Science, Spoken

2016 is coming to a close so know it's time to look back on the volcanic action of the year. Take a moment and vote for your top 3 volcanoes that you think deserve the honor of Volcanic Event of the Year - the coveted Pliny Award. If you need some refreshers, check of the Atlantic's review of some cool eruptions, browse through the Global Volcanism Program's Weekly Volcanic Activity Reports or fli...

Maybe 2016 wasn’t your year. Buck up, at least your $60 million dollar rocket bearing a $200 million dollar payload didn’t explode on the launchpad. Or, perhaps your year was great. Again, some perspective: Did you land four rockets on ocean barges after inserting satellites into orbit around the Earth? No? Neither? Then lay off the superlatives, because SpaceX probably had both a better, and wors...

Randy is 62 years old and stands tall at six foot one. He grew up on a farm in Glasford, Illinois, in the 1950s. Randy was raised with the strong discipline of a farming family. From the time he was five, he would get out of bed at dawn, and before breakfast he’d put on his boots and jeans to milk cows, lift hay, and clean the chicken coops. Day in and out, no matter the weather or how he felt, Ra...

This should be an officially labeled time of the year. I suggest we call it Maker Time-it's that time after kids get out of school, but before all of the holiday festivities begin. This is the perfect time for kids (and adults) to make something. This is what I tell my own children (I probably heard it from someone else). Don't just be a consumer, be a creator (or the rhyming version-be a maker, n...

Something was wrong with the Jackson Pollock. For one thing, 3-D images from a stereomicroscope revealed that the signature was traced with a needle—forged. And, working with a hyper-precise Raman microscope, a tool capable of analyzing sample areas as small as a thousandth of a millimeter across, Jamie Martin identified the presence of Red 170, a pigment that wasn’t widely available until decades...

Of course I'm not the first to look at the physics in Super Mario Bros-there was this interesting paper looking at the optimal jump to get to the highest point on the flag at the end of the level. There is also a nice page looking at the acceleration of jumping Mario in the different games. Good stuff. But there's a new game out-Super Mario Run on iOS and Android. This is a great chance to take an...

This post is Chad Orzel's fault. It started with this tweet: Hey, @rjallain , is this consistent with your regression analysis of the Lego brick cost a while back? pic.twitter.com/RaTcP07xI1 — Chad Orzel (@orzelc) December 13, 2016 Yes, it's true that I have pondered the price of Lego bricks before, by looking up the cost and number of pieces in various sets. Here is the data, and a link to my ori...

You unfurl your yoga mat at home, ready to stretch out into downward dog and take some deep breaths. Just for a second, you look away to grab your water bottle and block. But when you turn around, you find that your pup has already staked her territory on your mat, doing some stretches of her own. If you’re an asana-ing dog person, you’ve probably already figured out a way to tap into your canine’...

Basil Al-Reabi was riding home from school in southern Syria, in the fall of 2014, when a roadside bomb struck. The eight-year-old watched as shrapnel shredded his classmates and reduced them to a collection of body parts. As the remnants of the minibus bounced, rolled, and finally came to rest at the foot of a low embankment, three of his limbs were scythed off, his cheeks peppered with shards of...

Hurricane Ivan would not die. After traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, it stewed for more than a week in the Caribbean, fluctuating between a Category 3 and 5 storm while battering Jamaica, Cuba, and other vulnerable islands. And as it approached the US Gulf Coast, it stirred up a massive mud slide on the sea floor. The mudslide created leaks in 25 undersea oil wells, snarled the pipelines leadi...

Let's look at some volcanic rumblings and eruptions from the last week: Washington Mount St. Helens is keeping up its unsettled 2016, this time with another small earthquake swarm. The USGS detected over 120 earthquakes over the last few days, all occurring 2-4 kilometers (1-2 miles) beneath the volcano and all very small (less than M1). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...

Even for a particle physicist, Janet Conrad thinks small. Early in her career, when her peers were fanning out in search of the top quark, now known to be the heaviest elementary particle, she broke ranks to seek out the neutrino, the lightest. In part, she did this to avoid working as part of a large collaboration, demonstrating an independent streak shared by the particles she studies. Learn mor...

John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth and, later, the oldest human to leave the planet, died on December 8, 2016. He was 95 years old. In 1962, Glenn became the face of American technological triumph. NASA rocketed him upward in a vessel that looked more like a spotlight bulb than a space capsule, not sure that he would make it back. But they knew they had to try, and that this was the tim...

Today, SpaceX announced it expects to begin launching again in early January—just four months after one of its Falcon 9 rockets burst into flames on a Florida launchpad. But the private space company helmed by Elon Musk is still missing one important thing before it leaves Earth: a license from the Federal Aviation Administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoice...

The International Space Station is currently home to six intrepid astronauts, one Robonaut, and four 14,000-pound payload-holders called ExPRESS Logistics Carriers. Experiments from Earth like the laser-communicator OPALS fly up to Station and Lego-attach to these carriers, which provide them with a place to stay and, just as importantly, the electrical power and data links they need to do their j...

Before Steve Bannon was Donald Trump’s campaign advisor, a right-wing media mogul, or a conservative Hollywood documentarian, he helped a group of climate scientists steer a controversial experiment in the Arizona desert back from financial chaos. Twenty-five years ago, a New Agey-experiment called Biosphere 2 set out to recreate life on another planet with eight people locked in a giant glass hab...

Magnets aren’t miracles, but neither are they a phenomenon that physicists completely understand. Particularly big magnets, like the sun. Until recently, the annals of research failed to completely explain how massive currents blooming on the sun’s surface burst into solar flares, releasing incredible volumes of energy in short time frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

Last night, the ONEMI (Oficina Nacional de Emergencias) and SERNGEOMIN (Chilean Geological Survey) in Chile raised the alert status for the area around Cerro Hudson in the southern Andes. Normally, raising the alert status like this is due to an acute change, when the behavior of the volcano shifts suddenly. However, this time, the elevation to Yellow alert status at Cerro Hudson is due to accumul...

Kourtney Kardashian hawks its health benefits. Counterfeiters and chemists labor to unlock its molecular secrets. And now it's at the center of an international branding war. It's honey, but not just any honey. It's ManÅ«ka honey, a sweet extravagance from New Zealand that sells for a sticky $2.50 an ounce—six times the cost of conventional honey—and has attracted a slew of famous fans. Learn more...

Theoretical computer science can be as remote and abstract as pure mathematics, but new research often begins in response to concrete, real-world problems. Such is the case with the work of Cynthia Dwork. Over the course of a distinguished career, Dwork has crafted rigorous solutions to dilemmas that crop up at the messy interface between computing power and human activity. Learn more about your a...

I'll be honest. I don't really watchGotham, but it looks interesting. It chroniclesthe events in Batman's city before he became Batman. That's about all I know. However, when I saw a recent commercial for an upcoming episode, I had to do something. I'm not sure what's going on here, but from my research this appears to be Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne doingsomething with a tightrope. Learn more abou...

You know you’ve struck marketing gold when a brand becomes a so-called “proprietary eponym.” Need to blow your nose? Grab a Kleenex. Track some sand from the beach onto your floor? Hoover it up. In biology, Crispr is the proprietary eponym of the moment. The gene-editing technique is so inexpensive and easy to use that, in just four years, it’s become a ubiquitous tool in labs across the world. An...

Sequels rarely live up to the original. And thank goodness for that. Yesterday, a 6.9 earthquake shook the coast of Japan almost exactly where a 9.1 quake hit nearly 6 years ago. Japan is fortified against quakes and tsunamis. But the 2011 quake was so powerful it generated 30 to 60-foot tsunamis, overtopping the island nation's extensive sea walls and shore protections, killing over 15,000, leavi...

Last week, a Royal New Zealand Air Force flight spotted a new pumice raft in the middle of the Pacific ocean to the west of Tonga. Pumice rafts are floating islands of pumice created during a submarine volcanic eruption and they can persist for months or longer. This raft was seen by aircraft and satellite in an area with no known volcanoes. However, from the looks of the raft, it might be a long...

November started out pretty normal for the Arctic. The sun had set for the season, temperatures were dropping, ice was growing rapidly. Winter was coming, right on schedule. And then, a few days ago, everything came screeching to a halt. Ice stopped forming. And then it actually started to melt, thanks to a sudden heat wave that blistered the region with temperatures 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit ab...