friday by federal health officials. That report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also estimates that approximately 100,000 people have been hospitalized for complications resulting from the flu. It’s still too soon to know how bad the 2018-2019 season will be. Learn about yo...
Jan 23, 2019•7 min
Even though Earth is floating in the void, it does not exist in a vacuum. The planet is constantly bombarded by stuff from space, including a daily deluge of micrometeorites and a shower of radiation from the sun and more-distant stars. Sometimes, things from space can maim or kill us, like the gargantuan asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 23, 2019•5 min
To get a great job, you’ve got to network—make contacts, know the right people. You know the drill. But a study out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the kind of networking that works best for men isn’t enough for women. Women need access to key kinds of information that men don’t. And how can they get it? From other women. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 22, 2019•9 min
