Science, Spoken

On a frigid day last January in northern Sweden, a German-led team of physicists loaded a curious machine onto an unmanned rocket. The payload, about as tall as a single-story apartment, was essentially a custom-made freezer—a vacuum chamber, with a small chip and lasers within, that could cool single atoms near absolute zero. They launched the rocket about 90 miles past the boundary of outer spac...

“Dear everyone,” wrote Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck during a reddit AMA in April, “I'm not building a bigger rocket any time soon.” Beck seems to get asked about expansion a lot. He and his Kiwi-US space company don’t build craft whose names end in “heavy.” Their rockets don’t land after launch. They’re only about as tall as a five-story building and as wide as a bookshelf, and they heft just 500 pou...

Pain is an indispensable tool for survival. The prick of a nail underfoot is a warning that protects you from a deep, dirty wound—and maybe tetanus. The sizzle of a steel skillet is a deterrent against a third-degree burn. As much as it sucks, pain, oddly enough, keeps us from hurting ourselves. It's a luxury that prosthetic users don’t have. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

Small satellite makers have promised to do a lot of things: change the way we communicate, change the way we see our planet, change the way we predict the weather. They’re cheaper, faster to develop, and easier to update than their bigger and more sophisticated counterparts. But for all the revolution and disruption, they tend to keep their focus close, and largely cast their eyes down. Learn more...

Consider the rotten strawberry. Sitting there in your fridge, it suffers a cascading trifecta of maladies: For one, it dehydrates. Two, oxygen seeps in. And three, with the berry thus weakened, mold invades. Eventually, the strawberry turns to goop, a messy reminder of our own mortality. Rotting produce is an inevitability—I for one wouldn’t trust fruit that lasts forever—but that doesn’t mean we...

For a long time, China has been a dumping ground for the world’s problematic plastics. In the 1990s, Chinese markets saw that discarded plastic could be profitably recreated into exportable bits and bobs—and it was less expensive for international cities to send their waste to China than to deal with it themselves. China got cheap plastic and the exporting countries go rid of their trash. But in N...

After months of teasing a new military arm devoted to extra-stratospheric security, President Donald Trump publicly ordered the Department of Defense and the Pentagon to immediately begin establishing a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces on Monday. Well, maybe. The president’s statement was not accompanied by any written directive or executive order calling for the creation of a n...

On Monday night Gary Taubes will board his second transatlantic flight in a week—from Zurich to Aspen—then eventually back to Oakland, where he calls home. The crusading science journalist best known for his beef with Big Sugar is beat after four days of nutrition conference glad-handing. But there’s no rest for the down and out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the early Space Age, the people who sent up satellites could operate under what's known as "big sky" theory. Space is so vast, so spacious, that we could never possibly use it all up. History, however, has repeatedly shown that whenever we think something is too abundant for humans to deplete, we're wrong. And so it is in space, where more and more satellites and space junk threaten to crash in...

Whether they believe robots are going to create or destroy jobs, most experts say that robots are particularly useful for handling “dirty, dangerous and dull” work. They point to jobs likeshutting down a leaky nuclear reactor,cleaning sewers ,orinspecting electronic componentsto really drive the point home. Robots don’t get offended, they are cheap to repair when they get “hurt,” and they don’t ge...

Today, during a World Cup game between Morocco and Iran, Moroccan winger Nordin Amrabat suffered a wicked head injury when he collided with an opponent. After he went down, a team trainer tried to revive him by slapping his face—a move decried by athletes and followers online. But despite the frequency of those kinds of injuries in soccer, you won’t see many international pros wearing gear that mi...

As Hurricane Maria approached Puerto Rico in late September 2017, planetary scientist Ed Rivera-Valentin knew he needed to get out. His apartment was near the coast, in Manatí, and some projections had the storm passing directly over. “I knew I couldn’t stay there because something bad was going to happen,” he says. Some people stayed with inland family, or in shelters. Learn more about your ad ch...

The mantis shrimp is neither a mantis nor a shrimp, but it does wield perhaps the most stunning strike in the animal kingdom. Sitting below its face are two hammers, which the crustacean cocks back and launches at its prey with such speed that it shatters snail shells and tears crabs’ limbs right of their bodies. These things are ornery, and will even fight a human given the chance. For the mantis...

Granit Xhaka is a true marathon man, often running more than almost anyone else in soccer’s English Premier League for his London-based club, Arsenal. The 25-year-old midfielder covered 7.6 miles during one game last year. All that running up and down the field (not to mention headers, tackles, and kicks) means Xhaka’s body requires not only fitness, but rest and recovery. Learn more about your ad...

When the Antarctic wants to rid itself of ice, it has to get creative. The cold is too stubborn to allow surface ice to gently melt into oblivion. Instead, crushed by the immense build-up, ice gets shoved slowly along valleys and gorges until it finally reaches the edge of the continent, walking the plank into its watery grave. Back in the 1980s, scientists would plant stakes on these so-called “i...

A journalist, a soup exec, and an imam walk into a room. There’s no joke here. It’s just another day at CrisprCon. On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of scientists, industry folk, and public health officials from all over the world filled the amphitheater at the Boston World Trade Center to reckon with the power of biology’s favorite new DNA-tinkering tool: Crispr. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

Who wouldn’t enjoy a little X-ray vision, really? You could cheat at cards, for one. And that game where someone puts something under one of three cups and you have to guess where it is. Easy. Of course, X-ray vision would come with a downside, in that you’d be spraying all your surveillance targets with radiation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Perpetual motion—it's fun to say that. For some people, perpetual motion machines hold the secret to everlasting free energy that will save the world. To them, it's a machine that is just beyond our grasp. If only we could tweak our design just a little bit, it would work. To others (like me), perpetual motion machines are impossible—they don't fit with our well-tested ideas of the conservation of...

David Liu’s office on the eighth floor of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts is designed to quiet the mind. A museum-grade gemstone collection lines the walls, interspersed with blue-tinged photos Liu has taken of inspiring science-on-location scenes—the concrete corners of the Salk Institute, a sunset through the Scripps pier, the lights of Durango, Colorado where Darpa often meets....

When geologist and nuclear security researcher Rodney Ewing left the University of Michigan for Stanford in 2014, he left some of his belongings back in the Midwest. Hundreds of his belongings, actually. All of them radioactive. He wasn't trying to poison anybody: It was a collection of minerals from around the world—some unearthed himself, some donated—each with uranium enmeshed inside. Learn mor...

Find yourself adrift at sea, surrounded by undrinkable water, and you will parch to death. Find yourself lost in a desert and you will meet the same fate, also surrounded by water, also undrinkable. That’s because, even in the driest of lands, the air is loaded with water molecules—they just won’t do you any good. Devices exist that can pull that water out of the air and convert it into liquid, bu...

What happens when you see bad physics in the world? Does it make you angry? Does it make you laugh? Do you have to hold back a tidal wave of "well, actuallys" because of the overwhelming wrongness? Some might feel that way, but I think about it a little differently. In my mind, there are different categories of incorrect physics—and I deal with each one with its own particular strategy. Learn more...

For 10 years, Andre Igoudala slept terribly. Back in college, the Golden State Warriors forward would play videogames late into the night. Eventually he'd crash, sometimes as late as 4 am, only to wake up a few hours later for practice. Then came class. When he was lucky, he'd squeeze in an afternoon nap. Later that night, it'd be back to videogames—either that or Fresh Prince reruns. Igoudala's b...

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died in December of 2017; the election to replace him was Tuesday. No one knows who won. Partially that’s because the votes are still trickling in. Mail-in ballots merely had to be postmarked by election day, and as I write the city is reporting 87,000 votes yet to be processed. But that’s not the only roadblock. The other problem is math. See, the San Francisco mayoral...

Westworld is a hell of a show, but the sense of dread it elicits is nothing new. Pygmalion sculpted a woman who came to life. Same goes with the Golem, only with mud. The amalgamated Frankenstein jolted awake to get all murderous. Humans creating life in their own image is a cornerstone of the realm of fiction. And until recently, they’ve stayed there. But today, ever-sophisticated robots are grad...