On September 14, 2015, at 3:50 AM Central time, a tiny vibration shuddered down the 2.5-mile-long arms of a massive machine in Livingston, Louisiana. A fraction of a second later, a similar vibration shook the arms of an identical machine in Hanford, Washington. Eventually, physicists from those facilities confirmed the nature of those twinned tremors: […]
The launch company Rocket Lab has amusing names for its missions. The first, in May, was called “It’s a Test” (it was). When the staff debated what to call the second launch of their diminutive Electron rocket, so sized (and priced) specifically to carry small satellites to space, they said, “Well, we’re still testing, aren’t […]
This story originally appeared on the Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For over 20 years, Thomas Hildebrandt has harbored a dream: to save the northern white rhinoceros, the world’s rarest large mammal. On Monday the scientist received the devastating news that Sudan, the last male of the species, had been put down in his northern […]
“What is the difference between apples and pears?” That’s an old Dutch saying that Ben Nijssen has pondered for his entire life. Any five-year-old could tell you the difference in taste, but a much smaller percentage of the population could speak on the chemical differences between the two fruits. Nijssen, an analytical chemist in the […]
By design, the downtown San Francisco storefront offices of Forward feel more like a spa or a ritzy skin care boutique than a doctors’ office. But the latter thing is true. Despite the sun shining through floor-to-ceiling windows onto pastel walls, blond-wood surfaces and no check-in desk in sight (attractive, casually dressed receptionists with iPads […]
In the early 2000s, Greg Wyler, former founder of a semiconductor company, was laying fiber in Africa. He wanted to do something that mattered. Semiconductors didn’t matter, you know? But linking people to each other and to information did, he thought. “The lesser educated version of myself said, ‘Fiber is the answer,'" says Wyler. "'I’ll […]
The world is full of water, flushing down our toilets and flowing from our taps. And yet where I live, in the American Southwest, and quite possibly where you live, the kind of water people need to survive is getting harder to come by. Across the region, temperatures are rising and droughts are getting more […]
As the Milky Way was growing, taking shape, and minding its own business around 10 billion years ago, it suffered a massive head-on collision with another, smaller galaxy. That cosmic cataclysm changed the Milky Way’s structure forever, shaping the thick spirals that spin out from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. Two new […]
Travel with me to the year 2100. Despite our best efforts, climate change continues to threaten humanity. Drought, superstorms, flooded coastal cities. Desperate to stop the warming, scientists deploy planes to spray sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, where it converts into a sulfate aerosol, which reflects sunlight. Thus the planet cools because, yes, chemtrails. It’s […]
Even in retirement, Chimp the robot’s still got it. The giant red humanoid crouches down like a Transformer to roll on all fours, then stands up and slowly approaches a door. It sees its world by coating it in lasers, allowing Chimp to reach for the handle, delicately turn it, and roll through the entry. […]