Science, Spoken

Of all the Star Wars tropes fans love—the scoundrels, the weird foods, the planets dominated by a single biome—the best one might just be the face-off. Not the battle itself, but the fermata beforehand: Two combatants, gazes locked on each other, knowing that it's about to go down. Most of the time, the ensuing struggle goes the way you want it to. This time, though, is not that time. Learn more a...

Compared to the swooping architecture of other fine-art institutions, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (aka Mass MoCA) is a hulking, big-boned anomaly. “We don’t just collect art and hang it on white walls,” says director Joseph Thompson. The cavernous complex displays works that couldn’t fit anywhere else. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

First comes the unscratchable itching, and the angry blossoming of hives. Then stomach cramping, and—for the unluckiest few—difficulty breathing, passing out, and even death. In the last decade and a half, thousands of previously protein-loving Americans have developed a dangerous allergy to meat. And they all have one thing in common: the lone star tick. Red meat, you might be surprised to know,...

The return of the bicycle to the modern urban transport paradigm continues unabated. All over the world, citizens are rediscovering the benefits of cycling. Cities are responding by building the infrastructure to serve and keep them safe. This rush to increase cycling levels and improve the quality of city life is the greatest movement in global urbanism. Of course, not all cities are equal. Some...

For nearly a century, Herman Miller built a business by getting people to sit down, introducing iconic objects like the Aeron Chair and the classic Eames Lounge. But the company's newest product, Live OS, suggests that maybe it’s time to stand up. Live OS is not a line of furniture, but a cloud platform that tracks how people make use of office space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

Artificial intelligence is not a contact sport. Not yet, at least. Currently, algorithms mostly just compete to win old Atari games, or accomplish historic board gaming feats like pwning five human Go champions at once. These are just practice rounds, though, for the way more complicated (and practical) goal of teaching robots how to navigate human environments. But first, more Atari! Vicarious, a...

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On a clear, sunny day at a vineyard in the northern California town of Ukiah, a most unusual train chugs through a field of barely budding syrah grapes. Well, it doesn't chug so much as whoosh because this train—actually, a one-sixth scale train—doesn't rely upon a diesel engine or electricity to get around. It uses vacuum power and heavy duty magnets. The 89-year-old man who built it believes it...

The internet loves videos of motorcyclists doing crazy things on the autobahn. This one seems especially popular. From what I can gather, the rider is hauling along when a car cuts him off, requiring some sudden emergency braking. Let me show you how out of control I can get with the physics in this video. And don't worry—I've got a homework question for you at the end. Learn more about your ad ch...

The robot is building a tesseract. He motions at a glowing cube floating before him, and an identical cube emerges. He drags it to the left, but the two cubes stay connected, strung together by glowing lines radiating from their corners. The robot lowers its hands, and the cubes coalesce into a single shape—with 24 square faces, 16 vertices, and eight connected cubes existing in four dimensions. A...

A metronome ticks time. Not for the student, but for the teacher, who plays a short piano melody. Without missing a measure, the student follows with an improvised, yet derivative, cello run. The student plays the same run again, and then again. “I have it looping, actually, so you can hear the response over and over again,” says the teacher, Jesse Engel, a computer scientist with Google Brain. Le...

I must admit to being pretty excited about Wonder Woman. Although I read a lot of comic books when I was younger, I favored Marvel over DC, so everything I know about Wonder Woman came from the TV show starring Linda Carter. It sounds likeWonder Woman might be the best superhero movie so far. Like all superhero movies, Wonder Woman provides an opportunity to do a littlephysics. Learn more about yo...

When it comes toCrispr, the bacterial wünderenzyme that allows scientists to precisely edit DNA, no news is too small to stir up some drama. On Tuesday morning, doctors from Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Iowa published a one-page letterto the editor of Nature Methods—an obscure but high-profile journal—describing something downright peculiar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

The Internet of Animals has arrived. No, not like cat-stalking zucchini gifs and skateboarding bulldog snaps (those are so 2015). Across the country, farmers are building actual connected networks of cows, pigs, and chickens. Using everything from microphones, accelerometers, and GPS trackers totemperature, glucose, and skin conductivity sensors, farmers can now track and monitor their flocks and...

It started with vomiting and a fever. But a few days later, five-month old Liam was in the emergency room, his tiny body gripped by hourly waves of seizures. X-rays and MRIs showed deep swelling in his brain. When an infectious disease specialist at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center diagnosed Liam with Powassan virus in November, he became the first recorded case in state history. Learn more a...

President Trump’s proposed 2018 budget will never actually determine how the government spends your money: Potus proposes and Congress disposes. But that’s no reason for relief. In fact, it makes this document even more of a nightmare. It doesn’t direct funding, but it does put the Trump administration’s underlying philosophy of governance on display. And it’s a harsh one. The science cuts make th...

All good things must come to an end, and Eruptions on WIRED ends today. It has been a great 5-plus years of reporting on volcanoes here, but nothing lasts forever (even geologically). There are a pile of people to thank at WIRED for all the help I’ve gotten over the years: Nick Stockton, Nadia Drake, David Mosher, Katie Palmer, all the former WIRED Science bloggers, all the great folks at WIRED’s...

From the outside, the Lost Spirits Distillery is just another boxy, early-20th-century building along the frayed edge of downtown Los Angeles. At first the inside appears similarly uninspired: deep and unfinished, littered with cardboard boxes, plumbing fittings, spools of wire, inscrutable items made of copper, a forklift. The usual crap. But what’s this then? A heavy black curtain bisects the in...

Carbon dioxide is one hell of a molecule. Perhaps you only know it as the stuff humans exhaleand plants inhale, or the primary culprit for climate change. But CO is capable of so much more. For instance, some engineers think it could help make the power industry a little greener. Now, you’re probably thinking this is atwist on carbon capture and storage. Nope. It’s about turbine generators—the eno...

At 4 pm local time on May 25, Rocket Lab’s Electron stood on the company’s private launch pad on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Perched on the edge of an eroding cliff, pointing toward the sky from the southern tip of the world, the little rocket—just 56 feet tall and 4 feet wide, meant to carry similarly small satellites—looked ready for its first trip to space. Learn more about your ad choi...

When astronaut Peggy Whitson pushed out of the International Space Station’s airlock on Tuesday morning, she was floating into history. Stipulated, Whitson was already a badass. But this extra-vehicular activity—an EVA, NASAspeak for a spacewalk—was Whitson’s 10th. That ties her for the American record. A PhD biochemist before she became an astronaut, Whitson has now spent more time in space outsi...

Roger Moore died today. Now, you could argue that Moore was not the best James Bond, and I'd be willing to have that discussion at some point, but I think everyone agrees he made significant contributions to the 007 canon. I certainly think so, if only because when I was a kid, Moore was the James Bond I saw in movie theaters. Sean Connery was the James Bond who appeared on television with older,...

When Bakul Patel started as a policy advisor in the US Food and Drug Administration in 2008, he could pretty much pinpoint when a product was going to land in frontof the reviewers in his division. Back when medical devices were heavy on the hardware—your pacemakers and your IUDs—it would take manufacturers years to get them ready for regulatory approval. FDA reviewers could keep up pretty well. L...