On Monday, November 26th, following a six-month journey across hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, NASA's InSight spacecraft will arrive at Mars in suitably dramatic fashion, hitting the top of the planet's atmosphere at 12,300 miles per hour—several times faster than a speeding bullet—shortly before 12:00 pm PST (3:00 pm EST). If all […]
WIRED ICON Jill Tarter, cofounder of the SETI Institute NOMINATES Margaret Turnbull, astronomer investigating alien biology When she met Jill Tarter more than two decades ago, one of Margaret Turnbull’s first questions was, “How can somebody work with you?” Tarter was leading the Center for SETI Research at the time; Turnbull was an astronomy student. […]
Half a century ago, astronauts aboard NASA's Apollo 8 mission become the first humans to leave low Earth orbit, traverse the 240,000 miles separating our planet from its moon, and loop around that natural satellite to look upon its forever-hidden far side (not dark side) with their own eyes. The first crewed voyage to orbit […]
About ten years ago, British veterinarians discovered an unlucky family of King Charles Spaniels whose male pups sometimes came down with a mysterious set of maladies before their first birthday. They grew clumsy and weak, and they often choked on their own tongues. To blame was a mutation on their X chromosomes, in a gene […]
On the third floor of a back building on Verily’s South San Francisco campus, 10 white machines emit a low-pitched hum. Atop each one sits a plastic container so jammed with tubes and sensors it looks like a protein shake on life support. Inside, beige-colored broth bubbles away while tiny high-res cameras capture the frothy […]
In my family, Thanksgiving this year has turned into a weeklong holiday. Not because we’re all so fanatical about celebrating the violent European colonization of North America, but because it will take us that long to figure out what on earth to put on the table. In a party of 12 we’ve got a duo […]
Climate science made a big comeback on Capitol Hill yesterday, with two separate hearings underway on the same day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2018 the fourth-hottest year on record and revealed that climate-related weather events caused $91 billion in damages to the US economy. The last time that climate change was […]
Bounding around on giant hind limbs, using its giant tail to balance, the well-named giant kangaroo rat of Southern California is half Pokemon, half Mighty Mouse. It emerges at night to forage on seeds, building up underground stores. When it’s not busy foraging, it’s busy scrapping with its peers to claim territory. It dominates these […]
Let’s say you have a baby. Maybe you really do, maybe you don’t. But Dan Scolnic, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, does have one, and perhaps that's why a hypothetical baby helps him explain the universe. If you take this baby to the doctor, that doctor will weigh and measure the baby, plot […]
Shimmering in pools on industrial hogs farms in North Carolina, several million tons of urine and feces await the arrival of Hurricane Florence. The state is home to about as many pigs as it is people. Its hog farms are a major part of the state economy, with many of them concentrated in the eastern […]