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What if Ketamine Actually Works Like an Opioid?

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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 […]

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The Science Behind Home Disaster Preparedness Kits Is a Disaster

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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, […]

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The Formidable Physics of Spider-Man's Water Monster

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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. […]

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Astronomers Have Found the Universe's Missing Matter

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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 […]

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Why the Gene Editors of Tomorrow Need to Study Ethics Today

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WIRED ICON Jennifer Doudna, Crispr pioneer NOMINATES Jiwoo Lee, Crispr wunderkind, Stanford sophomore Two years after biochemist Jennifer Doudna helped introduce the world to the gene-editing tool known as Crispr, a 14-year-old from New Jersey turned it loose on a petri dish full of lung cancer cells, disrupting their ability to multiply. “In high school, […]