This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Almost three weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the island is in a grim state. Fewer than 15 percent of residents have power, and much of the island has no clean drinking water. Delivery of food and other necessities, especially to remote areas, has […]
Late at night, I tend to flip through the channels just to see what's up. If there's a good movie on, I might watch part of it—and recently, I stumbled on Iron Man 3. I know what you're gonna say—that's a terrible superhero movie. But I disagree. Fantastic Four, now that's a terrible superhero movie. […]
What is temperature? This question comes up quite a bit—especially in introductory science courses. The most common answer is something like this: Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in an object. When temperature increases, the motion of these particles also increases. It's not a terrible definition, but it's not […]
You and your favorite cheese—whether it's cheddar, Wensleydale, or a good aged goat brie—have something in common: You’re both home to a constantly evolving menagerie of microbes. The bacteria inside you and your fermented dairy live together in a community called a biome, growing and changing in response to their environments. And they adapt to […]
If Jonathan Rothberg has a superpower, it’s cramming million-dollar, mainframe-sized machines onto single semiconductor circuit boards. The entrepreneurial engineer got famous (and rich) inventing the world’s first DNA sequencer on a chip. And he’s spent the last eight years sinking that expertise (and sizeable startup capital) into a new venture: making your smartphone screen a […]
There’s teamwork—NASA putting people on the moon, for instance, or the Mighty Ducks triumphing over Team Iceland—and then there’s teamwork. A gelatinous sea creature called a salp knows this better than anyone, forming long chains of neurologically connected individuals that work together for the greater good. That is, eating and not dying. A new study […]
Imagine a world without grapes. Someday greenhouses like the one above may be our last defense against such a fate. Beneath the glow of high-voltage lamps, dozens of crop samples grow at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York. Here, Cornell University scientists crossbreed domesticated crops with their wild ancestors to propagate superhardy strains […]
For the last 100 years, ever since German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to pluck fertilizer out of thin air with brute-force chemistry, farmers have relied on an imperfect product to make their plants grow: fertilizer. Production of the stuff burns through 3 percent of the world’s natural gas annually, releases […]
A year ago this week, Chinese physicists launched the world’s first quantum satellite. Unlike the dishes that deliver your Howard Stern and cricket tournaments, this 1,400-pound behemoth doesn’t beam radio waves. Instead, the physicists designed it to send and receive bits of information encoded in delicate photons of infrared light. It’s a test of a […]
Underwater robots do a lot of neat things—take photos of underwater volcanoes, track leopard sharks, and explore shipwrecks—but they could still learn a few things from fish. Especially the rocket-fast, insanely agile tuna. Tuna are built to cruise across oceans, usually around 2 mph. But they can crank up to 45 mph at the drop […]