Science, Spoken

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Scientists Brew Up the Creepiest Batches of Brain Balls Yet May 02, 2017

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Stem cell biologists are basically modern day witches. While they’re not exactly taking a creepy fetal Lord Voldemort and turning him into noseless Ralph Fiennes, these scientists can use tinctures and concoctions to grow incredible things from just a few human skin cells. One of those things is a brain ball, a collection of stem cells that biologists have coaxed into a bobbing tangle of living neurons.

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You Want Better Beer? Good. Here’s a Better Barley Genome May 01, 2017

Show notes

The genome of barley—the grain that’s the soul of beer and whiskey—is weird. The commodity crop has just seven pairs of chromosomes (compared to your 23, assuming you are a human being) but twice the size of your genome overall, with the vast majority of the sequences repeating themselves. And you care because (making the same assumption again) you care about beer and whiskey, even just in the abstract.

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Let’s Do the Shocking Physics of Why Power Lines Sag Apr 28, 2017

Show notes

You might look at an overhead power line and see an engineering problem. After all, those transmission towers are impressively huge. But if you've ever seen those cables, you probably noticed they seem to hang fairly low. Why they hang low is a great physics question that can be modeled with masses and springs. Basic Model For a Hanging Cable Let's start by creating a model. Suppose I string a cable between two points so it is supported horizontally from theends.

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Marching Brought Scientists Together—But What Do They Do Now? Apr 27, 2017

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Peaceful, orderly, rational, and with a lot of signs too clever by half (actually, 0.56932 according to our measurements)—that’s how scientists march on Washington. It’s also how they march in more than 600 of them all over the world on Saturday, with even a few wintering-over researchers in Antarctica signaling their support. The movement covered all seven continents. The March for Science was controversial almost from its inception.

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So, That Asteroid Didn’t Kill Earth. Bonus: It Delivered Tons of Data Apr 26, 2017

Show notes

This week, a kilometer-wide asteroid whizzed by within about a million miles of this planet—about four and half times the distance between the Earth and the moon. A near miss? Not really. The odds of 2014 JO25 actually hitting Earth were around one in a million. The safer bet is on science. As in, how much of it astronomers were able to gather from the close pass of such a huge space rock.

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Who’ll Really Benefit From Verily’s Exhaustive Health Study? Apr 25, 2017

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Ugh, you’re not going sign up for Project: Baseline, are you? That new, 10,000-person health study Google’s putting together? Well, OK, not Google, but Verily. Which used to be Google Life Sciences, and is part of Alphabet, the company that used to be called Google but now owns Google. (So, Google.

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The Mystery of the 5-Foot-Long Shipworm Just Got Stinkier Apr 21, 2017

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That image above, depending on what your job is, could well be considered not safe for work. What you’re looking at is a giant shipworm—a scientific legend that can grow to over five feet long. It’s actually a super-elongated mollusk, one that grows vertically in sediment, excreting a thick shell and poking two siphons out of the muck. It is, as biologists note, really weird.

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How Steve Wozniak Got Over His Fear of Robots Turning People Into Pets Apr 20, 2017

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Steve Wozniak is one half of Silicon Valley’s most prototypical founder’s myth. But whereas Steve Jobs went on to define what it meant to be a modern founder—the turtleneck uniform, the keynote showmanship, the scorn for formal education and steamrolling managerial style—Woz just became a wealthier version of his former self. That is, a gigantic nerd. In case you clicked this article out of blind curiosity, here’s a quick recap on Woz.

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Let’s Model Radioactive Decay to Show How Carbon Dating Works Apr 19, 2017

Show notes

Radioactive material gets a bad rap, what with radiation and fallout and nuclear waste and all. But it offers some practical uses. One of the coolest (OK, maybe the coolest) is using radioactive carbon to determinethe age of old bones or plants. To understand this, you mustfirst understand radioactivity and decay. When an element undergoes radioactive decay, it creates radiation and turns into some other element.

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The Secret to Training for a Marathon: Just Keep Running Apr 18, 2017

Show notes

As part of WIRED’s exclusive look at Breaking2, Nike’s attempt to break the two-hour marathon mark next month in Monza, Italy, our writer is using the same training regime, apparel, and expertise as Nike’s three elite athletes to try to achieve his own personal milestone: a sub-90-minute half-marathon. This is the fourth in a series of monthly updates on his progress. Last week, I travelled for work to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.

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