Science, Spoken

Every week, two million people across the world will sit for hours, hooked up to a whirring, blinking, blood-cleaning dialysis machine. Their alternatives: Find a kidney transplant or die. In the US, dialysis is a roughly 40-billion-dollar business keeping 468,000 people with end-stage renal disease alive. The process is far from perfect, but that hasn't hindered the industry's growth. Learn more...

At one point in the past, I was a teenager. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true. During that time, I thought about teenager things. In particular, I recall thinking about and wanting a super fast car. Maybe a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. At lunch my friends and I would argue about the best cars (THE BEST), and what we wouldn't give to drive them. Today I drive a minivan. Nothing wrong with that. N...

The 007-meets-the-X-Files adventures in Cuba continue. Last week the US Department of State recalled non-emergency personnel and families home from the embassy in Havana, citing injuries and illness among 21 people—“hearing loss, dizziness, headache, fatigue, cognitive issues, and difficulty sleeping” according to a statement from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Those 21 people weren’t just cult...

The way the Nobel Committee tells it, the story of this year’s physics prize begins like a certain 1970s space opera. “Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, two massive black holes engaged in a deadly dance,” said physicist and Nobel committee member Olga Botner at today's prize announcement. The pair spiraled toward each other, colliding to form an even bigger black hole w...

Today, the Nobel committee kicked off its 2017 season by awarding the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three scientists for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms. The Americans—Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young—used fruit flies to isolate a gene that dictates the biological clock ticking away inside all living organisms. Learn mor...

After the deluge comes the deluge. First Hurricane Irma raked Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in early September, and then two weeks later Hurricane Maria did the same, leaving 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico without clean water, communications, or electricity, amid damaged buildings and floodwaters. Aid is finally reaching the islands—fuel for generators, water, medical supplies, food—but...

Sixty years ago, a team of scientists went looking for yellow fever in the jungles that line the northwestern edge of Lake Victoria. What they found instead, in the blood of a rhesus monkey, was a new virus, one they named for the area’s dense vegetation: Uganda’s Zika Forest. Within a few years, Zika virus was showing up in humans, causing a pink rash and mild flu-like symptoms. Learn more about...

What is temperature? This question comes up quite a bit—especially in introductory science courses. The most common answer is something like this: Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in an object. When temperature increases, the motion of these particles also increases. It's not a terrible definition, but it's not the best either. There are plenty of other crazy...

At Tesla, Peter Carlsson spent nearly five years at Elon Musk’s side, locating various parts of the Model S as the electric car company's global supply chain manager. "The overarching goal of Tesla is to help reduce carbon emissions, and that means low cost and high volume," Musk said back in 2006. "We will also serve as an example to the auto industry, proving that the technology really works and...

On Monday night, residents of the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Westwood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and parts of the San Fernando Valley experienced a mild earthquake—a magnitude 3.6. Most people slept through the temblor and no damage was reported. But a select group of 150 LA residents got a text alert on their mobile phone a full eight seconds before the quake hit at 11:10 pm—enough time for peopl...

When Alexander Fleming came back from a Scottish vacation in the summer of 1948 to find his London lab bench contaminated with a mold called Penicillium notatum, he kicked off a new age of scientific sovereignty over nature. Since then, the antibiotics he discovered and the many more he inspired have saved millions of lives and spared immeasurable suffering around the globe. But from the moment it...

On the morning of August 21—the day of the solar eclipse—five archaeologists and I piled into two SUVs and drove an hour northwest of Tucson, into the thick of the Sonoran Desert. Turning off-road, we reached a yellow expanse inside Ironwood Forest National Monument through a series of latched gates. We brought eclipse glasses, but the quarter-sliver of the sun was just a sideshow. Learn more abou...

If you’re trying to get in shape and you want a tiny, wrist-bound computer to help you do it, you have more options than ever before. Fitness trackers come in all shapes, colors, and price tags, with newfangled sensors and features to stand out to customers. But for doctors and scientists studying how exercise can help people deal with disease, the landscape is much simpler. There’s Fitbit, and th...

For the last 100 years, ever since German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to pluck fertilizer out of thin air with brute-force chemistry, farmers have relied on an imperfect product to make their plants grow: fertilizer. Production of the stuff burns through 3 percent of the world’s natural gas annually, releases tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and runs off into rivers and...

Maybe the United States is sticking with the Paris Climate Agreement? Maybe it isn’t? But even if the US bails out of the international accord to limit climate change, well, nations aren’t the only players. If every city with a population over 100,000 stepped up, they could account for 40 percent of the reductions required. But that’s no small if. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...

The commissions are coming. Hurricane season hasn’t ended, but forensics waits for no one, so the after-action reports on Harvey and Irma have to get started. The relevant agencies—local and perhaps federal, plus maybe some national academies and disaster responders—will all no doubt look at themselves and others to see what went right or wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

Antarctica’s summer season is about to begin, which means hundreds of scientists are preparing to head south to conduct experiments on melting glaciers, migrating penguins, and elusive neutrinos. But so, too, will the support staff of the United States Antarctic base, McMurdo Station, population 1,100. McMurdo is a company town of sorts: It has its own air traffic controller, machine shop, IT help...

The gray clapboard house on the two-lane road in a western suburb of Boston looked, in fall 1974, the way you would expect a comfortable old Massachusetts house full of children to look. It was rambling and tall, made out of a house and a barn butted together. There were other barns out back, down a long gravel drive that stretched to a grove of trees: small sheds and one big building, 200 feet on...

Like many other surgery patients, Hayley Anthony has a daily physical therapy regimen. But unlike other post-ops, the 30-year-old marketing consultant is recovering from a procedure she helped invent. Five months ago, she became one of the first people in the world to have a piece of tissue incised from the cavity of her abdomen and turned into a vagina. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

I am going to make a prediction. As people start to get bored with their fidget spinners, they are going to start playing with these double pendulum fidget spinners. The normal spinner has a bearing in the center of some object such that you can hold it and spin it—moderately cool, I'll admit. But the double pendulum spinner has two bearings with two moveable arms. Learn more about your ad choices...

Ash is raining down on the city of Portland. Thousand-degree fireballs are forcing evacuations near Salt Lake City, Seattle, and parts of Northern California. In Missoula, Montana, the sun burns a bloody red even even at high noon. These days, the American West looks less like an Ansel Adams postcard and more like the kingdom of Mordor. Across nine states, nearly 1.5 million acres are on fire. And...

These days, the only thing more American than apple pie is eating an animal raised on antibiotics. Eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the US go not to human patients, but to the nation’s plate-bound pigs, cows, turkeys, and chickens. As these wonder drugs became a mainstay of modern agriculture, factory farms began churning out another, far less welcome commodity—antibiotic resistant bacteria....

I have many jobs, but one of my favorite is finding crazy stuff on the internet and using physics to see if it is real or fake. In this case we have a video that shows a drone carrying a human in a hammock. I'll go ahead and say it—this is probably fake. The Physics of Drones You can't tell if the video is real or fake without first understanding the basics of drone flight. In particular, we need...

In the ever-more masochistic world of wellness-boosting, pound-shedding diets, the latest trend involves putting your body into a controlled state of starvation known as “ketogenesis,” by cutting out nearly all carbs. If that doesn’t sound like your particular brand of torture, guess what? You’re already on it. Well, at least while you’re sleeping. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

This morning around 7 am, the engines of a massive, beluga-bodied helicopter cut on with a rumble. The hum harmonized with the reverberations of Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles. As the Chinook’s two enormous rotor blades started to spin, blasting hot vapor smudged the monochrome stripes of pavement, desert floor, mountain ridge, and sky above NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. A...