Science, Spoken

When it comes to black boxes, there is none more black than the human brain. Our gray matter is so complex, scientists lament, that it can’t quite understand itself. But if we can’t grok our own brains, maybe the machines can do it for us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The world is busted. For decades, scientists have carefully accumulated data that confirms what we hoped wasn’t true: The greenhouse gas emissions that have steadily spewed from cars and planes and factories, the technologies that powered a massive period of economic growth, came at an enormous cost to the planet’s health. Today, we know that absent any change in our behavior, the average global t...

Behold the stomach-clenching spectacle of the quad cork 1800. The dizzying snowboarding trick—first landed by British Olympian Billy Morgan, above—involves catapulting off a ramp into four off-axis flips (called corks) and five full spins. Only four people have ever completed the 1,800-degree stunt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been a turbulent year for the NFL. Ratings plummeted 12 percent in the regular season, even more during the playoffs. It’s hard to know what hurt the league more, its public feuding with the White House over players protesting police brutality during the national anthem or the fact that people don’t watch TV anymore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After nearly seven years of varying concepts, redesigns, and delays, SpaceX is poised to launch the Falcon Heavy rocket next week on its maiden flight. Last week, SpaceX performed a hold-down firing of the massive rocket’s 27 engines, creating a towering exhaust plume and jolting the space coast with over 5 million pounds of thrust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Sarah Jamie Lewis was thinking about an internet-connected cock ring. As a computer scientist, she could understand the nominal use case. It was studded with accelerometers and other sensors. People with penises were supposed to put it on before having penetrative sex and record things like thrust length, speed, overall time of session … the things that sex experts tell people not to worry about b...

Maybe you are one of those humans that avoids all trailers because they spoil the movie too much. I am not one of those humans. Which is why I immediately watched a trailer that came out this week for the upcoming Marvel movie Ant-Man and the Wasp. Although I was a huge comic book fan growing up, I never really got into Ant-Man. But the first Ant-Man movie was better than expected—and now I'm look...

One July afternoon last summer, Matt Wilsey distributed small plastic tubes to 60 people gathered in a Palo Alto, California, hotel. Most of them had traveled thousands of miles to be here; now, each popped the top off a barcoded tube, spat in about half a teaspoon of saliva, and closed the tube. Some massaged their cheeks to produce enough spit to fill the tubes. Learn more about your ad choices....

Your DNA is your body’s most closely guarded asset. To reach it, any would-be-invaders have to get under your skin, travel through your bloodstream undetected by immune system sentries, somehow cross a cell membrane, and finally find their way into the nucleus. Most of the time, that’s a really good thing. These biological barriers prevent nasty viruses from turning your cells into disease-making...

This storyoriginally appeared on CityLaband is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. In a coastal city, it’s easy to assume the greatest climate threat comes from the rising ocean. But in Long Beach, California, the biggest danger is not the sea, but the sun. “We have to deal with sea-level rise,” Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said. “But it’s not our biggest challenge. The increase in temperature...

Hi. My name is Robbie, and I'm addicted to browser tabs. For years, I deluded myself into thinking they were an efficient way to gather information on a given subject. Or subjects. Sub-subjects, too. You see the problem. Which is why, for the past few months, I've been experimenting with a Chrome extension called xTab. It works by limiting the number of tabs I can have open in a given browser wind...

A decade ago, Pablo Graiver was working as a VP at Kayak, the online airfare aggregator, when he sat down to dinner with an old friend—a heart surgeon from his home country of Argentina. The talk turned to how tech was doing more to save folks a few bucks on a flight to Rome than to save people’s lives. The biggest problem in healthcare? “Clinical trials,” she said. “They’re a disaster. Learn more...

On Wednesday, humanity will be treated to a celestial trifecta: A supermoon (meaning it’s relatively close to Earth), but also simultaneously a blood moon (it’ll be orange or red), but also simultaneously a blue moon (the second full moon in one calendar month) will pass in the shadow of Earth, for a total lunar eclipse. It’s going to be righteous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

This week, I settled down to watch the first episode of The 100. If you haven't seen the show, I'll just point out that it takes place in the near future (though it ran, on the CW, in the near past). For reasons that I won't get into, there is a spacecraft with a bunch of teenagers that is traveling from a space station down to the surface of the Earth. During the reentry process, one kid wants to...

She’s probably mostly kidding when she tells the origin story this way, but Kathy Hudson—until last year the deputy director for science, outreach, and policy at the National Institutes of Health—says that a massive update to the NIH’s rules for funding science started with humiliation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you’ve spent time with marijuana—any time at all, really—you know that the high can be rather unpredictable. It depends on the strain, its level of THC and hundreds of other compounds, and the interaction between all these elements. Oh, and how much you ate that day. And how you took the cannabis. And the position of the North Star at the moment of ingestion. OK, maybe not that last one. Learn...

A new clip from the upcoming movie Black Panther was recently shown during an episode of Ellen. In the scene (which I assume isn't a spoiler, since it was on TV), the Black Panther is in pursuit of (or being pursued by) some people in another car. As the Black Panther rides on top of the car (which is, of course, the most efficient way to travel as a superhero), the bad guys are pelting him with b...

The long-awaited Falcon Heavy rocket roared to life on Wednesday at 12:30 pm Eastern, as SpaceX fired up the 27 Merlin engines that power the triple-booster rocket at Kennedy Space Center. Perched atop what CEO Elon Musk claims will be the most powerful lift vehicle in the world is the billionaire’s Tesla Roadster, which will launch toward a Mars elliptical orbit on the Falcon Heavy’s upcoming mai...

For a very long time, conventional wisdom held that swearing was not a useful response to pain. Many psychologists believed that swearing would actually make pain feel worse, thanks to a cognitive distortion known as catastrophizing. When we catastrophize we leap to the conclusion that the bad thing that is currently happening is the absolute worst thing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

I don’t think sci-fi saw this coming. For so long, futuristic books and films have promised us robots like C-3PO that translate alien languages and assist us in hijinks. Or ones like Rosie that clean our houses. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, robots that level our houses and destroy humanity. Looking at you, Arnold. The reality of modern robotics couldn’t be more different. These days, it’s...

Before Pierre Curie met the chemist Marie Sklodowska; before they married and she took his name; before he abandoned his physics work and moved into her laboratory on Rue Lhomond where they would discover the radioactive elements polonium and radium, Curie discovered something called piezoelectricity. Some materials, he found—like quartz and certain kinds of salts and ceramics—build up an electric...

Information from space has historically been the province of the rich and powerful. Big Earth-observing satellites can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch, and the price of their data scales accordingly. Scrappy scientific upstarts have, for a while, been building smallsats to get orbital data on the cheap. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Travel with me to the year 2100. Despite our best efforts, climate change continues to threaten humanity. Drought, superstorms, flooded coastal cities. Desperate to stop the warming, scientists deploy planes to spray sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, where it converts into a sulfate aerosol, which reflects sunlight. Thus the planet cools because, yes, chemtrails. Learn more about your ad choices...

The launch company Rocket Lab has amusing names for its missions. The first, in May, was called “It’s a Test” (it was). When the staff debated what to call the second launch of their diminutive Electron rocket, so sized (and priced) specifically to carry small satellites to space, they said, “Well, we’re still testing, aren’t we?” They were. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

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