Science, Spoken

Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire and Woolsey Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. By at least one metric, we humans are dumber than frogs. The fable goes that if you toss a frog in a pot of hot water, it’ll leap right out. Put it in cold water, though, and bring it slowly to a boil, and the frog won’t notice before it’s too late. That...

Ebola is one of those scourges where the mere mention of its name strikes fear: the virus, which kills about half of those it infects and gets passed on through body fluids, is notoriously hard to contain. Because of its long incubation period, healthy-looking people can spread the deadly disease for weeks before symptoms appear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire, Hill Fire, and Woolsey Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. In California three major fires—the Camp Fire in the north and Hill Fire and Woolsey Fire in the south—continue to rage on a scale the state has never seen before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire, Hill Fire, and Woolsey Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. At 6:30 Thursday morning, a wildfire of astounding proportions and speed broke out in Northern California. Dubbed the Camp Fire, it covered 11 miles in its first 11 hours of life. A mile an hour might not seem fast in human terms, but it’s an...

On Wednesday night, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders shared an altered video of a press briefing with Donald Trump, in which CNN reporter Jim Acosta's hand makes brief contact with the arm of a White House Intern. The clip is of low quality and edited to dramatize the original footage; it's presented out of context, without sound, at slow speed with a close-crop zoom, and contain...

Science hasn’t been giving us a tremendous amount of good news these days. We’re speeding toward climate catastrophe, for one. We’ve screwed up the environment so badly, it’s hard to even call it an environment anymore. And that’s coming back to bite (or sting) us: Bee populations, which we rely on to pollinate our crops, are plummeting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...

And so a few more dominoes fall. Michigan voted to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, while Utah and Missouri legalized it for medical use, according to projections made late Tuesday night. (A recreational measure in North Dakota failed, though medical cannabis remains legal there.) They join 31 other states that have already gone the medical route, and nine others that have gone fully rec...

Today, cannabis continues its slow march toward nationwide decriminalization with voters deciding whether to allow recreational use in Michigan and North Dakota, and for medical purposes in Utah and Missouri. As states keep chipping away at federal prohibition, more consumers will gain access, sure—but so will more researchers who can more easily study this astonishingly complex and still mysterio...

When a company called HawkEye360 wanted to test its wares, it gave an employee a strange, deceptive task. While the worker stood in Virginia, he held the kind of transceiver that ships carry to broadcast their GPS locations. Usually such a signal would reveal his true position to a radio receiver, but he’d altered the broadcast to spoof his GPS position, making it seem like he was in fact off the...

In 2013, Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page announced the formation of a new Alphabet entity dedicated to solving the pesky puzzle of mortality. Since then, the billion-dollar longevity lab known as Calico—short for California Life Company—has been trying to tease apart the fundamental biology of aging in the hopes of one day defeating death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...

The Breakthrough Prizes are unlike anything else in science. Instead of the hum of lab equipment, there’s Orlando Bloom. Instead of donning lab coats, the scientists find themselves marching down a red carpet in their black-tie best. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Max Krause was thinking of buying some bitcoin, as one does. But Krause is an engineer—mostly he works on modeling greenhouse gas emissions from landfills—so his first step was to run the numbers. He looked at price, of course, but also how fast the world’s bitcoin miners create new bitcoins and the ledger that accounts for them. And he looked at how much electricity that would seem to require. “I...

In early 2015, Sen. Ervin Yen, an anaesthesiologist who became Oklahoma’s first Asian American state legislator, introduced a bill to require all schoolchildren to be vaccinated, unless they had a medical reason not to. California had recently debuted similar legislation after an outbreak of measles in Disneyland sickened 147 people and led to the quarantine of more than 500 others. Learn more abo...

In 2015, the U.S. Naval Academy decided that its graduates needed to return to the past and learn how to navigate using the stars. Nine years prior, it had dropped celestial navigation from its requirements because GPS was so accurate and simple to use. But recent events had shaken the academy’s faith in GPS. Researchers had taken over a yacht’s navigation system as it steered in the Mediterranean...

One year ago, Hewlett Packard Enterprise sent an off-the-shelf supercomputer up to the International Space Station, to see if its mass-produced hardware could survive, basically unmodified, in the harsh environment of space. Now NASA and the computer company are declaring the experiment a success—even though nearly half of its hard disks failed after getting fried by solar radiation. Learn more ab...

If you ever meet a climate scientist, give them a hug. Not only is the work important, it involves an absolute mess of variables—emissions, maybe sequestering those emissions, atmospheric patterns, maybe geoengineering that atmosphere. Data is often sparse or non-existent. So give them a hug. The data problem is particularly acute in the oceans. A key part of figuring out how much the planet has w...

Last November, Apple Watch owners began receiving recruitment emails from Apple. The company was looking for owners of its smartwatch to participate in the Apple Heart Study—a Stanford-led investigation into the wearable's ability to sense irregular heart rhythms. Joining was simple: Install an app and wear your watch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It would be extraordinarily difficult—impossibly difficult—for any one of the several thousand asylum-seeking refugees in the so-called migrant caravan now on the border between Guatemala and Mexico to have smallpox. A global vaccination campaign eliminated the disease from the world at large in 1980. Yet that’s what a guest on the Fox Business Network show Lou Dobbs Tonight said earlier this week...

Los Angeles derives much of its charm from its diversity, both of its people and its amenities—rolling hills here, lovely architecture there, a national forest to the north and legendary beaches to the west. But much of it is in trouble: Sea level rise is coming for Los Angeles County and its 74 miles of coast. According to a new report from the New York Academy of Sciences, it’ll take LA as much...

This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. New York is suing the oil giant ExxonMobil in a lawsuit that claims the company engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to downplay the risks posed to its business by climate change regulations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a dire report that made crystal clear that we have about a decade to stop catastrophic levels of climate change. The report caught fire for another extremely near deadline: It suggests that if we don’t manage to dramatically shift carbon emiss...

On paper, carbon capture is a simple proposition: Take carbon that we’ve pulled out of the Earth in the form of coal and oil and put into the atmosphere, and pull it out of the atmosphere and put it back in the Earth. It’s like hitting undo on the Industrial Revolution. And scientists can indeed yank CO2 out of thin air, except that the process is expensive, not very efficient, and morally complic...

In November 2016, a team of scientists from the Medical Research Council in Gambia visited primary schools armed with hundreds of beige-colored nylon socks. Handing them out to children there aged five to 14, the researchers instructed them to wear the socks overnight, only taking them off if they were washing their feet for prayer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

When I think of Halloween, I think of kids outside in the dark. Traditionally, this is the way it works. First, darkness makes everything just a little bit spookier and more Halloween-like. Second, the end of October used to be after the end of Daylight Savings Time such that it would get dark earlier. Of course this year, Daylight Savings Time doesn't end until November 4. However, let's assume i...

The internet is oozing (dripping? spurting?) with recipes for fake blood, but to get the exact color and consistency your Halloween costume calls for—be it bright and wet or dark and crusty—your best bet is to brew your own bloody concoction. To do it, it helps to know the properties of blood that you're approximating and the non-biohazardous ingredients you can use to imitate them. Learn more abo...