At the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco Sunday evening, Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini robot got onstage and did what no other quadruped robot has done before: It danced the running man like it was born to. It was a bit more, well, robotic than a human, but it illustrated just how far Spot has come: Twenty-five […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yogurt containers, and other items into recycling bins. But in the past three months, half of these recyclables have been loaded onto trucks, […]
Check this out. It looks like a magic wand that makes things float, but it's just plain physics. I guess that's what makes these kinds of toys so cool. They do things that go against our everyday experiences. Normally stuff doesn't just hang in the air like this. But how does it work? The answer […]
Bad news from the high seas: the Ocean Cleanup’s 600-meter-long floating tube, which was supposed to catch plastic whilst somehow surviving the relentless forces of the ocean, has done neither. In November, the organization—which has raised $40 million from donors and companies—announced that the thing wasn’t really catching plastic, and last week it said the […]
The stone in Kurt Steiner's hand is roughly circular, four inches wide, flat on one side and irregularly dimpled on the other, like a petrified chocolate chunk cookie. He handles it with a card dealer's deftness, searching its surface for divots, notches, ridges—any irregularities that will lend his fingers the purchase they need to clutch […]
The kids are not messing around. Across the planet today, in 100 countries and every state in the US, thousands upon thousands of children skipped school and took to the streets with a message for the adults: Save the world you broke. The walkout was one of the biggest protests against climate change ever organized. […]
When Piraye Beim went to her first OBGYN visit more than two decades ago, she got a pap smear and an earful about avoiding STDs. She didn’t learn in that visit that the fact she was having excruciating periods as a teenager might mean she could have trouble conceiving later in life. She definitely didn’t […]
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There’s a specter hanging over the COP24 climate talks, happening this week in the small city of Katowice, Poland. It’s not the goalpost-moving report that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released two months ago about the need to limit […]
After three bitter years and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, the epic battle over who owns one of the most common methods for editing the DNA in any living thing is finally drawing to a close. On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decisive ruling on […]
Instead of figuring out how many Pacific hake fishermen can catch sustainably, as his job demands, scientist Ian Taylor is at home with his four-month old daughter, biding his time through the partial government shutdown. Taylor’s task is to assess the size and age of hake and other commercially harvested fish species in the productive […]