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Science, Spoken

WIRED•play.prx.org
Science

Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.

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Episodes

7/26 PM Here’s How Elon Musk Plans to Stitch a Computer into Your Brain

Elon Musk doesn’t think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. Just a lot of it. Eventually. At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It’s a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. Learn about your ad choices: dovet...

Jul 26, 2019•12 min

An Alien-Hunting Tech Mogul May Help Solve a Space Mystery

In spring 2007, David Narkevic, a physics student at West Virginia University, was sifting through reams of data churned out by the Parkes telescope—a dish in Australia that had been tracking pulsars, the collapsed, rapidly spinning cores of once massive stars. His professor, astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer, had asked him to search for a recently discovered type of ultra-rapid pulsar dubbed RRAT. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 24, 2019•27 min

The Sea Is Consuming Jakarta, and Its People Aren't Insured

Jakarta is sinking at the worst possible time. As sea levels creep higher, the coastal megalopolis continues to pump too much water from its underlying aquifers, and consequently the land is collapsing by almost a foot a year in some places. A modern city, home to 10 million people, is in danger of disappearing: According to one researcher’s models, 95 percent of north Jakarta could be submerged by 2050. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 24, 2019•5 min

What Happens When Reproductive Tech Like IVF Goes Awry?

It sounds like the setup to a bad joke: Three couples walk into a fertility clinic. But the punch line—what happened to those families at one Los Angeles medical facility in August 2018—is no laughing matter. The embryos from two couples hoping to conceive were mistakenly implanted into a third patient. That third woman and her husband, both of Korean descent, suspected that something was amiss when their two newborns didn’t look anything like them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...

Jul 22, 2019•10 min

7/19 Headed to Mars? Pack Some Aerogel—You Know, for Terraforming

Mars attacks. Its wisp of an atmosphere means that if you were standing on the surface, it’d be a race to see if suffocation or the sub-zero temperature killed you first. But that’s all tarring the red planet with too broad a brush, perhaps. It’s not all a rusty, frozen hellscape. At the mid-latitudes, just inches down into the ground, you’d find ice—frozen gases like carbon dioxide, even frozen water. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 19, 2019•7 min

The Strange Saga of the Butt Plug Turned Research Device

Take it from sex researcher Nicole Prause: Cobbling together an orgasm detector that works on both men and women ain’t easy. You at least know that it has to go in the anus to detect the muscle contractions that the sexes share, so you begin with a butt plug. Many butt plugs, actually. “We ordered like 20 of these butt plugs off Amazon, and it messed up my recommendation engine for all time,” Prause says. To the butt plugs Prause added piezoelectric discs, which detect deformation. Learn about y...

Jul 18, 2019•5 min

A Rocket-Launching Plane, Nintendo's New Switch, and More News

Virgin Orbit is dropping rockets out of a Boeing 747, Nintendo is switching up the Switch, and a new design could make the middle plane seat tolerable. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 18, 2019•3 min

Trees Emit a Surprisingly Large Amount of Methane

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There are many mysteries in the Amazon. Until recently, one of the most troubling was the vast methane emissions emerging from the rainforest that were observed by satellites but that nobody could find on the ground. Around 20 million tons was simply unaccounted for. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 17, 2019•13 min

Tropical Storm Barry Pits New Orleans Against Water—Again

If all does not go well this weekend, Tropical Storm Barry will spin into the city of New Orleans, bringing with it (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) life-threatening storm surge, 40 mile-per-hour winds, and perhaps as much as 25 inches of rain. Barry is a lumbering brute; forecasters expect it to linger. Early coverage of the oncoming storm has focused, understandably, on the seemingly tenuous state of the levees alongside the Mississippi River. Learn about your...

Jul 16, 2019•7 min

How Phone Taps and Swipes Train Us to Be Better Consumers

In February, leaked software code predicted the demise of the back button on the latest version of Google's Android smartphone. Apple did away with the iPhone's home button in 2017. LG’s latest handset allows users to control their devices without touching them at all. Now, we scroll, swipe, and tap. Soon, we may never again need to hit a button on our phones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 16, 2019•7 min

Why Dogs Now Play a Big Role in Human Cancer Research

The Cancer Moonshot initiative, launched under the Obama administration, was audacious by design: Supercharge cancer research to encourage innovation, with the mission “to end to cancer as we know it.” Cancer researchers avoid using the word “cure.” From studying cancer at the molecular level, they know that tumors are complex—even personalized. There’s no simple cancer and no single cure. So, no single destination for a “moonshot. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 15, 2019•7 min

Virgin Orbit Just Dropped a Rocket From a Boeing 747

On Wednesday morning, a rather unusual plane could be seen flying high over Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. Unlike the military aircraft endemic to the area, this was a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet, its bright red tail emblazoned with a single word: VIRGIN. A 70-foot rocket was strapped beneath its left wing and about 30 minutes after takeoff, jet pilot Kelly Latimer released the rocket and sent it careening to the desert floor 35,000 feet below. Learn about your ad choices: dove...

Jul 12, 2019•4 min

NASA Needs to Out-Crazy Elon Musk

On July 20, I will celebrate the 50thanniversary of NASA’s moon landing with my mother, an astronomer at Princeton University and the former chief scientist of NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute. Our family’s ties to NASA run deep. My father, also an astronomer, helped start the Hubble Space Telescope program and protected it over the years from Congressional budget-cutters. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 10, 2019•10 min

The Meat-Allergy Tick Also Carries a Mystery Killer Virus

On May 31, 2017, 58-year-old Tamela Wilson checked into Barnes-Jewish Hospital, in St. Louis, with a fever, fatigue, and a strange red rash. She’d been undergoing chemotherapy to treat a relapsing lymphoma, but this exhaustion wasn’t just the cancer or the drugs. She told the doctors she worked at nearby Meramec State Park, tending to its miles of trails through forested river bluffs. And that while there, a week before her symptoms started, she found two ticks burrowed into her body. Learn abou...

Jul 10, 2019•11 min

The Colorful Science of Why Fireworks Look Bad on TV

Maybe you figure that 60-inch 4K TV you just bought gives you a good excuse to never leave the house. All the entertainment you could ever need gets caught in its internet-enabled gravity well, orbits your streaming services a few times, and then, thwoomp! Into your eyeballs comes the sweet dopamine hit of fun. But you are being deceived. Color televisions show color, sure—but not real, accurate, bold-as-life, wonderful-world-of color. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 09, 2019•7 min
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