Science, Spoken

Sometimes a bad piece of legislation doesn’t die, it just returns in another form. Call it a zombie bill. In this case the zombie is a bill that morphed into a proposed rule that would upend how the federal government uses science in its decision making. It would allow the US Environmental Protection Agency to pick and choose what science it uses to write legislation on air, water, and toxic pollution that affects human health and the environment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is the symbol of a climate change generation gap, a girl rebuking adults for their inaction in preventing a future apocalypse. Thunberg’s riveting speech at the UN's Climate Action Summit has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube, and she was considered a viable contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Inside his lab in Israel, Jeff Steinhauer crafts microscopic black holes. These objects are but humble specks, lacking the spaghettifying suction strength of an actual dead star. But Steinhauer, a physicist at the research university Technion, assures me that he’s constructed them mathematically to scale. Zoom in far enough, and you’ll see a miniature event horizon restaging the drama of a true black hole. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What sort of noise would juggling pins make if they fell three stories off a roof onto the pavement below? For a moment, it seems as if the adults and children gathered for the WIRED 25 Festival atop San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club will find out. But Adam Savage, tossing the three blue, white, and silver pins into the air over and over again, keeps his distance from the roof’s edge and his juggling on point. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fish are dying and Surface users are crying, but first: a cartoon about a modern-day death wish. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Teeming off Hawaii’s famous beaches is a complex web of life—sharks, turtles, seabirds—that relies enormously on tiny larval fish, the food for many species. In their first few weeks of existence the larvae are at the mercy of currents, still too puny to get around on their own, gathering by their millions in surface “slicks” where currents meet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The air above Earth—especially above California, United States, Earth—might have way more of one particular climate-changing gas in it than anyone thought. And that could actually be good news. The gas is methane, CH4, the main component of natural gas—also a frequent byproduct of oil drilling, agriculture, animal husbandry, garbage decomposition, and farts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are no walruses in Iceland, but, at one time, there were hundreds. The timing of the walruses' disappearance suggests that the population's loss may be one of the earliest known examples of humans driving a marine species to local extinction. The Ghost of Walruses Past Walruses used to be a major feature of life in Iceland. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Not quite an e-cigarette and not the old paper kind either, the Iqos is the latest controversial device to enter the vaping wars. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2017, Stafford Sheehan was a chemist working on artificial photosynthesis, coming up with metal-based catalysts that’d mimic the way living things acquire energy from the Sun. He did not expect to create a martini that could save the planet. Sheehan had an invention, a box that could electrolyze a burst of carbon dioxide and a dose of water. Run all that over a metal catalyst to goose a biochemical reaction, and, presto: renewable fuel made from air. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday, a small capsule launched off its test stand at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reaching speeds of more than 600 mph in just seconds. The spacecraft was Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule, which will begin carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station next year. Later this week, SpaceX will also perform a test of its Crew Dragon capsule, a second try after a catastrophic explosion ended a similar trial run earlier this year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In May 2018, a radar facility in Tromsø, Norway trained its antennas on GJ237b, a potentially habitable exoplanet located 12 light years from Earth. Over the course of three days, the radar broadcast a message toward the planet in the hopes that there might be something, or someone, there to receive it. Each message consisted of a selection of short songs and a primer on how to interpret the contents. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In what will go down as one of the greatest robotics experiments ever, a few years back researchers in Japan let a robot loose in a mall and watched how kids reacted. Far from the sense of wonder you might expect from children, the mood soured into a sense of concern for the next generation, as the kids proceeded to kick and punch the robot and call it names. Call it unconstructive criticism. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the evening of October 23, in the middle of the kind of dry, windy night that has become more frequent and more terrifying in recent California autumns, a fire began outside the small unincorporated Northern California town of Geyserville. Over the next two days, as winds reached hurricane-like strength, they carried the fire south, burning some 75,000 acres and threatening some 90,000 structures as of Wednesday afternoon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When President Trump visited Pittsburgh last month, he complained about how the Paris climate treaty was unfair to the United States. “I withdrew the United States from the terrible, one-sided climate accord, it was a total disaster for our country,” Trump told a cheering crowd at a natural gas conference. “They were taking away our wealth. It was almost as though it was meant to hurt the competitiveness—really, competitiveness of the United States. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’d be tough to mistake a hippo for a sensitive type. Weighing more than a Honda Accord and packing massive incisors, it’s one of the most dangerous animals on Earth. But in reality it’s far more vulnerable than it lets on: Habitat loss, climate change, and rampant water extraction are all threatening the African rivers the hippo calls home. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nose pickers are often said to be digging for gold. But a 48-year-old Australian man needed an entirely different kind of nugget mined from his schnoz. Doctors excavated from the man's right nasal cavity a 19 mm by 11 mm rock-hard mass—the calcified remains of a small amount of marijuana he tried to smuggle into prison a startling 18 years earlier. ARS TECHNICA This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the summer of 1907, a German doctor named Clemens von Pirquet noticed something strange with one of his patients. The five-year-old boy had previously tested positive for tuberculosis. The test involved injecting a tiny bit of TB protein just under the skin. His antibodies recognized it, activating immune cells which formed a little bump at the injection site. This happens to anyone who has ever been infected with TB. But when Pirquet performed the same test on the boy a second time, no bump. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Before astronauts head to the International Space Station, they spend years getting ready: They float in pools to practice for spacewalks, learn how to run different types of science experiments, and even practice how to poop. For future missions to the moon and Mars, scientists first try living and working in space-analog environments on volcanoes, deep inside caves, at the South Pole, and even underwater. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Laura Lewis and her team of researchers have been putting in late nights in their Boston University lab. Lewis ran tests until around three in the morning, then ended up sleeping in the next day. It was like she had jet lag, she says, without changing time zones. It’s not that Lewis doesn’t appreciate the merits of a good night’s sleep. She does. But when you’re trying to map what’s happening in a slumbering human’s brain, you end up making some sacrifices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Interstellar space exploration has long been the stuff of science fiction, a technological challenge that many engineers believe humans just aren’t up to yet. But an ongoing study by a group of NASA-affiliated researchers is challenging this assumption. The researchers have a vision for a mission that could be built with existing technology. Indeed, the group says that if their mission is selected by NASA it could fly as soon as 2030. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In February, the Spanish pilot Daniel González climbed into a small aerobatic plane at the Sabadell Airport outside Barcelona and fired up its single prop engine. Once he was in the air, González began a steep climb for about six seconds before entering a nosedive. The plane’s rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the cockpit and for a few seconds, González felt what it was like to be an astronaut. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Thirty years from now, we’ll need to feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise provide for 2 billion more people. Human-caused global warming is going to make these tasks challenging as it produces more deserts, droughts, heatwaves, and other stresses. Even so, I believe we’ll easily meet our challenges and take better care of the people who inhabit the world of the future, without experiencing sustained shortages of food or other important resources. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every generation claims an event that defines it more than any other—winning a World War, or landing humans on the moon, or tearing down the Berlin Wall. But at this very moment, we have the dubious honor of living through an event whose impact will span generations: climate change. Never before has our kind faced such omnipresent peril, from supercharged storms to rising seas to drought to crop failure to biodiversity crises. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2021, a rocket is scheduled to lift off from French Guiana carrying the largest space telescope ever made. Known as the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers will use this beast of an observatory to study everything from habitable exoplanets to the formation of the first galaxies. JWST is the first mega-telescope of its kind to ever launch into space—and it may also be the last. The next behemoth might instead get assembled in space with the help of robots. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The old space shuttle landing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center received an unusual visitor early Sunday morning when the Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane autonomously returned from orbit after a record-breaking mission. For the last 780 days, the Air Force Research Laboratory used the space plane as an orbital platform for classified experiments. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A little over a year ago, a group called The Ocean Cleanup launched an unprecedented campaign to rid the seas of plastic, complete with an unprecedented device: a 600-meter-long, U-shaped tube that was meant to passively gather debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for a ship to come along and scoop up and take back to land. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Right on cue, Northern California has plunged back into wildfire hell. This time two years ago, the Tubbs Fire was ripping through Santa Rosa and other communities north of San Francisco, killing 22 and destroying 5,000 homes. And last year on November 8, the Camp Fire virtually obliterated the town of Paradise, killing 86 and burning an astonishing 20,000 structures to the ground. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There's a lot of power in a rough estimate. If you’re trying to figure out whether something is worth doing, you could really go deep into the weeds trying to capture all the costs and benefits. But here’s the thing: Usually you don’t need an exact answer in order to make the right decision. For example, say you’re having a big party, a hundred people, and you want to make special decorated cupcakes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday evening, Maggie Guterl and Will Hayward set out for the 60th time on a four-mile loop through the hickory-covered hills of central Tennessee. It was dark and rainy on day three of the Big’s Backyard Ultra, a running race of fiendish design. There's no set distance, and no set total time, just endless laps around a four-mile course, which participants must complete once an hour. To win, you basically just have to be the last competitor still moving your legs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

College football is all about traditions, and most schools have some signature thing they do at games. Mississippi State has the headache-inducing din of cowbells. Arkansas fans summon their team to the field with a hog call. “Woooo Pig Soooie!” The Oklahoma Sooners have the Sooner Schooner. It's a little covered wagon pulled by a pair of enthusiastic ponies—you know, a prairie schooner—that careens onto the field whenever the home team scores. It’s pretty exciting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With all the talk about sending humans to the moon and eventually Mars, it can be easy to forget there are other planets worth exploring. But a team of researchers at NASA has set its sights on Venus, Earth’s closest neighbor and one of the least understood planets in the solar system. Since the first (crash) landing on Venus in 1966, by a Soviet probe, spacecraft have only survived a total of a few hours on the planet’s surface. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When NASA designed its first space suits, they were tailored to fit the all-male crews who flew in the early 1960s and landed on the moon in 1969. But as NASA has become a more diverse agency, both in space and on the ground, the limitations of its suits have become a growing source of embarrassment. Since the final Moon mission in 1972, more than 40 American women have flown on the space shuttle or spent time on the International Space Station. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If it seems too good to be true, the old cliché goes, it probably is. And it doesn’t get much gooder than the bizarre hand of the aye-aye, a specialized lemur that uses a hyper-elongated middle finger to tap along hollow tree branches, listens for grubs within, gnaws a hole in the wood, and reaches that middle finger inside to fish out the food. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Cypher is selling out his compatriots over dinner with Agent Smith in The Matrix, he muses: “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” In a simulation like the Matrix, ones and zeroes represent every nuance of that steak—the texture, the smell, the flavor. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Presidential candidates are in the business of making big promises, and few of the Democratic contenders for the 2020 nomination have promised more than Andrew Yang. An entrepreneur turned politico, Yang has styled himself as the techie’s candidate. His platform is defined by its embrace of high-tech solutions for a variety of social problems and earned him endorsements from Silicon Valley heavyweights like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jack Dorsey. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Andrew Anzalone was restless. It was late fall, 2017. The year was winding down, and so was his MD/PhD program at Columbia. Trying to figure out what was next in his life, he’d taken to long, leaf-strewn walks in the West Village. One night as he paced up Hudson Street, his stomach filled with La Colombe coffee and his mind with Crispr gene editing papers, an idea began to bubble through the caffeine brume inside his brain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Trump administration this week proposed ending the so-called Roadless Rule, which banned logging, development, and road construction in Alaska’s Tongass, the biggest national forest in the US. If the USDA Forest Service has its way, it would “remove all 9.2 million acres of inventoried roadless acres and would convert 165,000 old-growth acres and 20,000 young-growth acres previously identified as unsuitable timber lands to suitable timber lands. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s official: Humans are canceled. If we’re not intent on slowly destroying the planet, then we’re getting busy being downright nasty to each other online. But in a world increasingly devoid of human role models, there are some unlikely sources of inspiration out there. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Enter The Blob—a yellowish chunk of slime mold set to make its debut at the Paris Zoological Park on Saturday. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Opinion: Brain scans, aided by AI, reveal as much about you as your DNA. Grappling with their ethical implications is vital to scientific integrity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A new measurement seems to eliminate an anomaly that has captivated physicists for nearly a decade. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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New shape-shifting liquids can move or morph on command. One scientist even used them to make liquid cables for his headphones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If successful, India will become the fourth country to put a lander on lunar soil. The spacecraft will then collect data on the south pole's many mysteries. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Called the eDumper, the massive truck relies on regenerative braking to recover some of its energy as it slows down. Let's break down the physics. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A new paper tracked possible bias among scientists awarding prestigious research positions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices