Since NASA’s Juno mission began orbiting Jupiter and sending data back to Earth last July, Juno scientists have all sounded pretty alike: They are very excited, and very confused. “Almost nothing is as we anticipated,” Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton told WIRED in May. “But it’s exciting that Jupiter is so different than we assumed.” […]
It's still near the beginning of the semester for most introductory physics courses—so it's not too late to give some physics advice. I know it might be hard to believe—at least it is for me—but I have been a physics educator in one form or another for over 20 years. In all that time, I […]
The baby was still in diapers when the first blister appeared, ballooning red and angry from his pale, newborn skin. Soon, they became a regular feature on the map of his body, along with deep creases in his face when he howled out in pain. A doctor told the parents his LAMB3 gene had a […]
In Gerald Grant’s line of work, there isn’t such a thing as an “average” patient. As a chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Stanford University Medical Center, the children that come into his operating room are unique, each requiring a complex surgical procedure tailored to the architecture of a young brain. But that doesn’t mean he […]
This year, government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are placing their bets on a warmer-than-average winter. In the East and southern two-thirds of the country, temperatures will be higher than normal, while Southern California, Texas, and Florida will be drier than usual. At first glance, this pattern looks a lot like the […]
In 2009, Dan Hooper and his colleagues found a glow coming from the center of our galaxy that no one had ever noticed before. After analyzing publicly available data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, a satellite launched a year earlier, the team concluded that the center of the Milky Way was radiating more […]
Conventional pharmaceuticals aren't always the best way to treat an ailment. Drugs are often imprecise, unpredictable, or come along with tricky side effects. Medicine is always trying to move on to more targeted treatments. And soon, robots will be one of those options: small and mobile, they could theoretically deliver pharmaceuticals right where they’re needed, […]
This story has been updated as of 4:45 pm EDT on Tuesday, August 29. Hurricanes are classified according to their wind speed. But a truer measure of their destructive potential would also include their moisture level. Just before making landfall on Friday night, Hurricane Harvey jumped up to become a category 4 hurricane, with sustained […]
Coral isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t a plant, but an animal. It doesn’t just grow in shallow, tropical waters, but also hundreds of feet deep in the darkness. And it is far tougher than doom-and-gloom stories about coral bleaching would have you believe. For all that science knows about coral reefs, these […]
For years, the total solar eclipse of August 21—the first to be visible in the mainland United States since 1979—has been in stealth mode. With the exception of the enthusiasts who’ve been snatching up all the hotel rooms along the eclipse’s 70-mile-wide, 2,800-mile-long path from Oregon to South Carolina, nobody really knew it was coming. […]