Science, Spoken

Nearly 10 months after Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, the space agency has estimated how much its Artemis Program will cost. NASA says it will need an additional $35 billion over the next four years—on top of its existing budget—to develop a Human Landing System to get down to the Moon's surface from lunar orbit while also accelerating other progr...

Just before midnight on Sunday, a spacecraft will depart from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to the sun. Known as Solar Orbiter, this spacecraft will spend the next seven years dipping in and out of the extremely inhospitable environment around the sun. In the process, it will provide us with our first glimpse of the sun’s poles, which will be critical to understanding its topsy-turvy magne...

Tearing across East Africa right now is a plague of biblical proportions: Hundreds of billions of locusts in swarms the size of major cities are laying waste to the crops in their path. It’s the worst outbreak in 25 years in Ethiopia. In Kenya, make that the worst in seven decades. Fueling the locusts’ destruction is a bounty of vegetation following unusually heavy rains. All that food means the l...

Everybody loves bubbles, regardless of age—the bigger the better. But to blow really big, world-record-scale bubbles requires a very precise bubble mixture. Physicists have determined that a key ingredient is mixing in polymers of varying strand lengths, according to a new paper in Physical Review Fluids. That produces a soap film able to stretch sufficiently thin to make a giant bubble without br...

Gene-editing trials are optimistic and Tesla stocks are going ballistic, but first: a cartoon about meme cinema. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Crispr-edited cells show promise in first US human safety trial Initial reports on the safety of the nation’s first in-human test of th...

It’s been over three years since US regulators greenlit the nation’s first in-human test of Crispr’s disease-fighting potential, more than three years of waiting to find out if the much-hyped gene-editing technique could be safely used to beat back tough-to-treat cancers. Today, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford finally revealed the first published report describing the...

It’s perhaps the best known and more worrisome of climate feedback loops: As the planet warms, permafrost—landscapes of frozen soil and rock—begins to thaw. And when it does, microbes consume organic matter, releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, leading to more warming, more thawing, and even more carbon emissions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No disrespect, but roboticists have got nothing on the animal kingdom. Birds cut through the air with ease, while our drones plummet out of the sky. Humans balance elegantly on two legs, while humanoid robots fall on their faces. It takes roboticists a whole lot of work to even begin to approach the wonders of evolution. But maybe if you can’t beat ‘em, hack ‘em. Learn more about your ad choices....

Inside a small metal box on a laboratory table in Vienna, physicist Markus Aspelmeyer and his team have engineered, perhaps, the quietest place on Earth. The area in question is a microscopic spot in the middle of the box. Here, levitating in midair—except there is no air because the box is in vacuum—is a tiny glass bead a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand. Aspelmeyer’s apparatus uses la...

Jonathan Read admits to being something of a dinosaur when it comes to publishing his work. An epidemiologist at Lancaster University in the UK, Read had always followed the old ways—submit to a journal, get accepted, get comments and edits from peer reviewers, revise the article, publish. But a few years ago, something started nagging at him. That process typically moves a lot slower than a disea...

Rocket ships are spinning and jellyfish are winning, but first: a cartoon about Instagram art. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Inside Spinlaunch, the space industry's best-kept secret A company called Spinlaunch is giving life to a decades-old idea for how to get rockets into spa...

The Chinese government announced Wednesday that it would quarantine the city of Wuhan, the center of an outbreak of a new viral disease that has (officially) killed 17 people and infected more than 500. As of 10 AM Thursday morning in Wuhan—9 PM EST—no flights were leaving the airport. High-speed rail won’t depart for Shanghai, 500 miles to the east, or anywhere else. The bus terminals and roads a...

This autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding humans and opening doors for its pals, Boston Dynamics finally announced that the machine was hitting the market—for a select few early adopters, at least. BD’s people would be the first to tell you that they don’t fully know what the hypnotically agile robot will be best at. Things like patr...

When asked what’s so special about Drosophila melanogaster, or the common fruit fly, Gerry Rubin quickly gets on a roll. Rubin has poked and prodded flies for decades, including as a leader of the effort to sequence their genome. So permit him to count their merits. They’re expert navigators, for one, zipping around without crashing into walls. They have great memories, too, he adds. Learn more ab...

Hyundai is solving and robots are evolving, but first: a cartoon about parental phone tracking. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Spot the robot dog trots into the big, bad world You've probably seen the videos of Boston Dynamics' incredible (and creepy) robot dog Spot opening door...

On October 12, 2019, Eliud Kipchoge crossed under a pink finishing arch emblazoned with the time 1:59:40. He had just become the first person to run a marathon in under two hours. For a few hours, this achievement, long unthinkable, was celebrated across the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What began in mid-December as a mysterious cluster of respiratory illnesses has now killed at least six people, sickened hundreds more, and spread to five other countries, including the US. On Tuesday, American health officials confirmed the nation’s first case of the novel coronavirus: a Washington man hospitalized outside of Seattle last week with pneumonia-like symptoms. Learn more about your a...

We like to think modern culture moves at a dizzying pace, fueled by a relentless parade of new works of music, literature, and technological design. Change in nature, by contrast, seems to follow a slower trajectory as genetic mutations over generations give animals bigger teeth, say, or a better camouflage. But maybe the opposite is true, and human culture doesn’t move so fast and we consumers ar...

On the day Susan Gordon learned Venetucci Farm, in Colorado, was contaminated by toxins, the vegetables looked just as good as ever, the grass as green, and the cattle, hogs, chickens, and goats as healthy. The beauty of the community farm she and her husband managed made the revelation all the more tragic. Chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, invisible and insidious, had tainte...

Under the watchful eye of a microscope, busy little blobs scoot around in a field of liquid—moving forward, turning around, sometimes spinning in circles. Drop cellular debris onto the plain and the blobs will herd them into piles. Flick any blob onto its back and it’ll lie there like a flipped-over turtle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cats are in the rubble and snakes are causing trouble, but first: a cartoon about the internet frontier. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Cats are making Australia's bushfire tragedy even worse Animals trying to escape Australia's fires now face a new adversary: cats. Learn more a...

Cats are scientifically, objectively, monumentally terrible for the planet. In the US alone, free-ranging domestic cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals a year, to say nothing of reptiles and amphibians. They are a scourge of the highest order. Now felines are poised to exacerbate the ecological crisis unfolding in Australia as an unprecedented fire season rips across the cont...

Australia’s wildfires are burning with such intensity that they’re sparking contained, small-scale weather systems. Thunderstorms triggered by atmospheric disturbance might at first seem to offer relief in the form of raindrops, but instead, bolts of lightning can strike nearby trees and spread the fire even further than before. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Learn more about...

Lithium-ion batteries have shaped the modern world. These power pouches are at the heart of most rechargeable electronics, from cell phones and laptops to vapes and electric cars. But while they’re great at holding charge and have a high energy density, lithium-ion batteries aren’t without their problems. Their reliance on toxic, flammable materials means the smallest defect can result in explodin...