If a giant telescope observes the universe, and no one around can take a picture of it, does it really exist? The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope—located in Guizhou, China—will have to find out. New regulations, put into effect in early April, ban (among other things) cell phones, smart wearables, drones, and digital cameras within 5 kilometers of the dish and impose uncomfortably large fines on those who break the rules. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-cho...
Apr 19, 2019•6 min
William Peranteau is the guy parents call when they’ve received the kind of bad news that sinks stomachs and wrenches hearts. Sometimes it’s a shadow on an ultrasound or a few base pairs out of place on a prenatal genetic test, revealing that an unborn child has a life-threatening developmental defect. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 18, 2019•7 min
At the top of the French Pyrenees, not far from the border with Spain, is a virtually pristine clearing, home to snow and a weather station—but mostly feet upon feet of snow. The nearest road closes in the winter. The most substantial town within 60 miles tallies just 9,000 people. Look closely at the landscape, though, and you’ll see the place is covered in plastic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 18, 2019•8 min
Some of the wood that burned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris on Monday was put in place in the year 1160. The beams and exterior of the roof over the nave, the long main section of the building, date from between 1220 and 1240. Nearly a millennium ago it was forest; today, after a catastrophe that cuts to the heart of French culture and human history, it’s ash. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 17, 2019•6 min
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Apr 16, 2019•6 min
The Falcon Heavy rocket is many things, but “timely” is not one of them. Delay after delay have plagued its development. And this week, the same fate befell its launch schedule. Originally planned to liftoff last Sunday, the Falcon Heavy’s first commercial launch was thrice delayed due to unfavorable weather conditions before it finally left launchpad 39-A at Kennedy Space Center today. The wait was worth it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 16, 2019•4 min
The UK Biobank is the single largest public genetic repository in the world, with samples of the genetic blueprints of half a million Brits standing by for scientific study. But when David Hill, a statistical geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, went poring through that data, he wasn’t looking for a cure for cancer or deeper insights into the biology of aging. Nothing like that. He was trying to figure out why some people make more money than others. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.p...
Apr 15, 2019•13 min
Last month, the FDA approved esketamine, the nose spray version of ketamine, for treatment-resistant depression. You probably know by now that ketamine is a party drug, but it actually finds far wider use as an anesthetic on the World Health Organization’s list of Essential Medicines. Scientists have a good idea of how exactly it brings about its anesthetic charms, on account of it interacting with certain receptors in the brain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 12, 2019•8 min
The Boston Marathon course looks like it should be fast. You start out in the distant suburb of Hopkinton—elevation 490 feet above sea level—and then cruise steadily downhill until about mile 9. The finish line has an elevation of a mere 10 feet above Boston Harbor. Fans pack the sides cheering you on. The route is pretty straight, west to east, with few 90-degree turns of the sort that slow your momentum. The road is asphalt, which is more forgiving than concrete. Learn about your ad choices: d...
Apr 11, 2019•10 min
On Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with its latest measles numbers, and let’s be honest, they weren’t great. At least 465 cases across 19 states have been reported nationwide so far this year, including 78 in the last week alone. Nationwide, that means more people have caught the notoriously contagious disease in the past three and a half months than all of last year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 11, 2019•8 min
With sea levels expected to rise at least 26 inches by the end of the century due to human-driven climate change, to say that we have a problem is something of an understatement. By the middle of the next century, many of the world’s major cities will be flooded and in some cases, entire island nations will be underwater. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 10, 2019•9 min
The duck is famous for two things: really liking bread (even though they’re not supposed to be eating it), and wielding insanely complicated reproductive bits. More specifically, male ducks have corkscrew-shaped penises, while females’ reproductive tracts corkscrew in the opposite direction. It’s a disturbing consequence of an evolutionary arms race, the females’ countermeasure to notoriously aggressive males. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 09, 2019•6 min
When it comes to the nature of dark matter astronomers are still largely, well, in the dark. The existence of this mysterious substance was hypothesized more than forty years ago to explain discrepancies in the calculations of how galaxies ought to behave, based on their mass, and what was actually observed. In short, it seemed like mass was missing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 09, 2019•10 min
This year, 47 million Americans will spend an estimated $8.5 billion betting on the outcome of the NCAA basketball championships, a cultural ritual appropriately known as March Madness. Before the tournament starts, anyone who wants to place a bet must fill out a bracket, which holds their predictions for each of the 63 championship games. The winner of a betting pool is the one whose bracket most closely mirrors the results of the championship. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...
Apr 08, 2019•13 min
The idea behind the guillotine is this: If you’re going to execute someone, you may as well do it efficiently and humanely, at least by 18th-century standards. Decapitating the condemned with an ax or sword may take a few swings—unacceptable for carrying out justice in a "civilized" society. The guillotine, on the other hand, is downright surgical, a perversely methodical way to end a life. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 08, 2019•9 min
If a woman (or non-female identifying person with a uterus and visions of starting a family) is struggling to conceive and decides to improve their reproductive odds at an IVF clinic, they’ll likely interact with a doctor, a nurse, and a receptionist. They will probably never meet the army of trained embryologists working behind closed lab doors to collect eggs, fertilize them, and develop the embryos bound for implantation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 05, 2019•8 min
Like most people, Daniel Ibrahim remembers exactly where he was the first time he came across a tiny, bug-eyed, toothless, limp-tongued cat called Lil Bub, the internet-breaking Queen of Cute. It was September 2014, during a mild night in Berlin, when the molecular geneticist found himself watching a Vice documentary on social media-famous felines by the blue light of his computer. But unlike most people, Ibrahim’s next move wasn’t to buy a Lil Bub shirt or join the ranks of her 2. Learn about y...
Apr 04, 2019•7 min
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nearly a billion people could be newly at risk of tropical diseases like dengue fever and Zika as climate change shifts the range of mosquitoes, according to a new study. Since the life cycle of mosquitoes is temperature sensitive, scientists have long been concerned about how their prevalence might spread as the world continues to warm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-...
Apr 03, 2019•4 min
As a shopper, you can chose from labels touting a product’s chemical-free nature (Certified Organic), genetic makeup (Non-GMO), and effect on tropical ecosystems (Shade Grown). Now you could start to encounter a label that certifies that your daily internet traffic is sustainable as well. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Apr 02, 2019•7 min
For nearly 400 million years, amphibians have led a highly successful double life on Earth, foraging on terra and reproducing in water. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and any number of other worldwide catastrophes, but they’ve never seen a catastrophe quite like humanity. Already stressed by habitat degradation and the wildlife trade, amphibians are now reckoning with the chytrid fungi, pathogens that humans have spread the world over. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org...
Apr 02, 2019•7 min
Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Humans are ruining everything for amphibians Amphibians may have survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, and all kinds of other catastrophes, but a fungi that humans helped spread is doing damage. Serious damage. More than 500 species of amphibians are experiencing decline because of chytrid fungi, which infects an amphibian’s skin and disrupts its ability to breathe and absorb water. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Apr 01, 2019•2 min
When Saralyn Mark heard the news earlier this month that NASA was planning the first all-women spacewalk at the International Space Station on March 29, she started to worry. Mark, an endocrinologist by training, was a senior medical advisor to NASA for 18 years. In that role, she studied the way men and women’s bodies differ, on space and on earth. Within the agency, she advocated for spacesuit and technological design that took these differences to account. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Mar 29, 2019•12 min
In December 2017, roughly a year into his tenure as president, Donald Trump directed NASA to develop a plan to return American astronauts to the moon. Since then, the government has released few details about what this mission would look like. But Tuesday, at the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence doled out a big piece of information: When American astronauts go back to the moon, they will land at the lunar south pole. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
Mar 28, 2019•5 min
Reproduction is messy. The genetic swaps and recombinations that occur when gametes merge don't always happen perfectly. Babies don't arrive when scheduled. Even preventing reproduction can be complicated, as anyone who has ever wrestled with birth control can attest. That said, It’s arguably a better time than ever to have a baby. Prospective parents struggling with infertility can turn to IVF, or sperm and egg donation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 27, 2019•2 min
Bacteria do it. Viruses do it. Worms, mammals, even bees do it. Every living thing on Earth replicates, whether that be asexually (boring) or sexually (fun). Robots do not do it: The machines are steely and very uninterested in reproduction. But perhaps they can learn. Scientists in a fascinating field known as evolutionary robotics are trying to get machines to adapt to the world, and eventually to reproduce on their own, just like biological organisms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
Mar 27, 2019•9 min
Something weird is happening around climate change. Republicans are deciding it’s real. Three years ago, only 49 percent of Republicans thought so, but by last December it was 64 percent, as a Monmouth University poll found. That’s a huge jump in a short time and is all the more astonishing given that the Republican president and many of his party’s politicians pooh-pooh the global emergency. Meanwhile, other parts of the electorate are really freaking out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Mar 26, 2019•5 min
The record-setting floods deluging the Midwest are about to get a lot worse. Fueled by rapidly melting snowpack and a forecast of more rainstorms in the next few weeks, federal officials warn that 200 million people in 25 states face a risk through May. Floodwaters coursing through Nebraska have already forced tens of thousands of people to flee and have caused $1.3 billion in damage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 25, 2019•4 min
Carlos Alvarado Quesada has heard all the naysayers before. In February, the 39-year-old president of Costa Rica committed to ridding the country of fossil fuels by 2050. If successful, Alvarado's plan could make Costa Rica the first zero-emissions country. But with a population of a mere 5 million, this leafy Central American nation is not a major contributor to the world's climate crisis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 25, 2019•6 min
Folded and sealed with a dollop of red wax, the will of Catharuçia Savonario Rivoalti lay in Venice’s State Archives, unread, for more than six and a half centuries. Scholars don’t know why the document, written in 1351, was never opened. But to physicist Fauzia Albertin, the three-page document—six pages, folded—was the perfect thickness for an experiment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 22, 2019•8 min
Not long after Calyxt moved into its shiny new steel and glass headquarters on the outskirts of Minneapolis last summer, a woman pulled her car into its freshly poured parking lot and headed for the biotech firm’s front door. She caught the company’s chief science officer, Dan Voytas, just as he was leaving. “Um, is this a medical marijuana facility?” she asked, here eyes drifting to the rows of greenhouses at the back of the property and the high fences surrounding them. Learn about your ad cho...
Mar 22, 2019•8 min
