Science, Spoken

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Can Science Keep Deep Sea Miners From Ruining the Seafloor? Dec 20, 2017

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Ocean explorers and entrepreneurs have been thinking about how to scoop up mineral-laden deposits on the seafloor since the HMS Challenger dragged a few up in a bucket during its globe-trotting scientific voyage in the 1870s. A century later, the CIA used deep sea mining as a cover story for a secretive plan to recover a sunken Russian nuclear sub. Now, it’s a serious engineering proposition.

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How to Run Up a Wall—With Physics! Dec 20, 2017

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I can't decide if this looks like something from a super hero movie or from a video game. In this compilation video of crazy stunts, a guy somehow finds a way to bound up between two walls by jumping from one to the other. "Somehow," of course, means with physics: This move is based on the momentum principle and friction. Could you pull it off? Probably not. But you can at least do the math.

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2017 Was the Year the Robots Really, Truly Arrived Dec 19, 2017

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Flu Season Is Here Early. Why Didn't We See It Coming? Dec 18, 2017

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If you’ve been putting off your flu shot until the season really gets going, wait no longer. It’s already here—and it’s looking like it’s going to be a doozy. Influenza viruses quietly circulate year-round in the US, but every winter they go big, triggering a seasonal epidemic of sniffles, sweats, and sore throats. And this year it’s come earlier than usual, just in time for a potential peak over the holidays.

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New Kepler Exoplanet Discovery Fueled by AI Dec 18, 2017

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Saturn's rings sure are pretty, and Matt Damon’s been to Mars, but our eight-planet solar system may not be that special after all. Today, scientists using data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft announced they’d discovered an eighth planet orbiting a star 2,500 light years away. They’ve named the planet Kepler-90i after the star it orbits, Kepler-90, which is slightly hotter and more massive than our sun.

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The Hard Math Behind Bitcoin's Global Warming Problem Dec 15, 2017

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Let me freak you out for a second. You know what bitcoin is, right? I mean, no, but quickly, it’s a “cryptocurrency” that’s basically secret computer money. One bitcoin, which doesn’t actually have a real, physical form, is worth at this moment upwards of $16,000. But to get one, you either have to buy them from online exchanges or use specialized computing hardware to “mine” it. That last bit is where the freak-out comes in.

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Patients Want Poop Transplants. Here's How to Make Them Safe Dec 15, 2017

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Neill Stollman has been called the Tupac of poop transplants. The Oakland-based, board-certified gastroenterologist didn’t invent the treatment. But he did bring it to the west coast. His first patient was a woman in her 80s with a horrible case of Clostridium difficile, a gut infection that can strike patients after a course of antibiotics clears out their existing bacterial community.

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The Alabama Senate Election Was Decided 100 Million Years Ago Dec 14, 2017

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Crispr Therapeutics Plans Its First Clinical Trial for Genetic Disease Dec 14, 2017

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In late 2012, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier approached a handful of American scientists about starting a company, a Crispr company. They included UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, George Church at Harvard University, and his former postdoc Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute—the brightest stars in the then-tiny field of Crispr research. Back then barely 100 papers had been published on the little-known guided DNA-cutting system. It certainly hadn’t attracted any money.

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Psychologists Want in on Social Media's Big Data Trove Dec 13, 2017

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Figuring out how human beings do human things is one of the most exciting things that science—psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology—can do. It’s also one of the hardest. Reliable, meaningful methods that distill real-world behavior into experimental variables have been, let’s say, elusive.

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