Science, Spoken

Humans dance. It's what they do. Everyone always wants to get some cool new dance move. First there was the electric slide. Yeah, that was cool—but then there was the moonwalk. That was really cool. And now we have the invisible box. OK, maybe it's not exactly a dance move, but more like a trick. The basic idea of this move is to make it seem like the dancer is stepping on a block—a block that's i...

The Thomas Fire spread through the hills above Ventura, in the northern greater Los Angeles megalopolis, with the speed of a hurricane. Driven by 50 mph Santa Ana winds—bone-dry katabatic air moving at freeway speeds out of the Mojave desert—the fire transformed overnight from a 5,000-acre burn in a charming chaparral-lined canyon to an inferno the size of Orlando, Florida, that only stopped sprea...

It took a while, but Russia finally got body-checked out of the Olympic Games. The road to ruin began in 2015, when two Russian track athletes-turned-whistleblowers raised suspicion about widespread state-sponsored doping at the 2012 London Games, followed by an independent report about problems at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, materials scientist Hunter Martin and his team load a grey powder as fine as confectioner’s sugar into a machine. They’ve curated the powder recipe—mostly aluminum, blended with some other elements—down to the atom. The machine, a 3-D metal printer, lays the powder down a single dusting at time, while a laser overhead welds the layers together. Over sever...

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Every year in December, a makeshift hangar at the NASA Ames Research Center pops up for one night, transforming the austere airfield into a glitzy, paparazzi’d, black velvet-roped Nerd Prom. At the Breakthrough Prizes—where on December 3, a total of $22 million was handed out to pioneers in math, physics, and the life sciences—researchers traded lab coats and latex gloves for floor-length gowns an...

This holiday season, more people than ever before are giving the gift of spit. Well, what’s in your spit, to be precise. Want to know where your ancestors once walked or whether you’re at risk for a genetic disease? There’s a spit tube kit for that. And customers are buying them in record numbers. Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, leading personal genomics company AncestryDNA sold about 1. Le...

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Hunter Williams used to be an English teacher. Then, three years into that job, he started reading the book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The 1966 novel by Robert Heinlein takes place in the 2070s, on the moon, which, in this future, hosts a subterranean penal colony. Like all good sci-fi, the plot hinges on a rebellion and a computer that gains self-awareness. But more important to Williams were...

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In 1891, a New York doctor named William B. Coley injected a mixture of beef broth and Streptococcus bacteria into the arm of a 40-year-old Italian man with an inoperable neck tumor. The patient got terribly sick—developing a fever, chills, and vomiting. But a month later, his cancer had shrunk drastically. Coley would go on to repeat the procedure in more than a thousand patients, with wildly var...

For the first time, humans have detected an interstellar asteroid—a space rock they're calling 'Oumuamua, which is a Hawaiian word meaning "scout." It's the only object we've ever seen that entered the solar system from beyond our little collection of planets. That's a pretty big deal on its own. But on top of that, this asteroid has a really interesting shape: It's very long and skinny, with a wi...

Behind the Scenes as NASA Tests the Most Powerful Rocket Ever NASA wants to send a human to Mars in the next two decades. And that means making the most powerful rocket ever. In 2019, NASA will send a capsule called Orion on an elaborate 25-day trajectory. First, the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, will blast it into the ether. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

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In Tampa, the conference center’s roof leaked. In Austin, the airport flooded. In Reno, conference organizers had to wait until a motorcycle rally was over before they could do some setup. During preparation for the SC Conference, a supercomputing meeting, there’s always something getting in the way of networking. But the conference, held annually in November, is perhaps more sensitive to water, d...

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Science and the people who study it have taken a pretty big beating during the first year of the Trump administration. Trump has appointed climate science skeptics and outright deniers to head the Environmental Protection Agency (Scott Pruitt), the Department of Energy (Rick Perry), and the Council on Environmental Quality (Kathleen Hartnett). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...

On the last Monday of September, 32 field workers stepped onto a 15-acre experimental plot in an undisclosed part of Washington and made apple harvest history. The fruits they plucked from each tree were only a few months old. But they were two decades and millions of dollars in the making. And when they landed, pre-sliced and bagged on grocery store shelves earlier this month, they became the fir...

Tesla just keeps making cool things. On the top of the list is its newest addition to the lineup, an all-electric semitruck. Oh, that might sound like a dumb idea—but I don't think so. Just consider how much stuff is shipped back and forth across the country. Clearly a train would be more efficient, but trucks also play a large role. It seems like the Tesla semi might be able to make two improveme...

Prepping a satellite instrument for its journey into space can feel like getting ready to lift off yourself. The sensors on board are vulnerable to the slightest speck of contamination—so to get close, you have to suit up. Required clean room attire includes a hair net, face mask, paper suit, disposable boots, and surgical gloves. No notebooks allowed—only paper that doesn’t release fluff if you t...

It wasn’t just that people were getting sick—it was who. And how many. Hepatitis A is a viral disease that primarily attacks the liver, and if it gets serious—as it can in the elderly and immune-compromised people—it can be fatal. But the graph of cases in the US over time looks like the second, fun half of a roller coaster ride. In the early 1970s, nearly 10,000 people a year got it. By the mid-1...

To get to work in the morning, Omar Akbari has to pass through a minimum of six sealed doors, including an air-locked vestibule. The UC Riverside entomologist studies the world’s deadliest creature: the Aedes aegypti mosquito, whose bite transmits diseases that kill millions each year. But that’s not the reason for all the extra security. Akbari isn’t just studying mosquitoes—he’s re-engineering t...

No one can deny that there are some great physics videos out there in the wild internet. Today, I found this one floating around—featuring what appears to be a worker that needs to get out of a cone-shaped hole. Oh sure, he could possibly climb up the side or maybe even use a rope as an assist. But no. This guy studied his physics. He knows a great trick to get out of this hole—by running in circl...

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