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 […]
“Gender and climate are inextricably linked,” said environmentalist and author Katharine Wilkinson on stage at TEDWomen last week, a gathering of women thought leaders and activists in Palm Desert, California. Women, she says, are disproportionately affected by climate change. When communities are decimated by floods or droughts, tsunamis or fire, the most vulnerable among them […]
The internet is oozing (dripping? spurting?) with recipes for fake blood, but to get the exact color and consistency your Halloween costume calls for—be it bright and wet or dark and crusty—your best bet is to brew your own bloody concoction. To do it, it helps to know the properties of blood that you're approximating […]
It sounds like a drastic course of action: inject stuff high into Earth’s atmosphere to reflect a little sunlight and help counteract global warming. Then again, injecting a bunch of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and warming the planet was pretty drastic, too. The key to thinking sensibly about this “solar geoengineering” is to avoid […]