Science, Spoken

Azi Tourkamani is eight months pregnant and working 12-hour shifts at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse, New York. She’s a resident doctor in internal medicine. Most days she has so many patients she doesn’t have time to stop and eat lunch; she eats as she walks from floor to floor treating patients. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They call it the Mighty Mug-and the idea is that it isn't easily knocked over. Of course, you can tip just about anything over if you try hard enough. But really, how does this work? Let me be clear: I haven't actually played with a Mighty Mug-so most of this is just physics-based speculation. It seems the key component of this mug is some type of suction cup on the bottom. When you put the cup do...

Few tropes in modern America are as enduring as the LSD Trip Gone Far Too Long. It should all be over after a few hours, right? OK maybe not. Eight? Ten? Probably should have cleared more of my calendar. Even though science has long had an intimate relationship with LSD-chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized it way back in the '30s-why the drug insists on producing such lengthy hallucinations ha...

Alireza Edraki spends weekends in the lab. It’s what he does. For the past three years, test tubes full of bacteria have been his constant companions. Not this weekend. “I’m so stressed out that I can’t work,” he says. Edraki is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts’ medical school in Worcester. You know Crispr/CAS-9, the gene-editing technology that’s in all the headlines...

For many, it's the start of a new semester of physics labs. That means there are new students in that introductory course. Of course, no one is really 100 percent ready to start these labs-but that's OK. Here are three big ideas that I find students need to work on to be successful in lab. Converting Units This is a pretty easy problem to fix, but I think I should go over it. Learn more about your...

Every day, 22 people in America die while waiting for an organ transplant. But when scientists can grow replacement livers or kidneys or pancreases inside of animal hosts, medicine’s organ shortage may end. That’s the hope anyway—and this week there’s more reason to hope than ever that it might become reality. The key to producing human organs in other animals is the chimera, a mixture of cells fr...

“I’m dying of Boredom,” complains the young wife, Yelena, in Chekhov’s 1897 play Uncle Vanya. “I don’t know what to do.” Of course, if Yelena were around today, we know how she’d alleviate her boredom: She’d pull out her smartphone and find something diverting, like BuzzFeed or Twitter or Clash of Clans. If you have a planet’s worth of entertainment in your pocket, it’s easy to stave off ennui. Le...

The late Nora Ephron famously felt badly about her neck, but that's minor compared to how people feel about their reading. We think everyone else reads faster than we do, that we should be able to speed up, and that it would be a huge advantage if we could. You could read as much as a book critic for the New York Times. You could finish Infinite Jest. You could read all of Wikipedia. Learn more ab...

During his campaign for president, Donald Trump promised to end action on climate change and kill the climate treaty adopted in 2015 in Paris. To truly understand why that’s such a big deal—perhaps the biggest deal ever—you need to think about a few things. Yes, you need to think about the oft-repeated but nonetheless true and alarming statistics: 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded till 2015...

Robots are coming to take your jog. Or, at least, your walk. Each spring in your step costs your body calories. Robotic assistants could help ease fatigue for people who earn their living on their feet—or who have been hobbled by disease. But many robotic exoskeletons are so bulky that they actually cause wearers more fatigue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why would you throw a washing machine? Who knows. Maybe that machine lost your socks. Maybe you have something against washing machines. You could have any number of reasons. But here it is-a washing machine throwing contest, and even a world record distance for washing machine throws. (4.13 meters, Zydrunas Savickas.) But when I see something like this, I just wonder how hard it would be to throw...

Over the past several months, scientists working in Antarctica have been watching—with a mixture of professional fascination and personal horror—a fissure growing in the continent’s fourth-largest ice shelf. Since last November, the crack has lengthened by some 90 miles. It has 13 miles more before it rends completely, and a chunk of ice the size of Delaware goes bobbing into the Weddell Sea. Lear...

This is one of my jobs. When there is something that happens, I have to do an analysis-the internetneeds me. In this case, it's a hit between Draymond Green and LeBron James. Was it a hit, or did LeBron flop? I'm not the judge, I'm just going to present evidence. Collisions When an object interacts with another object (with zero external forces), this is called a collision. Here are some important...

At four in the morning, Tim Caro roused his colleagues. Bleary-eyed and grumbling, they followed him to the edge of the village, where the beasts were hiding. He sat them down in chairs, and after letting their eyes adjust for a minute, he asked them if they saw anything. And if so, would they please point where? Not real beasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As part of WIRED’s exclusive look at Breaking2, Nike’s revolutionary attempt to break the two-hour marathon mark, 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 first in a series of monthly updates on his progress. Running is a simple sport: lace ’em up, and...

It's the start of a new semester, so I think now is a good time to talk about the nature of science. As a physics faculty member, I teach all sorts of classes. Some of those classes are for chemistry and physics majors and some classes are for non-science majors. Whatever class you teach, though, I think it's important to bring up a discussion of the nature of science. Learn more about your ad cho...

It started with a thumb into my eye socket as he tried to gouge out my eye. When he bit into my ear, the adrenaline flooding my veins masked the pain; I would not even realize my ear was gone till after the fight. Twenty years ago, in that dimly lit alley in Kent, Washington, as I walked into a ring of teenage onlookers to face off, my heart was pounding so hard my chest hurt. My vision narrowed—I...

Unlike many of her colleagues at NASA, Ellen Stofan never wanted to be an astronaut. She saw her first rocket launch at age four. It didn’t go well. Stofan,who recently left her position as the space agency’s chief scientist, dimly recollects traveling from Ohio to Cape Canaveral to watch the fifth flight of the uncrewed Atlas-Centaur launch system, a project of her NASA engineer father‘s. Learn m...

One of the most common topics covered in a high school physics class is simple machines. An I think the compound pulley is the coolest simple machine. Let's start with some basic physics. Work-Energy Principle The compound pulley, like all simple machines, uses the work-energy principle. I will skip theexplanation of energy (it's very abstract) and start with this: Don't worry about the change in...

NASA missions come packaged two ways. They’re either deep explorations of the familiar—STEREO’s focus on the sun, the International Space Station’s study of what microgravity does to the human body—or a trip to some crazy place no one has ever seen before. But still, any strange, distant object the agency targets will likely hold some clue about the origins of life. Humans are spacefaring narcissi...

Billions of years ago, an unknown object sent a seriously bright burst of radio waves into space. They traveled across the universe, past galaxies and clouds of gas and who knows what else. And in 2012, the burst arrived at the Arecibo radio telescope when astronomers happened to be watching. They kept searching that same spot in the sky. In 2015, they found 16 additional flashes. Then, in August...

California is having a notably wet winter. Since October, a succession of weather systems has greened the Golden State’s valleys, whitened its mountains, and washed its rivers and reservoirs in rippling blue-green. The state is currently between storms. The one that just ended was cold. It dropped snow as low as 2,500 feet in California’s highlands. The successor storm, expected to hit on Saturday...

If your resolution for the coming year is to spend less time on your commute scrolling through Twitter or playing “Puzzler on the Roof,” there’s no shortage of fantastic and fantastical new books you can use to take a break from mindless screen time. Curating this year’s new arrivals was tough, but we managed to narrow the list down to our top-ten favorites. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

It's been a long timesince I've skied. Of course, the fun is in going down the mountain, not going up. But you have to go up to get down, so what's the best way of doing that in terms of energy and power? Let's examinea few options inan excellent example of physics in action. I can't believe I just said that-it sounds like it's straight out of a middle school textbook. Learn more about your ad cho...

Monday is shipping day at MatTek. A truck pulls up to its red brick lab outside of Boston to load box after box, all kept at a cool 39 degrees. The precious, perishable cargo is human skin—thousands of dime-sized pieces in plastic dishes that add up, altogether, to about two whole adult humans’ worth. Every week. It’s not harvested from people, though. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...