Science, Spoken

From the windows of Ginkgo Bioworks’ Boston offices you can peer down into a grimy vestige of the city’s past. Across the street, workers in yellow-slicker overalls scrub, scrape, and repair the decks of worn-out warships and ocean tankers parked in a drydock. During World War II, 50,000 people worked the docks and the eight-story waterside warehouse that Ginkgo now calls home. Learn more about yo...

In July, a 65-year-old woman running a high fever checked into a hospital in the province of North Kivu, along the Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Uganda. She was later discharged and returned home to her remote town, only to die a few days later. By the time health officials checked in on the case, seven members of her immediate family had also died the violent, bloody deaths that can...

You might know wasps for their ability to brainwash cockroaches or inflict one of the most painful stings on Earth—one so powerful that the actual scientific advice to victims is to just lie down and scream until it passes. Lesser-known is the wasp’s superlative ability to carry loads that are unexpectedly heavy given the creature’s size. Small drones, or “micro air vehicles,” are only able to lif...

Alexander von Humboldt began his working life as a mine inspector for the Prussian government. But in his late twenties, he left his government gig and set off to explore Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru with botanist Aime Bonpland. He did an astounding amount of work during his travels, in pursuit of his hypothesis that “all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven”—and that, may...

1. When turkeys strut, their leg muscles work as shock absorbers to boost energy efficiency. That gam action inspired a prosthetic exoskeleton for humans: The lightweight contraption is outfitted with a spring and clutch that take the impact off the user’s calf muscle. In experiments, a person wearing the braces while walking expended 10 percent less energy. 2. Though it has a brain, the lamprey—a...

You might think you can just leave the science stuff to scientists—but you can't. We live in a world that is surrounded by science and we use toys that depend on science (like that fancy smartphone in your hand). Other issues, like climate change and vaccinations, can have a significant impact on any one of us. You don't have to be science nerd, but you have to at least know the important parts of...

Evolution is a trip. On the one hand, it’s a seemingly simple mechanism—those best fitted to their environment have more babies, while less fit individuals don’t reproduce as much, and their genes filter out of the system. But on the other hand (or paw or claw or talon), it has given rise to an astounding array of organisms. Some animals fly with feathered wings, others with membranes stretched be...

Early last spring, as flu season hit its peak, a woman checked into a Houston hospital with all the familiar symptoms: fever, headache, a grating cough. A chest x-ray revealed an infection engulfing her lungs. Doctors hooked her up to an antibiotic drip, collected blood to be processed and cultured in the hospital’s lab, and shipped one of the tubes overnight to a small, stealthy startup in Redwoo...

Facebook's 2.2-billion active users use the platform for sharing all kinds of things: Engagements. Group plans. Political misinformation. Cat photos. But as researchers reported this week, the words you post in your status updates could also contain hidden information about your mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine for a second that you’re a crab, and a fellow crustacean called a mantis shrimp has decided to make you its lunch. The truth is, it’s not worth struggling. The mantis shrimp uses muscles to cock back two hammer-like appendages under its face, storing energy in a saddle-like divot in the limbs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last Wednesday, Hurricane Michael slammed into the Florida Panhandle at 155 miles per hour, flattening neighborhoods, turning subdivisions into rubble, and plunging the coast into darkness. On Friday, Trevor Lewis packed up two trucks with crowbars, chainsaws, sledgehammers, ropes, walkie talkies, and five other guys from Cocoa Beach, where he lives on the east side of the state. As night fell the...

Delivery drones are real and they’re operating on a national level, but they’re not dropping off impulse purchases, and some of the most important applications are not in the United States. Zipline, a Bay Area startup, inked a deal with the government of Rwanda in 2016 and now uses small, autonomous planes to deliver medical supplies, and in particular blood, to rural communities across the Africa...

You heard it here first, folks; Stephen Quake is coming for the colonoscopy. The scientist has made a career of replacing invasive, painful, and dangerous procedures with simple, cheap tests that can be performed almost anywhere. Just this year, a blood panel he developed to detect genetic birth defects has been taken by more than three million women, replacing the need for amniocentesis and giant...

When Dan Riconda graduated with a master’s degree in genetic counseling from Sarah Lawrence College in 1988, the Human Genome Project was in its very first year, DNA evidence was just beginning to enter the courts, and genetic health tests weren’t yet on the market. He found one of the few jobs doing fetal diagnostics for rare diseases, which often meant helping young families through the worst ti...

Nick Hague spent 20 years dreaming of getting into space, first as an Air Force test pilot, then as a NASA astronaut since 2013. He got his big chance to blast into orbit last Friday aboard a Soyuz spacecraft launching from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin were expecting a routine six-hour flight to the International Space Station, but two mi...

Three hundred and sixty four days ago, Jiwoo Lee’s friends helped her celebrate her 18th birthday by baking her a Rice Crispr cake. They bedecked the gooey, cereal-based treat with blue and red frosted double helixes in honor of her favorite high school hobby—gene editing. Lee, who won top awards at the 2016 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, is one of the youngest champions of the...

Beer drinkers might pay more and find less of their favorite beverage as climate change comes for barley. Scientists expect that extreme droughts and heat waves will become more frequent and intense in the regions that grow the grain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco Sunday evening, Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini robot got onstage and did what no other quadruped robot has done before: It danced the running man like it was born to. It was a bit more, well, robotic than a human, but it illustrated just how far Spot has come: Twenty-five years into both WIRED’s and Boston Dynamics’ lives, robots have finally grown sophisticated...

Late last night Boston Dynamics dropped a new video of its robot dog, SpotMini, in action. It walks up some stairs (no big deal—it’s done that before) and then through some corridors, periodically extending its camera-equipped arm to survey bits of a construction site. Then it walks backwards down some stairs and through a doorway and then … Fade to black. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit p...

In 2013, a young computational biologist named Yaniv Erlich shocked the research world by showing it was possible to unmask the identities of people listed in anonymous genetic databases using only an Internet connection. Policymakers responded by restricting access to pools of anonymized biomedical genetic data. An NIH official said at the time, “The chances of this happening for most people are...

What’s in a name? For champagne, it’s the expectation of excellence and at the very least, bubbles. It’s even protected by law: To call a liquid champagne, you have to grow it in a certain part of France under certain rules of planting, pressing and even packaging. All the fuss means champagne makers can charge a premium for their product. The same may soon be true for Northern California’s legend...

Michael introduced itself to North America with 155-mile-per-hour gusts of wind and a barometric pressure of 919 millibars, the third-strongest hurricane to ever make continental US landfall. It was a monster, and it stayed a monster as it rolled through Georgia and then on toward the Carolinas. And monsters are made, not born. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a serious research robot, Baxter is a charmer. It’s sports-car red, with two big and deliberate arms. Its face is a flat screen that telegraphs “feelings” like embarrassment (rosy cheeks, upturned eyebrows). If you’re so inclined, you can sit in front of it and make it read your mind to fix its mistakes. Or you can point to objects for it to pick up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

This week, of all weeks, should have been triumphant for women in physics. For her work on lasers, Canadian physicist Donna Strickland became the first female Nobel Laureate for the field after 55 years. She finally joined a short list consisting of just two other women, Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer. But Seyda Ipek barely had time to celebrate. The University of California, Irvine physicis...

Andrew Rubin sits with a Surface tablet, watching a white skeletal hand open and close on its screen. Rubin’s right hand was amputated a year ago, but he follows these motions with a special device fitted to his upper arm. Electrodes on his arm connect to a box that records the patterns of nerve signals firing, allowing Rubin to train a prosthetic limb to act like a real hand. “When I think of clo...