Science, Spoken

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...

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 a...

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...

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, o...

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...

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. Mean...

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 more a...

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...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit...

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 g...

Humanity just can’t make up its mind about cannabis. For thousands of years, humans have used the stuff as medicine or to travel on spiritual quests. That, though, didn’t quite suit the British, who banned cannabis in colonial India. Then in the 20th century, the United States government declared war on marijuana, and most of the world followed suit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcast...

Back in the 1980s, researchers began to notice a strange pattern in the genes of many microbes. There would be a stretch of DNA that read the same forward and backward, then a stretch of what looked like junk, then another palindrome, and so on. No one knew what the segments were for, but they were striking enough that a pair of scientists in Europe dubbed them “clustered regularly interspaced sho...

Men and women can’t feel each other’s pain. Literally. We have different biological pathways for chronic pain, which means pain-relieving drugs that work for one sex might fail in the other half of the population. So why don’t we have pain medicines designed just for men or women? The reason is simple: Because no one has looked for them. Drug development begins with studies on rats and mice, and u...

DNA is one of the most powerful substances in the universe. In the same structure it can encode the instructions to make uranium-munching microbes, giant flying lizards, or a stand of quaking aspens five miles wide. It can store every movie ever made in a single test tube. And it can stick around for tens of thousands of years. Just this week, Japanese scientists revealed they’d awakened some anci...

Call it the Great Convergence of Creepiness. The first bit, the uncanny valley, we’re all familiar with by now: If a humanoid robot looks super realistic, but not quite realistic enough, it freaks us out. So far that idea has been applied almost entirely to robot faces and bodies, but it’s less known as a phenomenon in robot voices. Except, that is, to Kozminski University roboticist Aleksandra Pr...

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by UN Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 de...

On Sunday, the DNA testing company 23andMe revealed a new genetic analysis that it says will tell its customers if they have an elevated risk of developing the most common, and preventable, form of diabetes. The report—which has not been cleared by the FDA and is not intended to diagnose type 2 diabetes—arrives as the disease is becoming an intractable public health crisis in the US. One in four h...

Despite two failed attempts in as many years, President Trump has not been moved to change his tactics. At least not when it comes to this year’s federal budget request, a $4.75 trillion spending plan that guts domestic programs and federal scientific research in favor of boosting the US military and building a wall along the Mexican border. For the third straight year, Trump has proposed big cuts...

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Greta Thunberg cut a frail and lonely figure when she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish parliament building last August. Her parents tried to dissuade her. Classmates declined to join. Passersby expressed pity and bemusement at the sight of the then unknow...

Boot up the options for your digital voice assistant of choice and you’re likely to find two options for the gender you prefer interacting with: male or female. The problem is, that binary choice isn’t an accurate representation of the complexities of gender. Some folks don’t identify as either male or female, and they may want their voice assistant to mirror that identity. As of now, they’re out...

Between this past Christmas and New Year’s Day, Brian Metzger realized he had his home to himself—no emails coming in, no classes to teach—and maybe, just maybe, the glimmer of an answer to one of astronomy’s most stubborn mysteries. He chased hard after the lead, worried a little error could unravel everything or that someone else would put together the same pieces first. Learn more about your ad...

Deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is sleeping. But it won’t be quiet for long. Over the coming years, the world’s largest particle accelerator will be supercharged, increasing the number of proton collisions per second by a factor of two and a half. Once the work is complete in 2026, researchers hope to unlock some of the most fundamental questions in the universe. Le...

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you eat seafood, even occasionally, there’s a good chance you’ve been served a fish species you didn’t order. A new months-long investigation by ocean advocacy group Oceana finds widespread and persistent fraud in the US seafood industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The number of heat waves affecting the planet’s oceans has increased sharply, scientists have revealed, killing swathes of sea life like “wildfires that take out huge areas of forest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the three and a half decades since HIV/AIDS was discovered, the deadly disease has killed 35 million people. While drugs now allow patients to live long lives with the virus, only one man, an American named Timothy Ray Brown, otherwise known as the “Berlin patient,” is believed to have been cured. Now, it appears he’s no longer alone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...