Science, Spoken

Physicists and philosophers seem to like nothing more than telling us that everything we thought about the world is wrong. They take a peculiar pleasure in exposing common sense as nonsense. But Tim Maudlin thinks our direct impressions of the world are a better guide to reality than we have been led to believe. Not that he thinks they always are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastcho...

If civilization still exists a centuryfrom now, Earth ought to throw a parade for pension funds. For all their fiscally conservative stodginess, the people tasked with safeguarding your nest egg are forcing the financial world to pay attention to climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Not all girls grow up to be mothers. Sometimes they choose not to be, and sometimes circumstances take those choices away. A superfluity of cancers and genetic diseases can destroy women’s ovaries. Or treatments like radiation—used to save a woman’s life—can render those egg-producing organs useless. Ovaries also mediate female hormones. Without them, young patients might never go through puberty;...

One day, a woman is spending her Saturdays doing her normal Saturday stuff—blueberry pancake brunch, curling up on the couch with the cat reading a novel, grabbing a beer with friends. By the next, her life is suddenly and completely about keeping a screaming, floppy, red-faced, cone-headed thing alive using fluids secreted from her chest. Happy birthday to that. Learn more about your ad choices....

Skip Suva is a fidgeter. When he worked at paper-intensive administrative jobs, he’d doodle incessantly; when he started a coding career last year, he took up fiddling with an SD-card reader that made pleasant snick noises. “Popping the SD card out and clicking it back in,” he laughs. His fidgeting can seem like a crazy tic, Suva admits. But it helps him focus. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Fifteen years ago, Kevin Tracey sat in a Washington DC conference room surrounded by officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They’d been paying the neurosurgeon to study how doctors could stimulate the vagus nerve—a long nerve that controls everything from blood pressure to sexual arousal—to treat inflammation associated with PTSD. Now they wanted to know: Could he stimulate...

When I was young, there was no such thing as the world wide web or video streaming. If you wanted to watch something, you had to wait until it appearedon television. Sometimes you might think,“Hey, I think I’ll watch a show” and flip the channels until you found something interesting. This is how I discoveredThe Mechanical Universe … And Beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

The Cassini space probe is going to dive through Saturn’s rings again on Wednesday, the third of a planned 22 orbits threading that planetary needle as the probe continues a ballistic death-drop inward. And like the first ring-crossing two weeks ago, this one required a bit of complicated piloting. Remote-controlling a robot spaceship from 750 million miles away ain’t like dusting crops, as Han So...

Brian Greene is one of those physicists. You know the type: Blessed with a brain capable of untangling the mysteries of the universe,and a knack for clearly explaining it all to the rest of us schlubs. His enthusiasm for doing these things keeps him quite busy, what with the three best-selling physics books for grown-ups, a children’s book about time dilation(!), a fewTV specials, and, of course,...

Fidget spinners are the new Rubik’s Cube. Or maybe the new Tamagotchi. Or … I don’t know. Pick your fad. You see these toys, ostensibly designedto help kids fidgety concentrate, everywhere now. Seriously. Everywhere. Afidget spinner is basically a small bearing mounted in a piece of plastic or other material. You hold it and spin it. I guess it’s sort of amusing. Learn more about your ad choices....

I did it. On Saturday afternoon, a few hours after Eliud Kipchoge ranastunning, historic marathon in two hours and 25 seconds in Monza, Italy - narrowly missing his goal of breaking the two-hour marathon mark for Nike's Breaking2 initiative, but obliterating the current world record and everybody's idea of what is possible in the sport - I ran a half-marathon on the same course in 1:26:52. Learn m...

I have a tradition of doing a little analysis on one of my favorite movie franchises to celebrate Star Wars Day (May the Fourth Be With You). Given thatRogue One: A Star Wars Storyrecently appeared on DVD and various streaming services, I think its OK to look at that film without worrying about spoilers. In this case, I will calculate Darth Vader’s power output as he uses the Force. Learn more abo...

In the background of Colorado Springs, Pike’s Peak dominates the sky. But just to that mountain’s southeast looms another geological ripple. Cheyenne Mountain—a rounded, rocky thing that rises 9,565 feet above sea level—looks wild and quiet. But deep inside the mountain, a crew of humans toils in one of the nation’s most secure military installations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

Energy is the answer to so many questions. Pull back a spring-powered toy car and rolls forward. Why? Energy. You used your phone all day and it suddenly shut down. Why? No energy. A child eats six bags of M&Ms and runs around screaming and giggling because he has energy. But then he doesn’t want to clean his room because he has no energy. But what is energy? Ah… that is the real question. To answ...

On the outskirts of Bangalore one morning last summer, a sullen young man named Manjunath stood high atop a cocoa-colored 1,850-gallon tanker truck, waiting for its belly to fill with water. The source of the liquid was a bore well, a cylindrical metal shaft puncturing hundreds of feet down into the earth. An electric pump pulled the water up from the depths and into a concrete cistern; from there...

Stem cell biologists are basically modern day witches. While they’re not exactly taking a creepy fetal Lord Voldemort and turning him into noseless Ralph Fiennes, these scientists can use tinctures and concoctions to grow incredible things from just a few human skin cells. One of those things is a brain ball, a collection of stem cells that biologists have coaxed into a bobbing tangle of living ne...

The genome of barley—the grain that’s the soul of beer and whiskey—is weird. The commodity crop has just seven pairs of chromosomes (compared to your 23, assuming you are a human being) but twice the size of your genome overall, with the vast majority of the sequences repeating themselves. And you care because (making the same assumption again) you care about beer and whiskey, even just in the abs...

You might look at an overhead power line and see an engineering problem. After all, those transmission towers are impressively huge. But if you've ever seen those cables, you probably noticed they seem to hang fairly low. Why they hang low is a great physics question that can be modeled with masses and springs. Basic Model For a Hanging Cable Let's start by creating a model. Suppose I string a cab...

Peaceful, orderly, rational, and with a lot of signs too clever by half (actually, 0.56932 according to our measurements)—that’s how scientists march on Washington. It’s also how they march in more than 600 of them all over the world on Saturday, with even a few wintering-over researchers in Antarctica signaling their support. The movement covered all seven continents. The March for Science was co...

This week, a kilometer-wide asteroid whizzed by within about a million miles of this planet—about four and half times the distance between the Earth and the moon. A near miss? Not really. The odds of 2014 JO25 actually hitting Earth were around one in a million. The safer bet is on science. As in, how much of it astronomers were able to gather from the close pass of such a huge space rock. Learn m...

Ugh, you’re not going sign up for Project: Baseline, are you? That new, 10,000-person health study Google’s putting together? Well, OK, not Google, but Verily. Which used to be Google Life Sciences, and is part of Alphabet, the company that used to be called Google but now owns Google. (So, Google. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That image above, depending on what your job is, could well be considered not safe for work. What you’re looking at is a giant shipworm—a scientific legend that can grow to over five feet long. It’s actually a super-elongated mollusk, one that grows vertically in sediment, excreting a thick shell and poking two siphons out of the muck. It is, as biologists note, really weird. Learn more about your...

Steve Wozniak is one half of Silicon Valley’s most prototypical founder’s myth. But whereas Steve Jobs went on to define what it meant to be a modern founder—the turtleneck uniform, the keynote showmanship, the scorn for formal education and steamrolling managerial style—Woz just became a wealthier version of his former self. That is, a gigantic nerd. In case you clicked this article out of blind...

Radioactive material gets a bad rap, what with radiation and fallout and nuclear waste and all. But it offers some practical uses. One of the coolest (OK, maybe the coolest) is using radioactive carbon to determinethe age of old bones or plants. To understand this, you mustfirst understand radioactivity and decay. When an element undergoes radioactive decay, it creates radiation and turns into som...

As part of WIRED’s exclusive look at Breaking2, Nike’s attempt to break the two-hour marathon mark next month in Monza, Italy, our writer is using the same training regime, apparel, and expertise as Nike’s three elite athletes to try to achieve his own personal milestone: a sub-90-minute half-marathon. This is the fourth in a series of monthly updates on his progress. Last week, I travelled for wo...