You’ve heard that social media is screwing with your brain. Maybe you even read about it on social media. (So meta; so messed up.) The neurochemical culprit, dopamine, spikes when you like and get liked, share and are shared. You’ve probably also heard scientists compare the affliction to drug or alcohol addiction. That’s fair. The […]
Q: What does it mean to be a super blood wolf moon? A: Like presidential elections and celebrity drama, the beauty and intrigue of lunar events lies in their regularity. Supermoon! Blood moon! Harvest moon! Wolf harvest sturgeon blue blood pink worm supermoon! Alright, maybe that last one isn’t a thing (a pink moon being […]
Antarctica is the driest, highest, windiest, and, of course, coldest continent. Since it’s nearly uninhabitable for humans, it’s also the cleanest. That makes it the perfect place to launch an odyssey aimed at persuading people to curb their plastic-pitching habits. In late November, Dutch couple Liesbeth and Edwin ter Velde were preparing to set out […]
Last Sunday, as much of the country tuned into the Super Bowl, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and a crew of engineers were gathered in McGregor, Texas, the small city where the company maintains a rocket test site. For a few seconds in the early evening, the sound of a new engine roared across the flatlands. […]
Sometimes Vikki Preston is inching her way through the forest when she comes across a grove of tan oak trees that feels special. The plants are healthy, the trees are old, and their trunks are nicely spaced out on the forest floor. “You can feel that the grove has been taken care of,” she says. […]
Pleurothallis portillae is one odd-looking orchid. Sporting a small nub of a flower nestled in a long, bulbous leaf that droops like a pair of string beans, it’s considered fashionably drab by collectors. But its true home is in the remote cloud forest of the Ecuadorian Andes—a region where, according to an algorithm, it’s most […]
Three engineers walk into a bar to design a spaceship … but the ending of that sentence is no joke. Eight years ago, those three engineers were friends who shared a common dream of reaching the moon. Today a SpaceX rocket will ship their washing-machine-sized spacecraft off to our closest neighbor—a first for private industry. […]
Give a man a fish, the old saying goes, and you feed him for a day—teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Same goes for robots, with the exception that robots feed exclusively on electricity. The problem is figuring out the best way to teach them. Typically, robots get fairly […]
Q: What is an atmospheric river? A: Join me in song.* —three-four! Don’t know why it’s raining this wayAll this water and skies are so grayPack an umbrella; wear some Gore-TexYou haven’t seen the worst of it yetI wanna knoooooow you won’t tell meThis rain’s gonna stay Atmospheric river, drops on us the waterAtmospheric river, […]
The Breakthrough Prizes are unlike anything else in science. Instead of the hum of lab equipment, there’s Orlando Bloom. Instead of donning lab coats, the scientists find themselves marching down a red carpet in their black-tie best. And rather than receiving grants from NASA or the National Science Foundation, the researchers in attendance have come […]