Science, Spoken

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Wisconsin's Floods Are Catastrophic—and Only Getting Worse Sep 12, 2018

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An entire summer’s worth of rain has fallen across a broad swath of the Midwest in recent days. The resulting record floods have wrecked homes and altered the paths of rivers, in one case destroying a waterfall in Minnesota. The worst-affected region, southwest Wisconsin, has received more than 20 inches of rain in 15 days– more than it usually gets in six months.

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When Your Phone Sucks You Into the Void, This App Notices Sep 12, 2018

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Every night, an hour before bed, I stash my phone inside a drawer in my living room. Most days I retrieve it the following morning, when I'm heading out the door. It's a simple habit, but one that has helped me reclaim some focus from my smartphone—my personal fix for a growing problem that user experience researchers at Google recently called an "attention crisis." Outside the house, though, it's a different story: My phone rarely leaves my side.

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We Know Exactly How to Stop Wildfires—With Money Sep 11, 2018

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Wild lands are practically worthless. They’re not worthless to the things that live in them, of course. They love ‘em. And they aren’t worthless aesthetically, if that’s your bag. Any place with plants slurps up carbon dioxide, providing a bulwark against climate change.

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New Space Robots Will Fix Satellites, or Maybe Destroy Them Sep 11, 2018

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People in the satellite industry are fond of automobile analogies. Like this one: Imagine that you buy a car and need it to run for 15 years, but you can’t change the oil or replace the alternator, let alone refuel it. That, they say, is the state of satellites. Once they’ve slipped the surly bonds of Earth, satellites pretty much just have to work, from the time they unfurl from their rocket fairing to the day they shut down for good.

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This One-Armed Robot Is Super Manipulative (in a Good Way) Sep 10, 2018

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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 detailed coded instructions on how to manipulate a particular object.

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23andMe Cuts Off the DNA App Ecosystem It Created Sep 10, 2018

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Amy Mitchell started getting sick in 2012. Dizzy spells and fatigue became a part of her daily life, followed by numbness in her limbs and painful muscle spasms. After half a dozen doctors over two years couldn’t tell her what was wrong, she sent away for a 23andMe kit. At the time, the consumer DNA-testing company was only giving ancestry reports—the Federal Drug Administration had recently shut down 23andMe’s health information ambitions.

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A 600-Meter-Long Plastic Catcher Heads to Sea. But Scientists Are Skeptical Sep 07, 2018

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This weekend, a project of staggering ambition will sail past San Francisco and out to sea through the Golden Gate. The invention of an organization called the Ocean Cleanup, it consists of a 600-meter-long plastic tube with a dangling screen that a ship will tow 240 nautical miles out to sea for testing.

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Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood Into an Elixir of Youth Sep 07, 2018

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In the early 2000s, a handful of young scientists at Stanford turned the university’s Palo Alto campus into the mouse-stitching-together capital of the world. Reviving a centuries-old procedure known as parabiosis, they connected the circulatory systems of dozens of pairs of rodents, young sutured to old, so that they’d pump one another’s blood back and forth.

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This Hyper-Real Robot Will Cry and Bleed on Med Students Sep 06, 2018

Show notes

Hal the robot boy is convulsing. His head shakes back and forth so rapidly, it looks like he’s vibrating. His eyelids droop over his blue eyes and his mouth is ajar. He makes no sound, other than the faint whirs of his motors. Hal was built to suffer. He is a medical training robot, the sort of invention that emerges when one of the most stressful jobs on Earth tumbles into the uncanny valley. No longer must nurses train on lifeless mannequins. Hal can shed tears, bleed, and urinate.

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Why Scientists Are Using Frog Eggs to Power Tiny Electronics Sep 06, 2018

Show notes

Luigi Catacuzzeno lines up a long, thin needle against a frog egg. Peering at it through a microscope, he turns the knob of a machine to nudge the needle a fraction of a micron forward. Then he deftly punctures the membrane of the soft little egg to wire it to a small capacitor, an electrical component similar to a battery. This unusual arrangement is Catacuzzeno’s attempt to harvest energy from biological cells to power tiny electronics.

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