Science, Spoken

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Yuri Milner and the Fellowship of Silicon Valley Science Influencers Nov 14, 2017

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“Who are we?” That impossible question opened the 2015 public letter announcing a well-heeled SETI project called Breakthrough Listen. Dozens of people—scientists, astronauts, and also a producer, a chess champ, and a soprano—signed the note, which kicked off a $100 million effort by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to catch signals from alien civilizations. That quest, Milner and the signatories hoped, would answer that existential query.

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The Subtle Art and Serious Physics of Subway Surfing Nov 13, 2017

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I can't help myself. When I'm out in the real world and I see something cool, I have to turn it into a physics problem. It's just what I do. In this case, I was changing planes in the Atlanta airport. Like many other airports, Atlanta has a mini subway to take you between terminals. You walk in, the doors shut and then it accelerates up to some traveling speed. At some point it slows down and stops so that you can get off and catch your plane.

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Scientists Save a Kid By Growing a Whole New Skin For Him Nov 10, 2017

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The baby was still in diapers when the first blister appeared, ballooning red and angry from his pale, newborn skin. Soon, they became a regular feature on the map of his body, along with deep creases in his face when he howled out in pain. A doctor told the parents his LAMB3 gene had a glitch—his body wasn’t making enough of a protein to anchor the outer layer of his skin to the inner ones. For seven years they kept the blisters at bay.

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Mass Shootings, Climate, Discrimination: Why Government's Fear of Data Threatens Us All Nov 09, 2017

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In the aftermath of the massacre of 26 people in a small-town Texas church, you might have seen that the killer used a gun called an AR-15. It’s a popular weapon—relatively easy to use, endlessly customizable, military in appearance. How popular? It’s the same gun that a killer used in the massacre of 58 people at a Las Vegas concert last month, and by the killer who murdered 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando, and the one at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

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Artificial Intelligence Is Putting Ultrasound on Your Phone Nov 08, 2017

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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 window into the human body.

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Green Bank Observatory Embraces Its Alien-Hunting Future Nov 07, 2017

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It’s a fallish day in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, the rural home of Green Bank Observatory and the world’s largest fully steerable telescope. Rippled clouds hang low over the site’s hulking 100-meter radio dish, itself undergirded and overhung by bright white scaffolding. The browning leaves are nearly gone. And the visitor center director, Sherry McCarty, has agreed to give me the astronomy center’s new SETI tour ($40, reservations required).

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You Too Can Fly a Spacecraft Around Mars—With Physics! Nov 06, 2017

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Recently, I gave my introductory physics course a fairly standard problem, based on the Matter and Interactions textbook. I've modified the question, but it goes something like this: You have a spacecraft with a mass of 100 kilograms, moving near Mars (the planet, not the candy bar). At one point, it is traveling at a speed of 1,100 m/s, flying 5 x 107 meters from the center of the planet. At a later point, the spacecraft reaches a new altitude, flying 8.6 x 107 meters from the center.

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For Scientists Predicting Sea Level Rise, Wind Is the Biggest Unknown Nov 03, 2017

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From the air, the largest glacier on the biggest ice sheet in the world looks the same as it has for centuries; massive, stable, blindingly white. But beneath the surface it’s a totally different story. East Antarctica’s Totten Glacier is melting, fast, from below. Thanks to warm ocean upwellings flowing into the glacier—in some places at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second—it’s losing between 63 and 80 billion tons of previously frozen fresh water every year.

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Controversial Brain Imaging Uses AI to Take Aim at Suicide Prevention Nov 02, 2017

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When someone takes their own life, they leave behind an inheritance of unanswered questions. “Why did they do it?” “Why didn’t we see this coming?” “Why didn’t I help them sooner?” If suicide were easy to diagnose from the outside, it wouldn’t be the public health curse it is today. In 2014 suicide rates surged to a 30-year high in the US, making it now the second leading cause of death among young adults.

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After the Napa Fires, a Disaster-in-Waiting: Toxic Ash Nov 01, 2017

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By any measure, the fires that tore through Northern California were a major disaster. Forty-two people are dead, and 100,000 are displaced. More than 8,400 homes and other buildings were destroyed, more than 160,000 acres burned—and the fires aren’t all out yet. That devastation leaves behind another potential disaster: ash. No one knows how much. It’ll be full of heavy metals and toxins—no one knows exactly how much, and it depends on what burned and at what temperature.

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