Give a man a fish, the old saying goes, and you feed him for a day—teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Same goes for robots, with the exception that robots feed exclusively on electricity. The problem is figuring out the best way to teach them. Typically, robots get fairly […]
Q: What is an atmospheric river? A: Join me in song.* —three-four! Don’t know why it’s raining this wayAll this water and skies are so grayPack an umbrella; wear some Gore-TexYou haven’t seen the worst of it yetI wanna knoooooow you won’t tell meThis rain’s gonna stay Atmospheric river, drops on us the waterAtmospheric river, […]
The Breakthrough Prizes are unlike anything else in science. Instead of the hum of lab equipment, there’s Orlando Bloom. Instead of donning lab coats, the scientists find themselves marching down a red carpet in their black-tie best. And rather than receiving grants from NASA or the National Science Foundation, the researchers in attendance have come […]
Boaty McBoatface may be better known for its name than for its oceangoing prowess. But the autonomous underwater vehicle and darling of the internet is headed to greater things: embarking on the longest journey of an AUV by far, with an uninterrupted, roughly 2,000-mile crossing of the Arctic Ocean. The submersible robot got its moniker […]
In 2003, scientists at London’s Imperial College hatched a somewhat out-there idea. They wanted to deal with the increasingly pesticide-resistant mosquitoes that were killing half a million people a year by spreading malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. What biologists Austin Burt and Andrea Crisanti proposed was nothing short of hacking the laws of heredity. By planting […]
There's really no way to rehearse landing on Mars. You can simulate it, sure, but the most valuable lessons are learned during actual attempts. When things go poorly, those lessons are also the most expensive. The fact is, most missions to Mars don't make it, though NASA has a better track record than most. The […]
Few drugs are as two-faced as ketamine. By day, it works as a legitimate anesthetic, sitting comfortably on the World Health Organization’s list of Essential Medicines. By night, though, it moonlights as a party drug, sending users into an intense dissociative state (read: not in touch with reality) known as a K-hole. Of late, ketamine […]
Helicopters got to Wilmington, North Carolina, after a day of isolation; Hurricane Florence made landfall there, and the city, with one foot in the Atlantic and the other in the Cape Fear River, soon became an island. Its main roads underwater, Wilmington went without help until boats and choppers reached it with medical supplies, water, […]
I'll be honest. I really have no idea what's happening in this trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home. But no matter, I'm still super pumped. You know what happens when I get excited? Yup, I start doing physics calculations. So, let's look at one part of this trailer and try to figure some stuff out. […]
Astronomers have finally found the last of the missing universe. It’s been hiding since the mid-1990s, when researchers decided to inventory all the “ordinary” matter in the cosmos—stars and planets and gas, anything made out of atomic parts. (This isn’t “dark matter,” which remains a wholly separate enigma.) They had a pretty good idea of […]