Science, Spoken

Remember all those classics you devoured in comp-lit class? Neither do we. Research shows that we retain an embarrassingly small sliver of what we read. In an effort to help college students boost that percentage, a team made up of a designer, a psychologist, and a behavioral economist at Australia’s RMIT University recently introduced a new typeface, Sans Forgetica, that uses clever tricks to lodge information in your brain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cannabis is a hell of a drug. It can treat inflammation, pain, nausea, and anxiety, just to name a few ailments. But like any drug, cannabis comes with risks, chief among them something called cannabis use disorder, or CUD. Studies show that an estimated 9 percent of cannabis users will develop a dependence on the drug. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Antarctica is the driest, highest, windiest, and, of course, coldest continent. Since it’s nearly uninhabitable for humans, it’s also the cleanest. That makes it the perfect place to launch an odyssey aimed at persuading people to curb their plastic-pitching habits. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Recently I rolled into a local restaurant to try an Impossible Burger, an all-plant patty invented by the Silicon Valley startup Impossible Foods. It’s renowned for having an eerily chewy, even bloody, meatlike quality, a startling verisimilitude that has made it “perhaps the country’s most famous burger,” as New York magazine recently wrote. One bite into its gorgeous, smoky flavor and, damn, I was convinced. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Suppose you traveled back in time—say 40,000 years into the past—and then you got stuck. What would you do? How would you rebuild all the stuff that you like? That's the premise of the book How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, by Ryan North. Without getting into the nitty-gritty details, it gives you the general idea of how things like an electric motor or wifi work. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it’s rudely failed to deliver—jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful one might be the robot companion, à la Rosie from The Jetsons, a machine that watches over the home. It seemed like 2018 was going to be the year when robots made a big leap in that direction. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Geoffrey von Maltzahn was first pitching farmers to try out his startup’s special seeds, he sometimes told them, half-acknowledging his own hyperbole, that “if we’re right, you shouldn’t just see results in the field, you should be able to see them from outer space.” As the co-founder of a company called Indigo Ag, von Maltzahn was hawking a probiotic that he hoped would increase their crop yields dramatically. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When smoke from California’s wildfires was smothering the Bay Area last month, the Oakland Zoo closed to the public. The staff worked in shifts, many of them wearing N95 face masks, monitoring how animals dealt with the smoke from the fires more than a hundred miles away. Southern California was also dealing with wildfires and heavy smoke. In both regions, zoos had to make some tough decisions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The mountains of the High Sierra and the Rockies are, in effect, shrinking, according to a new analysis of the nation’s snowpack over the past 36 years. These places are experiencing a shorter winter with less snow, just like regions closer to sea level. That’s not good news for ski resorts and snowmobilers, as well as rural homeowners worried about wildfires that erupt in the summer and fall, experts say. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Since 2016, IBM has offered online access to a quantum computer. Anyone can log in and execute commands on a 5-qubit or 14-qubit machine located in Yorktown Heights, New York, from the comfort of their own home. This month, I finally tried it—nervously. I did not know what I was doing and worried I might break the hardware. “You won’t mess anything up,” IBM physicist James Wootton assured me via Skype. Courtesy of Sophia ChenI chose the 5-qubit machine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Clyde Tombaugh spent much of his life peering at telescope data. He discovered Pluto in 1930, and he spent years poking around the outer solar system. But as the scientific community began to dream about launching a vehicle into the great beyond, he focused his gaze much closer to home. At the time, the smaller stuff in our immediate space environment remained largely a mystery. People like Tombaugh worried whether orbiting gunk would make spaceflight that much harder. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

How do you handle the data of a scientist who violates all the norms of his field? Who breaches the trust of a community that spans the entire globe? Who shows a casual disregard for the fate of the whole human species? On the one hand, you might want to learn from such a person’s work; to have a full and open dissection of everything that went wrong. Because, spoiler, there was a lot that went wrong in the case in question. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every winter, millions of Americans descend on farms and lots across the country with the express purpose of inspecting, and ultimately choosing from, their local selection of coniferous evergreen trees. I'm talking, of course, about Christmas tree shopping—the widely practiced pastime of publicly scrutinizing spruces, pines, and firs in search of the ideal yuletide centerpiece. Many people are practiced at picking the perfect tree. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you think about the history of humans (disclaimer, I'm a human) you could make the argument that history is about the quest for energy. Not just any old energy, we want it cheap or maybe even free. If you have nearly limitless energy, you can do pretty much anything. You can extract the materials you need from the air, water, or land. You can build stuff. You can go to space. Energy is the key. But our quest for endless energy has caused some problems too. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The birth of Lulu and Nana—the first two babies believed to be born with Crispr-edited DNA—has triggered soul-searching in China as tech innovators, scientific researchers, and government bureaucrats reconcile conflicting values. At first Chinese media celebrated Jiankui He, the scientist who last week announced he had edited the girls' DNA. Some pundits even speculated whether a Nobel prize might be in the making. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A few years ago, a company called Spaceflight had a wacky plan. The plan, in the words of CEO Curt Blake, was “Let’s buy a Falcon!” Not, like, the bird of prey. Like the big SpaceX rocket that, similar to its avian namesake, swoops back down to Earth once it’s done its job. Buying the full capacity of such a big launcher is like booking out the town's largest, schmanciest bar: You really hope people will come to your party, and also that they'll pay their own tabs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There’s a specter hanging over the COP24 climate talks, happening this week in the small city of Katowice, Poland. It’s not the goalpost-moving report that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released two months ago about the need to limit warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (instead of 3.6 degrees). It’s not the conspicuous absence of prominent U.S. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

SpaceX launched its 20th rocket of the year just two days after lofting a record 64 satellites into orbit. On this flight, a brand-new Falcon 9 hoisted a Dragon spacecraft into orbit, bound for the International Space Station. But unlike Monday’s textbook touchdown, today’s landing didn’t quite go as planned. The Falcon’s first stage, the largest and most expensive portion of the rocket, was expected to navigate itself back to land after launching the Dragon spacecraft. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Corn farmers in Eastern Nebraska have long claimed weather patterns are changing, but in an unexpected way. “It’s something I’ve talked about with my dad and grandad many times,” says fifth-generation corn farmer Brandon Hunnicutt. Along with his father and brother, the 45-year-old lives in the 400-person village of Giltner and grows about 2,000 acres of corn each year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In February 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted through low clouds, pushing a Dragon capsule toward orbit. Among the spare parts and food, an important piece of scientific cargo, called SAGE III, rumbled upward. Once installed on the International Space Station, SAGE would peer back and measure ozone molecules and aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Pleurothallis portillae is one odd-looking orchid. Sporting a small nub of a flower nestled in a long, bulbous leaf that droops like a pair of string beans, it’s considered fashionably drab by collectors. But its true home is in the remote cloud forest of the Ecuadorian Andes---a region where, according to an algorithm, it’s most likely under threat of extinction. Plants have long gotten short shrift in conservation circles. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In Katowice, Poland, delegates from around the world have gathered to discuss how to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. The intent is to meet the goals that emerged from the 2015 Paris United Nations Climate Summit. But this year there’s a new top dog at the table. The United States, led by a president who doesn’t believe in climate change or the scientists who study it, will take a back seat at this month's climate summit, known as COP24. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fire is chaos. Fire doesn’t care what it destroys or who it kills—it spreads without mercy, leaving total destruction in its wake, as California’s Camp and Woolsey fires proved so dramatically this month. But fire is to a large degree predictable. It follows certain rules and prefers certain fuels and follows certain wind patterns. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“Gender and climate are inextricably linked,” said environmentalist and author Katharine Wilkinson on stage at TEDWomen last week, a gathering of women thought leaders and activists in Palm Desert, California. Women, she says, are disproportionately affected by climate change. When communities are decimated by floods or droughts, tsunamis or fire, the most vulnerable among them suffer the most. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2015, the 12-person organizing committee of the first International Summit on Human Gene Editing—which included Crispr co-inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier—issued a statement on how the world should responsibly push forward the science of permanently altering the DNA of Homo sapiens. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What people say they know about climate change is a roller coaster of human ignorance—wait, everyone knows that but no one knows that? It’s striking to learn (according to Yale’s climate survey program) that 74 percent of women and 70 percent of men believe climate change will harm future generations of humans, but just 48 and 42 percent, respectively, think it’s harming them personally. It is, of course, in lots of ways. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elon Musk has long promised a constellation of thousands of satellites, called Starlink, which Musk hopes will one day handle half of all internet traffic—and earn him billions in access fees. It's one of the ways he hopes to fund his future Mars adventures. SpaceX says two demonstration satellites it built and launched earlier this year already show that internet from space can be as fast and lag-free as people expect from cables on Earth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last week, diplomats from over 150 countries flew to Geneva to discuss how to reduce human-made emissions. No, not that kind. These suits want to cut mercury pollution. Mercury, that slippery, silvery stuff in old-timey thermometers, is a “huge public health threat,” says meeting attendee Susan Keane, a public health expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We said “don’t freak out,” when scientists first used Crispr to edit DNA in non-viable human embryos. When they tried it in embryos that could theoretically produce babies, we said “don’t panic.” Many years and years of boring bench science remain before anyone could even think about putting it near a woman’s uterus. Well, we might have been wrong. Permission to push the panic button granted. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the second day of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, the last session before lunch was already running long. But the crowd crammed into the Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre at the University of Hong Kong wasn’t budging. Neither were the 5,500 people around the world glued to their live video feeds. Everyone was waiting to hear from the the final speaker, the man who says he helped make the world’s first gene-edited babies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month, the US Department of Agriculture and FDA convened to debate meat: what it is and isn't, and if plant-based or lab-grown products like those made by Impossible Burger and Memphis Meats should be called meat. Lab-grown meat is still months from market, but vegetarian meats already have the poultry and cattle industries in a tizzy. Sales of meat analogues are growing at steady clip of 23 percent a year, nibbling out a decent market share. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the morning hours before NASA’s InSight spacecraft entered Mars’s atmosphere, roughly 30 employees of Lockheed Martin gathered in the company’s InSight Mission Support Area, in Denver. They all wore the same red button-down shirt adorned with a mission patch. Someone had taped red plastic over some of the fluorescent lights, to lend the room a martian ambience. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Delaney Van Riper was exhausted. It was the summer of 2017 and she’d spent the previous day touring UC Santa Cruz’s cliffside campus, getting her student paperwork in order, and meeting some of her 4,000 fellow incoming Slugs. Now, dressed head-to-toe in sweats, she was ready to nap in the backseat for the ride to her family’s home three hours away in Sacramento. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Northern California city of Paradise is gone—the Camp Fire, by far the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, has reduced home after home to ashes. It conjures images of a tsunami of flame tearing through the town, destroying everything in its path. Curiously, though, trees still stand between burned-out homes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There's really no way to rehearse landing on Mars. You can simulate it, sure, but the most valuable lessons are learned during actual attempts. When things go poorly, those lessons are also the most expensive. The fact is, most missions to Mars don't make it, though NASA has a better track record than most. The agency has executed seven successful touchdowns on the red planet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The general rule when developing a new kind of solar technology is to expect progress to be slow. Take silicon solar cells, the most ubiquitous and recognizable form of photovoltaic generations today. When silicon panels were first built in the early 1950s, they could only turn about 6 percent of the light that hit them into electricity. More than 30 years later, that number had inched up to 20 percent, and today—30 years after that—they regularly perform in the mid 20s. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Electronics often don’t mesh well with flesh and blood. Cochlear implants can irritate the scalp; pacemaker wires dislodge; VR headsets weigh heavily on the face. That’s why, for the past six years, Michael McAlpine has been Frankensteining alternatives. A mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota, he creates prototypes of bionic body parts with nice, soft components—some of them alive. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The twinkling of a starry night sky is romantic, sure. But for astronomer Dominika Wylezalek, “it’s a nightmare.” That’s because Wylezalek studies galaxies billions of light-years away, and all that finicky glimmering—she’d call it “turbulence”—gets in the way. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

To figure out how and when ancient fish first crawled from the ocean onto land, Neil Shubin is about to head to the mountains of Antarctica. Leaving behind family and friends for the upcoming holidays, he and a team of five other scientists and a mountain guide will be camping at the base of a remote mountain range that was a tropical river delta around 385 million years ago. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In my family, Thanksgiving this year has turned into a week-long holiday. Not because we’re all so fanatical about celebrating the violent European colonization of North America, but because it will take us that long to figure out what on Earth to put on the table. In a party of 12 we’ve got a duo of vegetarians, one part-time pollotarian, the recently dairy-avoidant and the long-time spice-averse, plus the seasonal carb-watchers and the one insufferable celery-hater. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Let’s say you have a baby. Maybe you really do, maybe you don’t. But Dan Scolnic, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, does have one, and perhaps that's why a hypothetical baby helps him explain the universe. If you take this baby to the doctor, that doctor will weigh and measure the baby, plot those points on a growth chart, and predict how big they’ll be later. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

1. The five traditional senses keep us alert and alive: Hot pans burn, loud noises startle. Within our bodies, a sixth sense, known as interoception, perceives the state of—and threats to—our internal organs. From pangs and cramps to shortness of breath, it warns us when something is off. Hung­over from a wild bender? Waves of nausea in the presence of alcohol are interoceptive warnings to lay off the juice. 2. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2018, people started using the blockchain to battle deepfakes, track sushi-grade tuna from Fiji to Brooklyn, and even cast a (symbolic) vote. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to put all 6 billion bits of your genetic source code on the blockchain too. Starting this week, a startup called Nebula Genomics is doing just that, offering whole-genome sequencing for free, as a way to stock up for its real ploy: a blockchain-based genetic marketplace. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Here are a few things you can buy with $200: one bluetooth-controlled fire pit, 100 lab-grown Impossible White Castle sliders, access to the 3 billion base pairs that make up all the DNA coiled inside your cells. Well, at least for the next 48 hours. Starting today, Cambridge-based Veritas Genetics will be lowering its $999 whole genome sequencing and interpretation service for just $199 for two days, or to the first 1,000 people who buy spit kits. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the morning of Friday, November 16, scientists and diplomats crammed into an auditorium in Versailles, a stone’s throw from the Sun King’s gilded chateau. Patrick Abbott, an American physicist, had flown into France for the long weekend. Forehead gleaming and blue suit jacket draped across his lap, Abbott watched from a packed balcony as a group of diplomats from 60 different countries voted unanimously on a treaty that intended to change global trade and technology forever. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you're a nefarious sort, you might use a commercial drone to smuggle drugs, carry explosives, or to just spy on your neighbors. Drones are appealing to criminals in part because they seem fairly anonymous, flitting through the sky with an invisible digital tether to its owner. But anonymity is no longer a safe bet. In the hands of crime investigators, a drone can reveal a range of personal and financial information about its owner. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As a fan of science fiction and science, I have to say that The Expanse has a bunch of great science. It's not just the science in the show. The characters also seem to demonstrate an understanding of physics. One scene from the first season stands out in particular as a classic physics example. I guess I should give a spoiler alert, but I'm not really giving away any major plot elements. But you have been warned. OK, since you are still here let me describe the scene. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Editor’s note: This is a developing story about California’s Camp Fire. We will update it as more information becomes available. On November 8, an almost unimaginable firestorm broke out in Northern California. Fed by dry vegetation, and fanned by northeasterly winds pouring off the Sierra Nevada Mountains, it rapidly descended on the community of Paradise, home to nearly 30,000 people. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It wasn’t a whodunnit. Last year’s unprecedented rainfall and flooding in Houston were the proximate result of Hurricane Harvey, a massive storm born northeast of Venezuela and reborn in the Gulf of Mexico, where it rapidly intensified, made landfall over Houston, and then stayed—parked, as it were, for five days. LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Climate Change Harvey was, however, something of a whydunnit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tuesday’s midterm elections offered voters across the US the chance to move decisively to slow down the global ecological disaster of climate change. As the votes were tallied, however, one thing became clear: Americans remain as divided as ever on climate change. During his tenure, President Trump has moved to roll back Obama-era emissions standards, cripple renewable energy research, and pulled the US from global climate talks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices