I can’t sit here and promise you that the robot apocalypse isn’t coming, that the machines won’t eventually rise up and overthrow their makers. But what I can promise you is that not all of them will be able to punch you out. Because robots are going soft. Like, literally soft, controlled with liquid or […]
As powerful as the gene-editing technique Crispr is turning out to be—researchers are using it to make malaria-proof mosquitoes, disease-resistant tomatoes, live bacteria thumb drives, and all kinds of other crazy stuff—so far US scientists have had one bright line: no heritable modifications of human beings. On Wednesday, the bright line got dimmer. MIT Technology […]
Update: On December 20, 2017 the House approved the GOP's overhaul to the nation’s tax code. A provision in the plan had originally proposed taxing graduate students’ tuition waivers. But in the final version of the combined House-Senate tax bill, which now makes its way to President Trump to be signed into law, tuition waivers […]
Chemotherapy is brutal. The drugs are delivered in near-toxic doses to penetrate tumor tissues, indiscriminately vanquishing the patient’s appetite, hair, and immune system alongside cancer cells. Scientists have tried everything from nanoparticles to homing-beacon bacteria to better target the disease. Now researchers at Germany’s Institute for Integrative Nanosciences are deploying a natural-born infiltrator: sperm. The […]
Gone is the boss who loved first-class travel to places like Morocco and Rome, forced his staffers to find him an apartment (and a used Trump hotel mattress), and asked fast-food executives to hire his wife. But EPA administrator Scott Pruitt's many scandals haven't been the real bugaboo for environmental advocates—rather, it's been his rollback […]
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Until she moved to Fresno, California in 2003, Janet DietzKamei had never experienced asthma. But after just a few years in a city notorious for its filthy air—the American Lung Association lists it in the five worst US cities for air quality—DietzKamei found herself in […]
Snakes, serpents, danger noodles. Whatever you call them, you’ve gotta respect them. I mean, have you tried getting around without any arms or legs? (Also, they can bite you.) The snake’s ambulatory secret is its special belly scales, which grip a surface like cleat spikes to help the reptile push forward. And now that secret […]
Bijunath Patla’s experiment sounds like a real bore: Gather 12 of the most accurate clocks around the world, and watch them tick. It’s like a physicist’s version of watching paint dry. Patla’s team, based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, began monitoring the clocks on November 11, 1999. And they’ve […]
Children’s blocks lie scattered on the floor. You start playing with them—squares, rectangles, triangles and hexagons—moving them around, flipping them over, seeing how they fit together. You feel a primal satisfaction from arranging these shapes into a perfect pattern, an experience you’ve probably enjoyed many times. But of all the blocks designed to lie flat […]
Update: SpaceX scrubbed Thursday's launch after an abort during the countdown sequence. The next window opened Friday at 4:14pm Eastern. The Falcon 9 successfully launched and its first stage landed on the drone ship off the coast of Florida, which marks the company's 25th landing. SpaceX is set to launch the Block 5 version of […]