No One Knows How Far Bird Flu Has Spread
In late March, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it had detected cases of bird flu in dairy cattle. Initially discovered in dairy farms in Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico, there are now 36 confirmed outbreaks in dairy herds…
How to Test the Reliability of Electrical Boards
Reliability of Electrical Boards If you are responsible for ensuring that printed circuit boards (PCBs) meet performance specifications, you need to conduct tests that can verify their structural and operational reliability. This requires a combination of visual inspection and electronic…
Get Ready for Monster Hurricanes This Summer
Three main factors converge to intensify hurricanes. The first is that as the world in general warms, so too do the oceans. Water evaporating off the surface rises, releasing heat that fuels the developing hurricane. The warmer a patch of…
China Has a Controversial Plan for Brain-Computer Interfaces
At a tech forum in Beijing last week, a Chinese company unveiled a “homegrown” brain-computer interface that allowed a monkey to seemingly control a robotic arm just by thinking about it. In a video shown at the event, a monkey…
What Testing Processes Are Integral to Microwave PCB?
Testing Processes Are Integral to Microwave PCB Microwave pcb are a specialized category of PCB that operate at high frequencies. They are able to capture and transmit signals with minimal loss or distortion, making them essential for many extraordinary applications…
The Uncomfortable Truth About the UK’s Climate Policies
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels like a really pivotal moment in this narrative. In the autumn of 2022, energy prices in the UK were skyrocketing, and yet the response of Liz Truss, prime minister at the time, was to double…
Can flex pcb design be used in high-temperature applications?
Can flex pcb design be used A flex circuit board combines thin substrates with high levels of bendability, tensile strength, and physical flexibility. It can be molded into complex three-dimensional shapes, making it suitable for applications such as heads-up displays…
The Mysterious ‘Dark’ Energy That Permeates the Universe Is Slowly Eroding
Beyond DESI, a slew of new instruments are coming online in the coming years, including the 8.4-meter Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission. “Our data in cosmology has…
1 in 3 Americans Live in Areas With Dangerous Air Pollution
For Gaddy, who is African American, the report’s findings confirm what she and her neighbors in Newark’s predominantly Black South Ward have experienced for years. Gaddy and her three children were all diagnosed with asthma; her eldest child died of…
Can rigid flex PCBs be used in wearable technology
rigid flex PCBs be used in wearable technology The advancement of wearable technology has seen the introduction of many new devices, including fitness trackers, medical sensors and augmented reality headsets. The unique requirement of wearable technology is the need for…
Doctors Combined a Heart Pump and Pig Kidney Transplant in Breakthrough Surgery
A 54-year-old New Jersey woman has become the second living person to receive a genetically engineered pig kidney. The surgery, carried out at NYU Langone Health on April 12, also involved transplanting the pig’s thymus gland to help prevent rejection….
The Role of Stencil Printing in Flexible Circuit Board Manufacturers
Stencil Printing in Flexible Circuit Board Manufacturers Stencil printing plays a critical role in surface mount assembly. It distributes paste, or adhesive, on the PCB substrate to prepare it for component placement and solder reflow. In a stencil-based system, the…
How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away
Throughout the five months of troubleshooting, Voyager’s ground team continued to receive signals indicating the spacecraft was still alive. But until Saturday, they lacked insight into specific details about the status of Voyager 1. “It’s pretty much just the way…
How Does MICROVIA HDI Technology Impact High-Speed Digital Applications?
MICROVIA HDI Technology HDI technology impacts high-speed digital applications such as smartphones and tablets, enabling designers to integrate complex circuitry into sleek devices with enhanced performance. It is also used in wearable devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, facilitating…
Plant-Based Meat Boomed. Here Comes the Bust
Over the past three years, the plant-based meat industry has experienced a major reversal in vibes. Sales boomed in the early months of the pandemic, as slaughterhouse shutdowns disrupted conventional meat supply chains and shoppers started trying out meatless burgers,…
Green Roofs Are Great. Blue-Green Roofs Are Even Better
Courtesy of De Dakdokters Below that stretches a filter layer, which keeps the soil from getting into the next layer, a lightweight crate system that stores the water. And finally, below that you’ve got additional layers to keep water and…
The Next Frontier for Brain Implants Is Artificial Vision
Brian Bussard has 25 tiny chips in his brain. They were installed in February 2022 as part of a study testing a wireless device designed to produce rudimentary vision in blind people. Bussard is the first participant. Bussard, who’s 56,…
Here’s a Clever Way to Uncover America’s Voting Deserts
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10 percent of Georgia’s…
We Finally Know Where Neuralink’s Brain Implant Trial Is Happening
Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink has chosen the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, as the initial study site to test its Telepathy device. The first participant in Neuralink’s study, Noah Arbaugh, underwent a successful procedure at the institute in…
How One Corporation Is Cashing In on America’s Drought
On its website, Greenstone describes itself as “a water company” and as “a developer and owner of reliable, sustainable water supplies.” Its CEO, Mike Schlehuber, previously worked for Vidler Water Company—another firm that essentially brokers water supply—as well as Summit…
Environmental Damage Could Cost You a Fifth of Your Income Over the Next 25 Years
Kotz, Levermann, and Wenz suggest that this is an indication of warming we’re already committed to, in part because the effect of past emissions hasn’t been felt in its entirety and partly because the global economy is a boat that…
Unruly Gut Fungi Can Make Your Covid Worse
When the team infected mice with Candida albicans strains taken from the severely affected Covid patients, they discovered that the mice generated increased fungal antibodies and neutrophils. And when they then treated these infected mice with the common antifungal drug…
NASA Confirms Where the Space Junk That Hit a Florida House Came From
NASA has confirmed that the object that fell into a Florida home last month was part of a battery pack released from the International Space Station. This extraordinary incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, the homeowner, and…
The Rise of the Carbon Farmer
Patrick Holden strolls across the field, pausing from time to time to bend and point out a bumblebee, or a white butterfly, or a dung beetle. A wide expanse of blue sky stretches above. Beneath, undulating green hills, sprawling hedgerows,…
The Atlas Robot Is Dead. Long Live the Atlas Robot
You don’t need to have been petrified by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Skynet-commissioned cyborg assassin in 1984’s The Terminator to fret that super-strong, all-terrain, bipedal humanoid robots sprinting up steps, pulling backflips, and righting themselves could be programmed to break our necks…
No, Dubai’s Floods Weren’t Caused by Cloud Seeding
Dubai is underwater. Heavy storms have caused flash flooding across the United Arab Emirates, leading to shocking scenes circulating on social media: Cars abandoned by the roadside, planes sloshing through flooded runways. Hundreds of flights have been canceled at Dubai’s…
They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War
The Allied soldiers who weren’t killed limped back from the defeat. It was clear now, they needed to be able to creep up to the beaches days before a raid to get up-to-date information. They needed to know where the…
US Infrastructure Is Broken. Here’s an $830 Million Plan to Fix It
There’s one word that will get any American fuming, regardless of their political inclination: infrastructure. Pothole-pocked roads, creaky bridges, and half-baked public transportation bind us nationally like little else can. And that was before climate change’s coastal flooding, extreme heat,…
It Takes Guts to Fix Wind Turbines for a Living
Maybe you think they’re majestic. Maybe you think they’re an eyesore. No matter how you feel about wind turbines, there’ll be a lot more of them in coming years. And someone will have to keep each one of them spinning….
The Paradox That’s Supercharging Climate Change
No good deed goes unpunished—and that includes trying to slow climate change. By cutting greenhouse gas emissions, humanity will spew out fewer planet-cooling aerosols—small particles of pollution that act like tiny umbrellas to bounce some of the sun’s energy back…
The Quest to Map the Inside of the Proton
“How are matter and energy distributed?” asked Peter Schweitzer, a theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut. “We don’t know.” Schweitzer has spent most of his career thinking about the gravitational side of the proton. Specifically, he’s interested in a…
Toronto Wants to Manage Storms and Floods—With a Rain Tax
This story originally appeared on Canada’s National Observer and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A plan to charge Toronto homeowners and businesses for paved surfaces on their properties is creating a public backlash, a deluge of negative international…
Space Force Is Planning a Military Exercise in Orbit
The Victus Haze mission is more complicated than Victus Nox, involving two prime contractors, two spacecraft, and two rocket launches from different spaceports, all timed to occur with short timelines “to keep the demonstration as realistic as possible,” a Space…
Can You Really Run on Top of a Train, Like in the Movies?
Just because you see something done in a movie, that doesn’t mean you should try it yourself. Take, for example, a human running on top of a moving train. For starters, you can’t be sure it’s real. In early Westerns,…
Europe Rules That Insufficient Climate Change Action Is a Human Rights Violation
Despite this, the positive ruling for the KlimaSeniorinnen is being touted as hugely significant by legal experts. In this case, the court did not accept complaints from individuals within the group, but it did accept complaints made by the group…
Bird Flu Is Spreading in Alarming New Ways
As a recent example of what may ensue, Pitesky points to the repeated African swine fever outbreaks across various Asian countries in the past decade, which decimated the pig farming industry to the extent that pork was briefly usurped by…
The Honeybees Versus the Murder Hornets
Teams of volunteers now hunt Asian hornets landing on British soil, but detection is only the tip of the iceberg, says Elmes. The true challenge is tracing the hornet back to its nest, to destroy the colony. “If something can…
Mexico City’s Metro System Is Sinking Fast. Yours Could Be Next
Solano‐Rojas and his colleagues found subsidence in the area of an overpass near the Olivos station, which collapsed in 2021 while a Metro train was traveling over it. “We did part of this analysis before 2021, and we detected that…
This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born
Walk me through your own decision to do this—to use Orchid’s technology on yourself. I mean, I started the company because I wanted to test my own embryos. Because of your mom, or because of who you are as a…
Elon Musk’s Latest Mars Pitch Has Potential
Elon Musk has been talking publicly about his sweeping vision for Mars settlement for nearly eight years now, dating to a speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September 2016. This weekend, at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, Musk once again…
The Best Total Solar Eclipse Photos (2024)
The arrival of the total solar eclipse in the US has brought with it an impressive array of photographs as well. If you weren’t able to find a spot to view the eclipse in person—or if it was stuck behind…
Why the East Coast Earthquake Covered So Much Ground
Friday morning at around 10:30 local time, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake popped three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Though nowhere near the magnitude of the West Coast’s monster quakes, the seismic waves traveled hundreds of miles, jostling not just…
A Popular Alien-Hunting Technique Is Increasingly in Doubt
The third factor is the probability of a lifeless planet producing the observed signal—an equally serious challenge, researchers now realize, that’s tangled up in the problem of unconceived abiotic alternatives. “That’s the probability that we argue you can’t fill in…
Total Solar Eclipse of April 8, 2024: Watch Online, What Time, Path of Totality
It’s shadow time, baby! Soon, people living in North America will get to experience their first solar eclipse in almost a decade. Even though the last solar eclipse in North America happened in 2017, the next one isn’t expected until…
How Will the Solar Eclipse Affect Animals? NASA Needs Your Help to Find Out
In other anecdotes, onlookers have reported birds that stop singing, crickets that stopped chirping, or bees that return to their hive, reduce their foraging, or suspend their flight during total darkness. But there are also studies that deny that some…
Searching for ‘Forever Chemicals’ From an Endless Landfill Fire
Testing done by ADEM, Butler said, also did not assess water samples taken from sites closest to the dump. And while PFAS compounds are certainly common, he said, experts have concluded that elevated levels in the human body can be…
He Got a Pig Kidney Transplant. Now Doctors Need to Keep It Working
Other than rejection of the organ, one of the most common transplant complications is infection. Doctors have to strike a balance when prescribing immunosuppressive drugs: too low a dose can lead to rejection, while too much can make a patient…
Can You View a Round Solar Eclipse Through a Square Hole?
If you live in the US and missed the last total solar eclipse in 2017, good news! You’re about to get another chance. There will be a total solar eclipse passing through Texas and the Midwest states on April 8….
These Women Came to Antarctica for Science. Then the Predators Emerged
On April 12, 2019, Boston University finally fired David Marchant for sexually harassing Willenbring. (The university said it could not corroborate her claims of physical and psychological abuse.) Marchant released a statement, which the journal Science quoted as vowing that…
International Space Station Trash May Have Hit This Florida House
A few weeks ago, something from the heavens came crashing through the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home, and NASA is on the case. In all likelihood, this nearly 2-pound object came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore…
‘In 24 Hours, You’ll Have Your Pills:’ American Women Are Traveling to Mexico for Abortions
Together with Floridians Protecting Freedom, Hochkammer and her team are calling for an amendment that would make it unconstitutional to pass legislation limiting access to abortion prior to viability or when necessary for a patient’s health. A total of 890,000…
This Bag of Cells Could Grow New Livers Inside of People
In early experiments, Lagasse found that if he injected healthy liver cells into the lymph nodes of mice, the cells would flourish and form a second, smaller liver to take over the functions of the animal’s failing one. The new…
Scientists Are Unlocking the Secrets of Your ‘Little Brain’
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the…
One Couple's Quest to Ditch Natural Gas
Two climate journalists decided to decarbonize their home. Here’s what happened.
Enjoy Your Favorite Wine Before Climate Change Destroys It
More subtly, heat influences volatile compounds that turn into gas—that’s the “nose” you get when tasting wine—which break down under higher temperatures. “The profiles tend to get pushed to what sensory scientists would call the ‘cooked’ side of the spectrum:…
The Next Heat Pump Frontier? NYC Apartment Windows
“There’s a massive difference in the amount of heat that our system is putting out when a user asks for heat to be comfortable versus a radiator which dumps tons of extra heat into the room,” says Vince Romanin, CEO…
Smartphones Do or Don’t Harm Kids! So Which Is It?
The anti-smartphone movement is having a moment. On March 25, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning children under 14 from social media platforms. In February, the UK government backed tighter guidance to keep children from using their smartphones…
Unveiling the Intricacies of RF PCB Design
Intricacies of RF PCB Design In the vast realm of wireless communication, Radio Frequency Printed Circuit Boards (RF PCBs) stand as the unsung heroes, orchestrating the seamless transmission of data across various devices. While often overlooked, these specialized circuit boards…
The Earth Will Feast on Dead Cicadas
Much like an unexpected free dinner will distract you from the leftovers sitting in your fridge, this summer’s cicada emergence will turn predators away from their usual prey. During the 2021 Brood X emergence, Zoe Getman-Pickering, a scientist in Lill’s…
Meet the Designer Behind Neuralink’s Surgical Robot
As a designer, what safety considerations did you have to think about with the Neuralink device? The primary safety considerations weren’t so much on the device but on the robot. We had a small role to play, which was to…
The Next Generation of Cancer Drugs Will Be Made in Space
During the course, King was part of a team tasked with identifying research that could be conducted in space with the best potential impact on humankind. Her team landed on the concept of crystallizing drugs in microgravity. There was data…
Why the Baltimore Bridge Collapsed So Quickly
Photographs of the aftermath show the bow of the ship pinned beneath fallen sections of the bridge. The anchor chain is visible, meaning that at some point the anchor was dropped, though it is not certain whether this happened before…
The Real Reason Why Some Abortion Pill Patients Go to the ER
Today the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in a consequential case that threatens to curb access to medication abortion across the country. A central issue in the case is the safety of the drug mifepristone, the…
The World’s E-Waste Has Reached a Crisis Point
The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it…
Are You Noise Sensitive? Here’s How to Tell
The sympathetic nervous system kicks in, boosting your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, and triggering the body to produce inflammatory cells. Over time, these changes can lead to chronic inflammation, high blood pressure, and plaque buildup on your arterial…
Large Language Models’ Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large…
How to View April’s Total Solar Eclipse, Online and In Person
It’s shadow time, baby! Soon, people living in North America will get to experience their first solar eclipse in almost a decade. Even though the last solar eclipse in North America happened in 2017, the next one isn’t expected until…
The US Is About to Drown in a Sea of Kittens
Scientists, conservationists, and cat advocates all agree that unchecked outdoor cat populations are a problem, but they remain deeply divided on solutions. While some conservationists propose the targeted killing of cats, known as culling, cat populations have been observed to…
There Are Already More Measles Cases in the US This Year Than All of 2023
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association sent out separate but similar pleas on Monday for unvaccinated Americans to get vaccinated against the extremely contagious measles virus as vaccination rates have slipped, cases are rising…
Specifying the Bend Radius for a Flexible Printed Circuit
Bend Radius for a Flexible Printed Circuit When designing a flexible printed circuit, you must specify the bend radius for your design. It is the minimum degree that a flex PCB can bend before it begins to experience permanent damage,…
Why You Hear Voices in Your White Noise Machine
Every night, I—like millions of others—put on a noise machine to help me sleep. Mine offers several types of noise: white, pink, green, and brown. I’ve noticed something strange, though. After about 30 minutes of the noise pumping into my…
.jpg)
The Feds Are Trying to Get Plants to Mine Metal Through Their Roots
“Just like we do research with corn, wheat, soybean, getting these plants to be more efficient in taking up nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium—well, there needs to be this research that goes into understanding the mechanisms of metal hyperaccumulation,” says McNear. “And…
A Gene-Edited Pig Kidney Was Just Transplanted Into a Person for the First Time
Slayman received his first kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor. The donor kidney initially functioned well, but Slayman started to go into kidney failure after years of living with diabetes. Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney disease,…
Europe Is Struggling to Coexist With Wild Bears
It was around 5 pm on March 15, and the light was fading fast, when Constantin and Tatiana were attacked by the bear. The young couple, aged 29 and 31 and identified in local media reports only by their first…
Neuralink’s First Human Subject Demonstrates His Brain-Computer Interface
On Wednesday, Neuralink introduced the first human subject to receive the company’s brain implant, a 29-year-old man who has been paralyzed from the shoulders down for eight years after a diving accident. In a brief livestream on the social media…
Illegal Trawlers Are No Match for Undersea Sculptures
As a carbon sink, seagrass has other advantages too. It’s unlikely to catch fire and release large quantities of carbon back into the atmosphere at once, for example. But it is vulnerable to other threats. Increased coastal erosion can muddy…
Google DeepMind’s New AI Model Can Help Soccer Teams Take the Perfect Corner
Working with player-tracking data from 7,176 corners taken in the Premier League during 2020 and 2021, the researchers began by representing the arrangement of players as a graph, with the players’ position, movement, height, and weight encoded as nodes on…
How to Live Forever
A Nobel Prize–winning biologist explores the science and charlatans of life-extension.
Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual…
A Startup Will Try to Mine Helium-3 on the Moon
Two of Blue Origin’s earliest employees, former president Rob Meyerson and chief architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here. The company…
The Global Danger of Boring Buildings
We need to make the exterior parts of buildings that people focus on more interesting, so that people want to protect rather than replace them. But most people aren’t architects or city planners—they can’t change the designs of what’s being…
Insurance Rates Are Soaring for US Homeowners in Climate Danger Zones
The First Street Foundation study points out that insurers could offer discounts to homeowners who take steps to fortify their homes, which would help make disasters less damaging. Moore said Florida once was a leader when it came to measures…
A Pill That Kills Ticks Is a Promising New Weapon Against Lyme Disease
If you have a dog or cat, chances are you’ve given your pet a flavored chewable tablet for tick prevention at some point. What if you could take a similar pill to protect yourself from getting Lyme disease? Tarsus Pharmaceuticals…
The Designer Who’s Trying to Transform Your City Into a Sponge
Your city isn’t prepared for what’s coming. The classical method for dealing with stormwater is to get it out of town as quickly as possible, with gutters and sewers and canals. But more and more, that strategy is breaking down:…
States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat
The pushback from legislators sympathetic to ranchers and the broader meat industry puts cultivated meat companies in a difficult situation. Major meat producers Cargill and Tyson have both invested in cultivated meat companies, while Brazil’s JBS is working on a…
You Can Count on Pi
For geeks, there are several great holidays on the calendar. There is of course Mole Day (10/23) to commemorate Avogadro’s number, which is huge (on the order of 1023) and hugely important in physics. There’s e Day (2/7) for Euler’s…
Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health, Wherever You Are
Extreme heat kills roughly half a million people worldwide each year, but at the current rate of global warming it could be close to five times as deadly by 2050. Then there are the indirect health risks of climate change:…
Rampant Wildfires Are Threatening a Collapse of the Amazon Rainforest
“Degradation means that you still have standing forest, but you are losing some of the structure, some of the functioning,” says Armenteras Pascual. “You might even look and think it’s really a beautiful forest, but it’s not so healthy.” Being…
Get Ready to Eat Pond Plants
If you ever watch a duck float across a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the surface, that bird is way ahead of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like crazy, doubling its biomass…
Your Next Job: Brain-Computer Interface Surgeon
There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the…
The 4 Big Questions the Pentagon’s New UFO Report Fails to Answer
But what, then, were those programs? Herein lies the most intriguing—and potentially ground-breaking—question that the Pentagon study leaves us wondering: What exactly are the secret compartmentalized programs that the whistleblowers and government witnesses misidentified as being related to UAP technology?…
Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach…
How Do Heat Pumps Work?
Now stretch it really hard and quickly hold it to your upper lip, which is sensitive to temperature. You will feel that it’s warmer than it was before. That’s because you’re adding energy to the rubber band, which increases its…
A New Headset Aims to Treat Alzheimer’s With Light and Sound
The company’s study included 74 participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s who received either the Cognito stimulation or a sham device that acted as a placebo. Subjects were asked to use the headset for an hour every day for six…
Solar-Powered Farming Is Quickly Depleting the World’s Groundwater Supply
That is certainly the case in Yemen, on the south flank of the Arabian Peninsula, where the desert sands have a new look these days. Satellite images show around 100,000 solar panels glinting in the sun, surrounded by green fields….
Stop Misunderstanding the Gender Health Gap
Well, if weight here is being used as a proxy for sex or gender, a larger woman would need the higher dose; a smaller man a lower dose. So why would you just not use weight as the measure for…
Scientists Are Inching Closer to Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth
De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. Well, not the woolly mammoth exactly, but an Asian elephant gene-edited to give it the fuzzy hair and layer of blubber that allowed its close relative to thrive in…
Cities Aren’t Prepared for a Crucial Part of Sea-Level Rise: They’re Also Sinking
Fighting off rising seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land…
A 62-Year-Old German Man Got 217 Covid Shots—and Was Totally Fine
A 62-year-old man in Germany decided to get 217 Covid-19 vaccinations over the course of 29 months —for “private reasons.” But, somewhat surprisingly, he doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects from the excessive immunization, according to a newly…
Less Sea Ice Means More Arctic Trees—Which Means Trouble
Like a nice wool blanket can help a human baby stay warm and healthy, so too does a baby white spruce get protection from a blanket of snow. At the same time, by preventing the chill of winter from reaching…
This Is What Your Brain Does When You’re Not Doing Anything
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your brain required to carry it out become “active” when neurons step…
The US Buried Nuclear Waste Abroad. Climate Change Could Unearth It
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaii in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a…
Spain’s Tragic Tower Block Fire Exposes the World’s Failing Fire Regulations
On February 22, a fire swept through a 14-story apartment block in the Campanar neighborhood of Valencia, Spain. Ten people died in the blaze. Smartphone footage showed an awning on a seventh-floor balcony catching fire at around 5:30pm CET, before…
Good Climate Solutions Need Good Policy—and AI Can Help With That
To achieve real climate solutions, changing behavior and developing technology is not enough, says Michal Nachmany, founder and CEO of the environmental nonprofit Climate Policy Radar. “A lot of this is policy,” she says. We need better laws, policies, and…
.jpg)
US Cities Could Be Capturing Billions of Gallons of Rain a Day
Your city is a scab on the landscape: sidewalks, roads, parking lots, rooftops—the built environment repels water into sewers and then into the environment. Urban planners have been doing it for centuries, treating stormwater as a nuisance to be diverted…
Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat
Humanity’s superpower is sweating—but rising heat could be our kryptonite, and an average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels could bring regular, fatal heat waves to large parts of the planet, says Tom Matthews, a senior lecturer…
Emergency Planners Are Having a Moment
Also, in a disaster, there are no good decisions, there are only least-worse decisions. Every decision will come with a set of consequences. What the government really struggled to do was mitigate the consequences of decisions they felt that they…
Alabama IVF Patients Are Running Out of Time
In October, Melissa began an in vitro fertilization cycle. A resident of Birmingham, Alabama, her fertility journey to that point had been not just difficult, but harrowing—earlier that year, she had nearly bled to death during a procedure to resolve…
A Discarded Plan to Build Underwater Cities Will Give Coral Reefs New Life
A combination of AI, a wild 1970s plan to build underwater cities, and a designer creating furniture on the seabed around the Bahamas might be the solution to the widespread destruction of coral reefs. It could even save the world…
A New Startup Wants to Turn the Sugar You Eat Into Fiber
What the body does need is fiber, a nutrient found in vegetables, whole grains, and legumes that helps regulate the bowel and lower blood cholesterol and glucose levels. Only about 5 percent of Americans get the recommended amount of daily…
There’s a New Theory About Where Dark Matter Is Hiding
But there may be opportunities to indirectly spot the signatures of those gravitons. One strategy Vafa and his collaborators are pursuing draws on large-scale cosmological surveys that chart the distribution of galaxies and matter. In those distributions, there might be…
What Would Happen if Every American Got a Heat Pump
“The answer ended up being, yes, in all US states, on average heat pumps will reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Eric Wilson, a senior research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the lead author of the new paper….
.jpg)
Frequent Heavy Rain Has Made California a Mudslide Hotspot
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Picture the minute hand at about 8 past the hour. That’s the slope of Viet’s backyard in southern Los Angeles County. It’s a bit…
Odysseus Marks the First US Moon Landing in More Than 50 Years
For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the moon. There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus…
Is This New 50-Year Battery for Real?
Wouldn’t it be cool if you never had to charge your cell phone? I’m sure that’s what a lot of people were thinking recently, when a company called BetaVolt said it had developed a coin-sized “nuclear battery” that would last…
The Transport Companies Leaving Fossil Fuels Behind
Cleaner, greener transport is on its way—from delivery to air travel—but government action on incentives and infrastructure is needed to make it work fast and at scale. “It’s a bit frustrating sometimes in the UK, with the government delaying targets…
Forget Carbon Offsets. The Planet Needs Carbon Removal Credits
We can reverse climate change if we redefine what carbon neutral looks like, said Gabrielle Walker, cofounder of carbon removal startup CUR8, at WIRED Impact in London in November 2023. Scientists define net zero not just as the reduction of…
A Startup’s Mission to Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth Is Being Made Into a Docuseries
The idea that humans caused this extinction, but human ingenuity can put things right again? Reed: That is one of the big questions that we should be exploring in the documentary series. That is at the heart of whether you…
Neuralink’s First Brain Implant Is Working. Elon Musk’s Transparency Isn’t
Some Neuralink rivals, such as Precision Neuroscience, are developing implants that sit on top of the brain, or in the case of Synchron, a stentlike device that’s inserted into a blood vessel and sits against the brain. These devices aim…
Measles Strikes a Florida Elementary School With Over 100 Unvaccinated Kids
Florida health officials on Sunday announced an investigation into a cluster of measles cases at an elementary school in the Fort Lauderdale area with a low vaccination rate, a scenario health experts fear will become more and more common amid…
.jpg)
Metal Prices Are Soaring. So Is Metal Theft
Something had gone wrong with the giant radio tower. Will Payne, of Payne Media Group, got an alert from his utility company in the middle of the night telling him as much. But it wasn’t until he got to the…
Tech Still Isn’t Doing Enough to Care for the Environment
We are in a climate crisis, and technology can be either a part of the problem or a force for good, says Greenpeace CTO Priscilla Chomba-Kinywa. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, she explains, we have “less than…
Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets…
Climate Finance Is Targeting the Wrong Industries
To achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, we have to increase the amount of capital invested in climate tech by 590 percent, says Daria Saharova, managing partner at VC World Fund, a European venture capital firm specializing in climate tech….
Google’s Chess Experiments Reveal How to Boost the Power of AI
His group decided to find out. They built the new, diversified version of AlphaZero, which includes multiple AI systems that trained independently and on a variety of situations. The algorithm that governs the overall system acts as a kind of…
A Virus Found in Wastewater Beat Back a Woman’s ‘Zombie’ Bacteria
But Cole’s progress was short-lived. Her blood infection returned, and her doctors determined the phage-antibiotic combination was no longer effective. She passed away from pneumonia in March 2022, seven months after phage therapy was stopped. Cole’s case demonstrates both the…
All That Rain Is Driving Up Cases of a Deadly Fungal Disease in California
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last week, a long, narrow section of the Earth’s atmosphere funneled trillions of gallons of water eastward from the Pacific tropics and unleashed it on California….
The Feds Just Bet Even Bigger on American-Made Heat Pumps
While everyone’s been focused on accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles to cut carbon emissions, a technological hero has been rapidly ascending under the radar: the heat pump. Instead of burning natural gas or coal to produce heat, this fully…
Kyiv Is Using Homegrown Tech to Treat the Trauma of War
But this is only half of the problem that needs solving. For those who do want to seek treatment, there simply aren’t enough resources to help them. Clinical psychologists are supposed to limit the number of patient consultations they do…
Fake Caviar Invented in the 1930s Could Be the Solution to Plastic Pollution
Imitation caviar invented in the 1930s could provide the solution to plastic pollution, claims Pierre Paslier, CEO of London-based packaging company Notpla. He discovered the cheap food alternative, invented by Unilever and made using seaweed, after quitting his job as…
Ocean Temperatures Keep Shattering Records—and Stunning Scientists
So what’s going on here? For one, the oceans have been steadily warming over the decades, absorbing something like 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have added to the atmosphere. “The oceans are our saviors, in a way,”…
Leading Lab-Grown Meat Company Upside Foods Just Paused a Major Expansion
It has been a rocky year for plans for large-scale cultivated-meat production. In May 2022, another Californian startup, Eat Just, announced its plans to build up to 10 large bioreactors, each with a 250,000-liter capacity, with the bioreactor firm ABEC….
Smoking Alters Your Immune System for Years After You Quit
To figure out why and how the effect lasts for years after someone smokes their last cigarette, Duffy’s team turned to their donors’ DNA. Seemingly everything from wildfire smoke to your parents’ trauma has been linked to epigenetic changes—physical manipulations…
Wild Animals Should Be Paid for the Benefits They Provide Humanity
We need to understand the value of nature if we want to protect it—and that should include paying ecosystems for keeping us alive, argues Ian Redmond, head of conservation for not-for-profit streaming platform Ecoflix and cofounder of Rebalance Earth, a…
Farming Prioritizes Cows and Cars—Not People
In late February, farmers from across the US will gather in Houston, Texas, to witness the crowning of their champions: the winners of the National Corn Yield Contest. Every year, thousands of participants brush up on the contest’s 17-page rule…
The City of Tomorrow Will Run on Your Toilet Water
Epic Cleantec’s soil amendment Photograph: Matt Simon Researchers are experimenting with using the same technique for wastewater solids, basically turning sludge into a solid product. “If you do pyrolysis—because it’s thermochemical, it’s a heated process—you kill these bacteria, kill these…
Who Tests If Heat-Proof Clothing Actually Works? These Poor Sweating Mannequins
Meet ANDI, the world’s sweatiest mannequin. Although he might look like a shop-floor stalwart from a distance, a closer glance reveals bundles of cabling and pipework concealed beneath his shell. He’s wired up with sensors, plumbed into a liquid supply,…
A Celebrated Cryptography-Breaking Algorithm Just Got an Upgrade
This is a job for LLL: Give it (or its brethren) a basis of a multidimensional lattice, and it’ll spit out a better one. This process is known as lattice basis reduction. What does this all have to do with…
Countries Are Building Giant ‘Sand Motors’ to Protect Their Coasts From Erosion
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they…
Did Climate Change Help This Skier Achieve the Impossible?
After a big mistake on his first run, Daniel Yule assumed he was out of the men’s slalom at this season’s Alpine Ski World Cup. “I’d already packed my bags, and I was ready to go back to the hotel,”…
.jpg)
This Small Wearable Device Reduces Parkinson’s Symptoms
In 2015, Lucy Yung was a young industrial designer working on assistive devices for stroke victims, people with multiple sclerosis, and those with other conditions which meant they struggled with fine motor control. Her projects included a pen that used…
NASA’s New PACE Observatory Searches for Clues to Humanity’s Future
Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or…
NASA Engineers Are Racing to Fix Voyager 1
Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission’s loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one…
These States Are Basically Begging You to Get a Heat Pump
Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humble heat pump. They’re already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making…
A Study at the Center of the Abortion Pill Battle Was Just Retracted
Scientific publisher Sage Journals has retracted three papers on abortion—including a controversial 2021 study on mifepristone, the medication at the center of a US legal battle. The 2021 study found that mifepristone, one of two pills used in a medication…
How to Guarantee the Safety of Autonomous Vehicles
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous…
The US Has Big Plans for Wind Energy—but an Obscure 1920s Law Is Getting in the Way
The reason for the Jones Act’s longevity, says Colin Grabow, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is that while it tends to benefit only a few people and businesses, the act goes unnoticed because there…
A Startup Has Unlocked a Way to Make Cheap Insulin
Now some key patents have expired, and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has paved the way for biosimilar versions of insulin—so-called because they’re almost identical to another product already on the market. For a product to be biosimilar,…
You Can’t Buy Lab-Grown Meat Even If You Wanted To
“The restaurant dinners we held at China Chilcano in Washington, DC, last summer went extremely well,” wrote Eat Just’s director of global communications, Carrie Kabat, in an emailed statement to WIRED. “We plan to resume these dinners this year.” Good…
Why Is Our Solar System Flat?
But the solar system contains more than two masses. In fact, it started as a big cloud of dust without any planets and without the sun, and every speck of dust had an attractive interaction with every other speck. That’s…
Inside the Beef Industry’s Campaign to Influence Schoolchildren
Science teachers in many states are currently updating their lessons to incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—a set of teaching guidelines that encourage educators to place more emphasis on how science is used in the real world. AFBFA funding…
Fiber Optics Bring You Internet. Now They’re Also Listening to Trains
Stretching thousands upon thousands of miles under your feet, a web of fibrous ears is listening. Whether you walk over buried fiber optics or drive a car across them, above-ground activity creates a characteristic vibration that ever-so-slightly disturbs the way…
Elon Musk Says a Human Patient Has Received Neuralink’s Brain Implant
Elon Musk said on the social media platform X on Monday that the first human patient has received a brain implant developed by his company Neuralink. After years of delays, Neuralink started recruiting patients for a clinical trial in the…
Scientists Just Discovered a New Type of Magnetism
“The very reason that we have magnetism in our everyday lives is because of the strength of electron exchange interactions,” said study coauthor Ataç İmamoğlu, a physicist also at the Institute for Quantum Electronics. However, as Nagaoka theorized in the…
Texas Is Already Running Out of Water
“However, if a system is permanently impaired it is also possible that recovery will not reach former levels,” Montagna said. Studies suggest that systems around Corpus Christi may already be “permanently impaired,” Montagna said, largely due to a sustained lack…
Inside the DIY Movement to Fight Coastal Erosion
For as long as David Cottrell could remember, his hometown had been falling into the sea. In the early 1960s, when Cottrell was 3 years old, an abandoned US Coast Guard station teetered over the water of the Pacific in…
How to Convince Your Flat-Earth Friends the Earth Is Round
Illustration: Rhett Allain You can see that we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse equal to the distance from the observer’s eyes to the center of the Earth (R + h), with the other two sides being just R…
Two Nations, a Horrible Accident, and the Urgent Need to Understand the Laws of Space
Representing Xenovia, the Leiden team took full responsibility for the explosion but said their client repossessed Candidia’s satellite in full accordance with the Outer Space Treaty. Having given notice to the Candidian company that it was late on payments, they…
The Extreme Sport of Ice Climbing Is at Risk of Extinction
Ice climbers and ecosystems will be forced to adapt as winter patterns change—and Arnold believes the sport will survive. People who engage in outdoor activities are adaptive, he says. “Sometimes I am concerned. But I don’t think it will happen,”…
6 Deaf Children Can Now Hear After a Single Injection
To get the new genetic material into cells, they engineered harmless viruses to carry it. Doctors carefully injected a tiny amount of liquid containing the viruses into a part of the children’s inner ears called the cochlea, a spiral-shaped chamber…
The World’s Essential Aquifers Are in Deep Trouble
The water that pours out of your tap, or that’s unnecessarily packaged in a single-use bottle, or that helped grow the produce in your fridge—all of it may well have come from aquifers somewhere. These are layers of underground material…
Scientists Will Test a Cancer-Hunting mRNA Treatment
To keep IL-12 inside tumors, scientists at Strand designed a set of instructions called a genetic circuit that tells the mRNA to make the inflammatory protein only when it detects the tumor microenvironment. The circuit is designed to sense levels…
The World’s First Malaria Vaccine Program for Children Starts Now
Malaria expert Brian Greenwood had once resigned himself to the possibility that a successful vaccine for the disease might not become available in his lifetime. Now, at 86 years old, the moment he’s spent four decades working toward has arrived….
Cryptographers Are Getting Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We all know to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be revealing. Search for driving directions, and our location becomes far…
Why the Polar Vortex Is Bad for Balloon Artists
It’s been crazy cold this week, even down where I live in Louisiana, thanks to an outbreak of a polar vortex. This frigid air is bad for all kinds of things, including football helmets, apparently. But it’s actually a great…
The Last-Ditch Effort to Stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline
With the Supreme Court green-lighting the MVP, it seems to Larkin and others that there’s only one thing left to do. That is, throw their bodies upon the gears, in hopes of at least slowing things down for one more day,…
The Murky Campaign to Discredit Lab-Grown Meat
Alamy said that the suggestion that ingesting immortalized cells could be linked to cancer in humans was “so ludicrous as to be laughable.” “So few people have had cultivated meat or have access to it that it feels like these…
A Gene-Edited Pig Liver Was Attached to a Person—and Worked for 3 Days
That has led researchers to genetically alter pigs in an attempt to make their organs a better match. The biotech company that bred the pig for the Penn study, eGenesis of Cambridge, Massaschetts, is aiming to do that with gene…
Trawling Boats Are Hauling Up Ancient Carbon From the Ocean Depths
The fillet of flounder sitting on your plate comes with a severe environmental cost. To catch it, a ship running on fossil fuels spewed greenhouse gases as it dragged a trawl net across the seafloor, devastating the ecosystems in its…
Scabies Is Making a Comeback
In recent months, Naveed Ijaz, a general practitioner specializing in dermatology, has seen a growing number of patients presenting at his clinic in Manchester, UK, with intensely itchy rashes. Their cause is scabies, a highly contagious skin condition caused by…
.jpg)
How Your Body Adapts to Extreme Cold
Thomson’s rule simplifies what’s actually a complex part of our evolution likely influenced by other factors, like sexual attraction. But researchers in the past decade have found supporting evidence based on studying people with roots in Northern Europe, West Africa,…
California Is Solving Its Water Problems by Flooding Its Best Farmland
For Rentner, the process wasn’t anywhere near so easy. Finding the $26 million she needed to buy the land from Lyons—and the additional $14 million she needed to restore it—required scraping together money from a rogues’ gallery of funders including…
Norway’s Deep-Sea Mining Decision Is a Warning
In a memo published in November 2023, Norwegian law firm Wilkborg Rein said that passing the bill with an inadequate environmental assessment could violate not only the country’s own laws on environmental protection, but also European and international laws. Local…
.jpg)
A Scandal Is Tearing the World of Record-Breaking Dogs Apart
But when Kimball asked Guinness about re-verifying Spike, these vet estimates were no longer sufficient evidence. One way to estimate the age of an animal is by their teeth, something that Spike lacks, although Kimball says she still has a…
The Boeing 737 Max Crisis Reignites Arguments Over Infant Safety on Planes
As terrible as that tradeoff is, it’s worth noting that the risk of death on a commercial airliner to anyone, lap-held infants included, remains vanishingly low—so let the pangs of guilt subside if you’ve flown holding your baby on your…
Unpicking the Mystery of the Body’s ‘Second Brain’
Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.
These Mining Companies Are Ready to Raid the Seabed
But deep-sea mining is considered a risky business not just because of environmental concerns. Norway’s startups are betting on an industry that doesn’t yet exist. “It could end up not becoming an industry at all because the resources are not…
A Mountain of Used Clothes Appeared in Chile’s Desert. Then It Went Up in Flames
As Bloomberg reported in May, New York, California, Sweden, and the Netherlands are developing legislation similar to Chile’s extended producer responsibility law that went into effect this year, mandating that the fashion industry fund recycling programs via tariffs calibrated to…
.jpg)
The Surprising Things That Helped Make 2023 the Hottest Year Ever
In this graph, the orange line shows the global sea surface temperature throughout 2023. The other squiggles are previous years, with the uppermost dashed black line being the average between 1982 and 2011. The dark black line at upper left…
The Real Problem With the Boeing 737 Max
Spirit AeroSystems, the Wichita-based aerospace manufacturer that manufactured the door plug that blew out on the Alaska Airlines flight, declined to comment on the incident. However, in a statement published on its website, Spirit says its “primary focus is the…
Air Pollution Is Ruining Your Skin
In June last year, a series of devastating wildfires tore through the Canadian province of Quebec, sending huge plumes of acrid smoke drifting across North America. Three hundred miles away in Boston, dermatologist Shadi Kourosh noticed something strange. “We had…
.jpg)
Why Humans Are Putting a Bunch of ‘Coal’ and ‘Oil’ Back in the Ground
In addition to burying solid carbon or sprinkling it on fields, researchers are also turning waste biomass into liquid carbon—oil, essentially, that they pump back into the ground instead of pumping the fossil variety up. “What we do at the…
There’s a Huge Covid Surge Right Now and Nobody Is Talking About It
Since 2021, all dominant Covid variants have descended from Omicron. The 2023–2024 booster was tailored for the XBB.1.5 strain of Omicron, but JN.1 is about as different from XBB.1.5 as Omicron was from Delta. Even so, researchers from China and…
During Pregnancy, the Placenta Hacks the Immune System to Protect the Fetus
“The cell is effectively dressing up as an infectious agent,” Kagan said. “The result is that it convinces itself that it’s infected, and then operates as such.” Simmering Immunity Immune responses can be destructive, and antiviral responses especially so. Because…
My Parents’ Dementia Felt Like the End of Joy. Then Came the Robots
You learn a lot about people by hanging out with robots. QT made it plain to me how much human interaction depends on tiny movements and subtle changes in timing. Even when armed with the latest artificial intelligence language models,…
Critical Infrastructure Is Sinking Along the US East Coast
Below is New York’s JFK Airport—notice the red hotspots of high subsidence against the teal of more mild elevation change. The airport’s average subsidence rate is 1.7 millimeters a year (similar to the LaGuardia and Newark airports), but across JFK…
They Had PTSD. A Psychedelic Called Ibogaine Helped Them Get Better
After multiple deployments with the US Army Special Forces, Joe Hudak returned home in 2011 changed by his time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and South America. He was quickly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He tried talk therapy and a range…
A Gel Injected Into the Scrotum Could Be the Next Male Contraceptive
The purpose of the current trial is to assess the gel’s safety and longevity, not how well it prevents pregnancy. Participants were asked to use a back-up form of birth control while being enrolled in the trial. The gel is…
.png)
This Ultrasound Bra Could Detect Cancer Sooner
In 2015, Canan Dağdeviren was working as a postdoc at MIT when she learned that her aunt, Fatma, had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Dağdeviren, whose work focused on building flexible devices that could capture biometric…
Former NBA Star Rick Fox Is Making a Play for Carbon-Neutral Concrete
Rick Fox has spent a lot of time in Hollywood, so naturally he has more than one origin story. Canadian-born, Bahamian-raised Fox played professional basketball in the NBA in the 1990s and 2000s, starring for the Boston Celtics and Los…
The Plan to Put Pig Genes in Soy Beans for Tastier Fake Meat
For Gastón Paladini, pork is a family affair. In 1923, his great-grandfather Don Juan Paladini moved from Italy to Santa Fe, Argentina, where he started putting a South American twist on classic Italian sausage recipes. Eventually, Don Juan’s company became…
20 Things That Made the World a Better Place in 2023
It’s been hard recently to think about anything other than the wars and humanitarian crises raging around the world. Climate change has left its mark in what was almost certainly the hottest year in human history—there were unprecedented heat waves,…
These Rogue Worlds Upend the Theory of How Planets Form
“We know from direct imaging searches of young stars that very few stars have giant planets in [wide] orbits,” Bate said. “It is difficult to accept that there were many large planetary systems in Orion to disrupt.” Rogue Objects Abound At…
What Are ‘Missed Period Pills,’ and How Do They Work?
Cari Siestra first learned about menstrual regulation when they were working on the Myanmar-Thailand border. At the time, abortion was broadly criminalized in both countries. But if a person’s period was late, it was relatively easy to get access to…
Your Eco-Friendly Lifestyle Is a Big Lie
The data scientist and author Hannah Ritchie expands on these examples in her upcoming book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Future. Everything comes with a greenhouse gas footprint:…
The Foods the World Will Lose to Climate Change
There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop…
Spying on Beavers From Space Could Help Save California
For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in…
Yes, the Climate Crisis Is Now ‘Gobsmacking.’ But So Is Progress
Scientists are running low on words to adequately describe the world’s climate chaos. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could already say earlier this month that there was more than a 99 percent chance that 2023 was the hottest year…
-copy.jpg)
The Tantalizing Mystery of the Solar System’s Hidden Oceans
And yet, defiantly, these alien seas remain liquid. A Mirror-Wrapped Ocean Scientists suspect that a handful of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn—and maybe even some spinning around Uranus and Neptune—harbor oceans. Hefty Ganymede and crater-scarred Callisto produce weak, Europa-like magnetic…
The Race to Put Brain Implants in People Is Heating Up
In September, Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink announced the much-anticipated news that it would start recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial to test its device. Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, it collects electrical activity from neurons and interprets…