Science, Spoken

I want to analyze a scene from Star Trek Beyondbut don't want to spoil the movie. Let me set things upin the most generic way possible. If you are very allergic to spoilers, maybe you should just move along tothis nice post about radioactive bananas. You have been warned. Here is the scene: Some people have found an old starship at the top of a cliff. They want toget itflying andleave the planet....

Drunk shoppers beware: Impulse buying online just got even easier. With Apple’s new MacBook Pro launched last month, all you have to do is tap your finger to the Touch ID scanner located on the Touch Bar to buy—no more searching through your wallet for the right card, no more typing in three-digit security codes and expiration dates. On the front end, the new method is faster and probably more sec...

Do you remember President-elect Trump holding forth on the campaign trail about "China beating us at our own game"? Well, it's true, as long as the game in question is editing human DNA using Crispr/Cas9. China is now using Crispr-edited cells in living, breathing human beings. Last month, Chinese scientists at Sichuan University injected cancer-fighting, Crispr-modified white bloodcells into a pa...

Earlier this year, James Gelsleichter got a call from the Bahamas. A group of researchers had been tracking the movements of some oceanic whitetip sharks off the coast of Cat Island, a long, thin stretch of land in the center of the Bahamas. Maybe, they thought, the sharks were moving certain directions because they were pregnant and looking for a place to give birth. Learn more about your ad choi...

Anyone who has taken introductory physics will recognize this famous question: Why can't you start your car with 8 AAA batteries instead of one 12 volt car battery? Eight AAA batteries do add up to 12 volts, but they still can't provide enough electrical current to run the starter motor. But that's not the whole story. Any battery has a limit on the maximum current it can produce. To explain why,...

Last spring, mathematician Henry Segerman found a peculiar post on Facebook. It was by a programmer who had could not conjure mental images—a condition called aphantasia. Segerman immediately recognized that he lives with the same limitation. “When I try to visualize something, I don’t see anything,” he says. Which is curious—because Segerman, 37, has made a career out of visualizing complex mathe...

Yesterday, four US states voted to legalize recreational marijuana. Casual smokers in Massachusetts, Nevada, and California are now free from the social stigma—and threat of jail time—that had clouded cannabis use for decades. (Maine is still up for grabs; Arizona voters kept the status quo.) In these states, downlow smokers will become legal consumers, and formerly clandestine growers and sellers...

An HIV diagnosis is a nightmare, but it is no longer a death sentence. Someday, vaccines might bat the virus out of your system without you ever knowing you’d been exposed. If successful, such a vaccine would effectively cure AIDS. Someday, maybe. So scientists are working on it. Like yesterday: Researchers published results to a promising study on primates infected with SIV, a monkey version of H...

Early in his career, the decorated biologist Richard Lenski thought he might be forced to evolve. After his postdoctoral research grant was canceled, Lenski began to look tentatively at other options. With one child and a second on the way, Lenski attended a seminar about using specific types of data in an actuarial context—the same type of data he had worked with as a graduate student. Learn more...

Forget Nate Silver. There’s a new king of the presidential election data mountain. His name is Sam Wang, Ph. D. Haven’t heard of him just yet? Don’t worry. You will. Because Wang has sailed True North all along, while Silver has been cautiously trying to tack his FiveThirtyEight data sailboat (weighted down with ESPN gold bars) through treacherous, Category-Five-level-hurricane headwinds in what h...

Christine Corbett Moran was in Antarctica when she got the news: NASA wanted to interview her, in person, for the next class of astronauts. Moran is a coder and theoretical astrophysicist, and she'd been holed up in the southernmost part of the world for 10 months, studying the echoes of the Big Bang. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like many people, I enjoy gettinga nice cup of coffee. Not that silly sugary stuff like a double-whip, non-fat, vanilla bean, espresso, iced with a twist of lime. No, I get plain old boring black coffee. But there's a problem: It's almost always too hot to drink right away. When life gives you coffee that's too hot, you must find the best way to cool it. I have two methods to cool off my coffee. M...

What generates voltage when you warm it up, push on it, or blow on it? Get your mind out of the gutter. The correct answer is polyvinylidene fluoride, a material NASA researchers have refined for use in morphing aircraft that shapeshift in response to their environment. But wait! There’s more: It can also kickstart the human body’s healing process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

The protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota are, on the surface, about water quality. The pipeline’s planned route—which closely mirrors the path of the would-be Keystone XL pipeline—goes right through the tribe’s water source. And like Keystone XL (which President Obama vetoed this February), the Dakota Access Pipeline has taken on large...

Imagine a Where’s Waldo book with nothing butblack and white pictures. Good luck using his candy-stripesweater as a visual cue. Now you know what it’s like trying to find a virus on a greyscale microscopic image. Microbiologists have dealt with this problem for decades, because when things get small, things go dark. Photons, bits of light essential to discerning color, are too clunky to resolve an...

Last summer, as it sped through the Pluto system, the New Horizons spacecraft only had a few hours to pack its memory banks with as much data about the dwarf planetary system as possible. On October 25, the last few hundred bits of that data finally arrived in one of NASA‘s deep space radio dishes. For posterity’s sake, take a moment and remember that before the flyby—a mere 15 months ago—the dwar...

If we get our way and really put humans on Mars in the coming decades, they’re going to need power. NASA has had concrete plants to send people to the Red Planet since 2010—with target dates in the 2030s, while Elon Musk thinks SpaceX can make it to Mars faster. But no matter who gets there first, the power problem remains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Volcanoes have been a persistent feature on Earth since the planet condensed out of the primordial nebula of our solar system. The scale and style of that volcanism has changed dramatically over that 4.5 billion years—heck, after Thera bumped into proto-Earth to form the Moon, we probably had a planet-wide lava lake as the molten Earth coalesced and cooled from the collision. However, we lack much...

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Last week, Tanzania planted its first ever genetically modified crop—a drought-resistant white corn hybrid. Government researchers will spend the next two to three years monitoring the plants for safety and effectiveness at growing in perilously dry conditions. It’s a notable milestone, given the nation’s longstanding lack of enthusiasm towards biotechnology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

When Nathan Copeland got into a car accident in 2004, he suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed in both arms and both legs. Eventually, Copeland got a prosthetic-but one that is very different from most anyone else's out there. Copeland is the first person in the world to use a system created by DARPA and the National Science Foundation, which allows him to "experience" the sensatio...

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's announcement in September that they will pour $3 billion into research, mainly at elite universities in California, with expressed interest to "cure all disease" within a century, was an endearing move from new money billionaires who have pledged to devote their phenomenal wealth to supporting biomedical research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcast...

Everyone knows MacGyver. He's the guy who gets out of sticky situations by cobbling stuff together. Here he is in the reboot, maybe four floors up, with a sudden need to jump from a window. Solution? Use a fire extinguisher and body bag to create an impromptu cushion. Could that really work? First, a disclosure. I'm the technical consultant for MacGyver, which means I check if MacGyver's hacks are...

At their core, data tell stories. They reveal patterns, show changes over time, and confirm or challenge our theories. And in cities across the country, mayors, police chiefs, and other local leaders are turning to data to help them understand and address gun violence, one of the most persistent crises they face. Innovative, data-driven programs are showing encouraging results. Learn more about yo...

The odds are stacked against Haiti. Geologically, it's wedged between tectonic plates, where earthquakes happen. Meteorologically, it's in the center of hurricane alley, where massive storms roil. And historically, the country is forever fighting a colonial legacy that left it largely incapable of recovering from natural disasters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...