Science, Spoken

Before he rocketed off to spend a year in space, one of Scott Kelly’s final acts on Earth was peeing on the back tire of a van. Not because you can’t pee in space (you can—it just requires some suction). It’s tradition: Yuri Gagarin, who made it to space first, did the same thing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the beginning of a new semester for introductory physics students. I have a new message that might not be very popular: Read the textbook. And I don't just mean, like, here and there. Read the whole thing as as soon as possible. I know many students have different ideas about the role of the textbook in college courses, so let me go over some of the reasons that students should start reading...

Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are swaths of placid Texas prairie, wetland, and forest straddling I-10 where it hits Highway 6, about 20 miles west of downtown Houston. But that’s not how nature sees them. To nature, those two open spaces are the top of a hydrological basin that drains through the city and into the Houston Ship Channel. Most of the time the reservoirs don’t reserve any water. Learn...

In 1954, Italian inventor Carlo Vanoni swelled with patriotic pride when he learned that his fellow countrymen had summited K2, the second-tallest mountain in the world. He was so proud, in fact, that he started naming all his formulas after it: K2a, K2b, K2c, and on down the alphabet. K2r turned out to be his biggest hit—it became K2r Spotlifter, a household cleaner that erases greasy stains from...

In Gerald Grant’s line of work, there isn’t such a thing as an “average” patient. As a chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Stanford University Medical Center, the children that come into his operating room are unique, each requiring a complex surgical procedure tailored to the architecture of a young brain. But that doesn’t mean he can’t learn from what other people have done. Learn more about your...

Hurricanes are ranked according to their wind speed. But a truer measure of their destructive potential would also include their moisture level. Just before making landfall on Friday night, Hurricane Harvey jumped up to become a category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. But more dangerously, it’s also packing enough moisture to drop 20 inches or more of rain across Texas’ g...

Too often, letters, words, and sentences get the credit for conveying information. But the human brain also makes meaning out of pitch. Like how upspeak turns any sentence into a question? Or how emphasizing the beginning of a sentence (Tom and Leila bought a boat) helps clarify that it was in fact Tom and Leila who bought the boat, not some other couple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

CrisprCon is not a place where spandexed, beglittered, refrigerator drawer fans come together for an all-you-can-eat celebration of unwilted produce. No. Crispr-Cas9 (no E), if you haven’t been paying attention, is a precise gene editing tool that’s taken the world by storm, promising everything from healthier, hangover-free wine to cures for genetic diseases. Like, all of them. Learn more about y...

I haven't seen The Defenders yet, but it's high on my list of things to watch. I am super excited about it, and why not? It brings Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones together to save ... oh, never mind. No spoilers! That said, I consider trailers fair game, and this one from Netflix features an amazing scene in which the four Defenders fight a horde of bad guys in a hallway. Of the...

Each year, the world throws 8 billion metric tons of plastic into the ocean, about a dump truck every minute. Some washes up on beaches, some sinks, and the rest floats to the surface, where currents sweep it into giant rafts of garbage. Over time, chopping waves and beating sunlight break those plastics down into microscopic particles—which conservation groups worry pose a real threat to marine l...

For a brief, non-shining moment on Monday, August 21, the moon will be the most important object in the daytime sky. Not that you’ll get a good look at much besides its backlit outline. And sure, it is uncanny and cool that the moon sits at just the right distance from the Earth to blot out the sun. But real lunatics—er, luna-philes? Let’s go with moon fans—know the moon’s real calling card is its...

Tansy was not into sports. The little border collie, a rescue, didn’t care for agility trials or flyball. But her adopted family—with two other border collies already in the house—did them all the time. Border collies are working dogs, the elite athletes of the canine universe. They go a little nuts without something to do. After a little consternation, Tansy's new owner Robin Queen, a linguist at...

On a Thursday afternoon in June, a 17-foot-tall rocket motor—looking like something a dedicated amateur might fire off—stood fire-side-up on the salty desert of Promontory, Utah. Over the loudspeakers, an announcer counted down. And with the command to fire, quad cones of flame flew from the four inverted nozzles and grew toward the sky. As the smoke rose, it cast a four-leaf clover of shadow acro...

In August 2015, scientists from the University of Notre Dame went west, the disassembled pieces of a particle accelerator secured in the back of their U-haul. Over 1,000 miles later and nearly a mile down, they started installing the machine in a new home: deep within an old mine in the town of Lead, South Dakota. Miners first excavated the Homestake gold mine in the 1880s. Learn more about your a...

You've surely heard by now that the moon will pass between Earth and the sun on August 21, creating a total solar eclipse that will cast a shadow over much of the US. Jimmy Carter was president the last time this happened, so you definitely don't want to miss it. The best way to observe this astronomical event is to be somewhere in the path of the totality that will experience total darkness in th...

Genes carry the information that make you you. So it's fitting that, when sequenced and stored in a computer, your genome takes up gobs of memory—up to 150 gigabytes. Multiply that across all the people who have gotten sequenced, and you're looking at some serious storage issues. If that's not enough, mining those genomes for useful insight means comparing them all to each other, to medical histor...

The most formal manifestation of the scientific consensus on climate change is an organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Headquartered in Geneva, under the aegis of the United Nations, it coordinates the volunteer efforts of several thousand scientists, industry experts, nonprofit researchers, and government representatives into reports issued every five to seven years....

Inside a red-bricked building on the north side of Washington DC, internist Shantanu Nundy rushes from one examining room to the next, trying to see all 30 patients on his schedule. Most days, five of them will need to follow up with some kind of specialist. And odds are, they never will. Year-long waits, hundred-mile drives, and huge out-of-pocket costs mean 90 percent of America’s most needy cit...

Animals are living color. Wasps buzz with painted warnings. Birds shimmer their iridescent desires. Fish hide from predators with body colors that dapple like light across a rippling pond. And all this color on all these creatures happened because other creatures could see it. The natural world is so showy, it’s no wonder scientists have been fascinated with animal color for centuries. Even today,...

Bruce Sherwood, the author of Matter and Interactions, had a question for me when I saw him at the American Association of Physics Teachers conference not long ago: "What calculator do you use?" If this seems odd, well, it was a conference of physics teachers. I responded with something along the lines of "I don't actually use a calculator." Of course, Bruce probably knew I'd say that. He absolute...

Woe be to the Environmental Protection Agency. If President Trump gets his way, the federal agency will lose 31 percent of its annual budget—about $3 billion. Supporters of Trump’s 2018 budget proposal call it a “back to basics” approach, carving away what they see as the agency’s regulatory overreach. Opponents are similarly pithy: The EPA’s former director labeled Trump’s proposal a “scorched Ea...

In October 2016, the organizers behind a conference on the microbiome sent promo materials to some prominent scientists. Elisabeth Bik was one of them: With her nearly 12,000 followers, her tweeting could help publicize their upcoming event in San Diego. But when she scanned the lineup, she noticed that almost every speaker was a man. Add more women, she suggested—or the conference should expect b...

In March, when Netflix quietly dropped its original teen suicide mystery series 13 Reasons Why, it took a few days for people to start freaking out. But soon, schools started sending home notes warning parents about the show’s graphic depictions of suicide and rape. Psychologists wrote op-eds denouncing its disregard for the World Health Organization’s suicide portrayal guidelines. News outlets pu...

For a few months in the fall of 1957, citizens of Earth could look up and see the first artificial star. It shone as bright as Spica, but moved across the sky at a much faster clip. Lots of people thought they were seeing Sputnik—Russia’s antennaed, spherical satellite, and the first thing humans had flung into orbit. But it wasn’t: It was the body of the rocket that bore Sputnik to space—and Eart...

There's something sort of cool in the next version of Apple's iOS. [It's call ARKit](https://developer.apple.com/arkit/—basically, it's a part of Apple's developer package to help programmers create awesome augmented reality apps. Like, maybe a program that adds dancing hotdogs to your screen so that they look like they are there in real life. Or better yet, something useful like an app that measu...