Science, Spoken

On a frigid day last January in northern Sweden, a German-led team of physicists loaded a curious machine onto an unmanned rocket. The payload, about as tall as a single-story apartment, was essentially a custom-made freezer—a vacuum chamber, with a small chip and lasers within, that could cool single atoms near absolute zero. They launched the rocket about 90 miles past the boundary of outer space, monitoring a livestream from a heated building nearby. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“Dear everyone,” wrote Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck during a reddit AMA in April, “I'm not building a bigger rocket any time soon.” Beck seems to get asked about expansion a lot. He and his Kiwi-US space company don’t build craft whose names end in “heavy.” Their rockets don’t land after launch. They’re only about as tall as a five-story building and as wide as a bookshelf, and they heft just 500 pounds max into orbit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Pain is an indispensable tool for survival. The prick of a nail underfoot is a warning that protects you from a deep, dirty wound—and maybe tetanus. The sizzle of a steel skillet is a deterrent against a third-degree burn. As much as it sucks, pain, oddly enough, keeps us from hurting ourselves. It's a luxury that prosthetic users don’t have. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Small satellite makers have promised to do a lot of things: change the way we communicate, change the way we see our planet, change the way we predict the weather. They’re cheaper, faster to develop, and easier to update than their bigger and more sophisticated counterparts. But for all the revolution and disruption, they tend to keep their focus close, and largely cast their eyes down. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Consider the rotten strawberry. Sitting there in your fridge, it suffers a cascading trifecta of maladies: For one, it dehydrates. Two, oxygen seeps in. And three, with the berry thus weakened, mold invades. Eventually, the strawberry turns to goop, a messy reminder of our own mortality. Rotting produce is an inevitability—I for one wouldn’t trust fruit that lasts forever—but that doesn’t mean we have to give in to the forces of decay so quickly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For a long time, China has been a dumping ground for the world’s problematic plastics. In the 1990s, Chinese markets saw that discarded plastic could be profitably recreated into exportable bits and bobs—and it was less expensive for international cities to send their waste to China than to deal with it themselves. China got cheap plastic and the exporting countries go rid of their trash. But in November 2017, China said enough. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After months of teasing a new military arm devoted to extra-stratospheric security, President Donald Trump publicly ordered the Department of Defense and the Pentagon to immediately begin establishing a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces on Monday. Well, maybe. The president’s statement was not accompanied by any written directive or executive order calling for the creation of a new, space-based branch of the armed forces, as some outlets initially reported. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday night Gary Taubes will board his second transatlantic flight in a week—from Zurich to Aspen—then eventually back to Oakland, where he calls home. The crusading science journalist best known for his beef with Big Sugar is beat after four days of nutrition conference glad-handing. But there’s no rest for the down and out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the early Space Age, the people who sent up satellites could operate under what's known as "big sky" theory. Space is so vast, so spacious, that we could never possibly use it all up. History, however, has repeatedly shown that whenever we think something is too abundant for humans to deplete, we're wrong. And so it is in space, where more and more satellites and space junk threaten to crash into each other and crowd out the future. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Whether they believe robots are going to create or destroy jobs, most experts say that robots are particularly useful for handling “dirty, dangerous and dull” work. They point to jobs likeshutting down a leaky nuclear reactor,cleaning sewers ,orinspecting electronic componentsto really drive the point home. Robots don’t get offended, they are cheap to repair when they get “hurt,” and they don’t get bored. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today, during a World Cup game between Morocco and Iran, Moroccan winger Nordin Amrabat suffered a wicked head injury when he collided with an opponent. After he went down, a team trainer tried to revive him by slapping his face—a move decried by athletes and followers online. But despite the frequency of those kinds of injuries in soccer, you won’t see many international pros wearing gear that might prevent a concussion—reinforced headbands. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As Hurricane Maria approached Puerto Rico in late September 2017, planetary scientist Ed Rivera-Valentin knew he needed to get out. His apartment was near the coast, in Manatí, and some projections had the storm passing directly over. “I knew I couldn’t stay there because something bad was going to happen,” he says. Some people stayed with inland family, or in shelters. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The mantis shrimp is neither a mantis nor a shrimp, but it does wield perhaps the most stunning strike in the animal kingdom. Sitting below its face are two hammers, which the crustacean cocks back and launches at its prey with such speed that it shatters snail shells and tears crabs’ limbs right of their bodies. These things are ornery, and will even fight a human given the chance. For the mantis shrimp, the only tool they have is a hammer, and all the world looks like a nail. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Granit Xhaka is a true marathon man, often running more than almost anyone else in soccer’s English Premier League for his London-based club, Arsenal. The 25-year-old midfielder covered 7.6 miles during one game last year. All that running up and down the field (not to mention headers, tackles, and kicks) means Xhaka’s body requires not only fitness, but rest and recovery. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the Antarctic wants to rid itself of ice, it has to get creative. The cold is too stubborn to allow surface ice to gently melt into oblivion. Instead, crushed by the immense build-up, ice gets shoved slowly along valleys and gorges until it finally reaches the edge of the continent, walking the plank into its watery grave. Back in the 1980s, scientists would plant stakes on these so-called “ice streams” to see how fast (or how slowly) they moved. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A journalist, a soup exec, and an imam walk into a room. There’s no joke here. It’s just another day at CrisprCon. On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of scientists, industry folk, and public health officials from all over the world filled the amphitheater at the Boston World Trade Center to reckon with the power of biology’s favorite new DNA-tinkering tool: Crispr. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Who wouldn’t enjoy a little X-ray vision, really? You could cheat at cards, for one. And that game where someone puts something under one of three cups and you have to guess where it is. Easy. Of course, X-ray vision would come with a downside, in that you’d be spraying all your surveillance targets with radiation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Perpetual motion—it's fun to say that. For some people, perpetual motion machines hold the secret to everlasting free energy that will save the world. To them, it's a machine that is just beyond our grasp. If only we could tweak our design just a little bit, it would work. To others (like me), perpetual motion machines are impossible—they don't fit with our well-tested ideas of the conservation of energy. However, they can still make a fun puzzle, as you see above. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

David Liu’s office on the eighth floor of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts is designed to quiet the mind. A museum-grade gemstone collection lines the walls, interspersed with blue-tinged photos Liu has taken of inspiring science-on-location scenes—the concrete corners of the Salk Institute, a sunset through the Scripps pier, the lights of Durango, Colorado where Darpa often meets. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When geologist and nuclear security researcher Rodney Ewing left the University of Michigan for Stanford in 2014, he left some of his belongings back in the Midwest. Hundreds of his belongings, actually. All of them radioactive. He wasn't trying to poison anybody: It was a collection of minerals from around the world—some unearthed himself, some donated—each with uranium enmeshed inside. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Find yourself adrift at sea, surrounded by undrinkable water, and you will parch to death. Find yourself lost in a desert and you will meet the same fate, also surrounded by water, also undrinkable. That’s because, even in the driest of lands, the air is loaded with water molecules—they just won’t do you any good. Devices exist that can pull that water out of the air and convert it into liquid, but they are bulky and use a lot of energy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What happens when you see bad physics in the world? Does it make you angry? Does it make you laugh? Do you have to hold back a tidal wave of "well, actuallys" because of the overwhelming wrongness? Some might feel that way, but I think about it a little differently. In my mind, there are different categories of incorrect physics—and I deal with each one with its own particular strategy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For 10 years, Andre Igoudala slept terribly. Back in college, the Golden State Warriors forward would play videogames late into the night. Eventually he'd crash, sometimes as late as 4 am, only to wake up a few hours later for practice. Then came class. When he was lucky, he'd squeeze in an afternoon nap. Later that night, it'd be back to videogames—either that or Fresh Prince reruns. Igoudala's brutal sleep habits followed him to the NBA. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died in December of 2017; the election to replace him was Tuesday. No one knows who won. Partially that’s because the votes are still trickling in. Mail-in ballots merely had to be postmarked by election day, and as I write the city is reporting 87,000 votes yet to be processed. But that’s not the only roadblock. The other problem is math. See, the San Francisco mayoral election isn’t just another whoever-gets-the-most-votes-wins sort of deal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Westworld is a hell of a show, but the sense of dread it elicits is nothing new. Pygmalion sculpted a woman who came to life. Same goes with the Golem, only with mud. The amalgamated Frankenstein jolted awake to get all murderous. Humans creating life in their own image is a cornerstone of the realm of fiction. And until recently, they’ve stayed there. But today, ever-sophisticated robots are graduating from Disneyland-style animatronics into increasingly realistic, intelligent beings. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today is the first day of the rest of your (storm-tossed, wind-swept, blacked-out, hot, humid) life. Which is to say, June 1 is the official start of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season. According to most forecasts—at least 26 groups issue them, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Colorado State University—it’s going to be pretty average. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday at its annual developer's conference, Apple unveiled several new features designed to help users understand and manage the time they spend on their iOS devices. There's new time-and location-based Do Not Disturb modes; a suite of notification-management tools; and a clever lock screen feature that organizes your push alerts into tidy little topic-specific bundles. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Consider the following physics problem. An object with a mass of 1 kg and a velocity of 1 m/s in the x-direction has a net force of 1 Newton pushing on it (also in the x-direction). What will the velocity of the object be after 1 second? (Yes, I am using simple numbers—because the numbers aren't the point.) Let's solve this simple problem two different ways. For the first method, I will use Newton's Second Law. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The bets on liquid biopsy keep getting bigger. Last month, Silicon Valley unicorn Grail Inc. raised a third round of financing to develop its blood-based tests for early cancer detection. That brings its total up to $1.5 billion since 2016, putting it among the top three most heavily funded private biotech companies in the US. While investors might be bullish on the risky venture, many oncologists have been more skeptical about how well Grail’s technique might work. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Bijunath Patla’s experiment sounds like a real bore: Gather 12 of the most accurate clocks around the world, and watch them tick. It’s like a physicist’s version of watching paint dry. Patla’s team, based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, began monitoring the clocks on November 11, 1999. And they’ve kept watching for some 4.5 billion seconds—over 14 years. But their patience paid off. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Cray-1 supercomputer, the world’s fastest back in the 1970s, does not look like a supercomputer. It looks like a mod version of that carnival ride The Round Up, the one where you stand, strapped in, as it dizzies you up. It’s surrounded by a padded bench that conceals its power supplies, like a cake donut, if the hole was capable of providing insights about nuclear weapons. After Seymour Cray first built this computer, he gave Los Alamos National Laboratory a six-month free trial. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the past two and half centuries, scientists envisioning the origin of planetary systems (including our own) have focused on a specific scene: a spinning disk around a newborn star, sculpting planets out of gas and dust like clay on a potter’s wheel. But as for testing the idea, by actually spotting an exoplanet coalesce from swirling matter? No luck yet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Are superheroes real? Maybe. In this recently released video, a firefighter in Latvia catches a man falling past a window. Let me tell you something. I have a fairly reasonable understanding of physics and this catch looks close to being impossible—but it's real. Here is the situation (as far as I can tell). A dude is hanging on a window (actually, the falling human is only rumored to be a male) and then he falls. The firefighters were setting up a proper way to catch him, but it wasn't ready. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the fall of 1987, a young Canadian couple set off from their hometown of Saanich, British Columbia to run a few errands in Seattle. They never made it there; police found their bodies a few days later near Bellingham, Washington. Jay Cook had been beaten and strangled. His girlfriend, Tanya Van Cuylenborg, had been raped and shot in the head. For more than 30 years their families held out hope that police would one day find the killer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Maybe you thought my previous post on the crushing g-force of the Epstein drive from The Expanse would be the end of that. Wrong. This is such great clip, I have to do more. In case you missed it, let me tell you what's going on. This guy has a spaceship near Mars (maybe in orbit) and he is playing around with some modifications to his fusion drive, giving the spaceship super thrust while using very little fuel. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There’s no one way to describe the scent of a beached, rotting whale. See, it really depends on time and space: So long as you’re more than 20 feet away, you don’t smell a thing. But if you’re downwind, the sour stench will just about bowl you over. Its bite sits heavily instead of sharply in your throat. If a zombie wore week-old gym socks, this is what it would smell like. Then consider the time of death. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You could be excused, when you first hear Dane Rudy describe his company, for thinking that he wants to use raccoons to send satellites into space. Trash pandas, though, are not the future that Rudy is talking about. He's talking about rockoons—rockets launched from high-altitude balloons. Rockoons trace their trajectory back to the military, like the 1950s Air Force program called Farside. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The viral disease Ebola has, as of May 26, killed 25 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and sickened 31 more. In response, treatment centers have popped up (two of three people who fled one of those centers in the city of Mbandaka have died) and health care workers there are getting a still-experimental vaccine. People who’ve had contact with someone with Ebola, and their contacts, will get the shot, too. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Raquel Loreto is a zombie hunter, and a good one. But traipsing through dried leaves in a hot forest in Sanda, at the southern end of Japan, she needed a guide. Just a few months before, she’d been on the internet and come across the work of artist Shigeo Ootak, whose fantastical images depict humans with curious protrusions erupting from their heads. She got in touch, and he invited her to Japan for a hike to find his inspiration. Ootak knew precisely where to look: six feet off the ground. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The city of Richmond, Calif. juts into the San Francisco Bay like the head of a rhinoceros looking west across the water, toward San Quentin State Prison and the tony towns north of the Golden Gate. It’s a low, industrial town, and 2,900 acres of it is an oil refinery. Chevron is Richmond’s biggest employer, and through taxes contributes about a quarter of the city’s total budget. Chevron is also Richmond’s eternal nemesis. Industrial accidents are an ongoing issue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Heredity is a powerful concept. It’s the thing that ties families together—that gives shape to their shared history of stories, of homes, of personalities. And more and more, it’s the way we understand families’ shared genetic inheritance. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you like science fiction, I can recommend a show for you—The Expanse. It takes place in the not-so-distant future all right here in our own solar system. There are no pew-pew lasers or faster-than-light space travel. When humans are on a spacecraft, they either "float" around or use magnetic boots (except when the spacecraft is accelerating). There are no "inertial dampeners" in The Expanse. Not only that, but it has interesting characters and a compelling plot. I like it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If I told you that flatworms had invaded France, you might say, c'est la vie. A worm is a worm, after all. But then I’d tell you they’re also known as land planarians, and you might think that sounds rather more alien. Then I’d say they’re also called hammerhead flatworms, and you might start getting nervous. Oh, and they grow to a foot long and release secretions from their hammerheads that glue them to their native French prey, the innocent little earthworms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Humans lives their lives trapped in a glass cage of perception. You can only see a limited range of visible light, you can only taste a limited range of tastes, you can only hear a limited range of sounds. Them’s the evolutionary breaks. But machines can kind of leapfrog over the limitations of natural selection. By creating advanced robots, humans have invented a new kind of being, one that can theoretically sense a far greater range of stimuli. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This storyoriginally appeared on Gristand is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. Chris Sayer pushed his way through avocado branches and grasped a denuded limb. It was stained black, as if someone had ladled tar over its bark. In February, the temperature had dropped below freezing for three hours, killing the limb. The thick leaves had shriveled and fallen away, exposing the green avocados, which then burned in the sun. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You like eating, yes? Apples, oranges, berries? For these foods we can thank bees and their extraordinary pollinating powers. Unfortunately, to show our appreciation, humans are killing off bees in staggering numbers—destroying their habitats and poisoning them with pesticides. And at the same time, our population is skyrocketing, which means if we can't get our act together, we have to somehow feed more people with fewer pollinators. Well, living pollinators, that is. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Forget ruby-encrusted swords or diamond-tipped chainsaws. The scanning probe microscope is, quite literally, the sharpest object ever made. Hidden under its bulky silver exterior is a thin metal wire, as fine as a human hair. And at one end, its point tapers to the width of a single atom. Scientists wield the wire not as a weapon, but as an intricate paintbrush—using its needlelike tip to position single atoms on a tiny semiconductor canvas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This storyoriginally appeared on CityLaband is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. When Latter-day Saint migrants arrived in Utah in 1847, a verse in Isaiah served as consolation to them in the dessicated landscape: “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” Lately, the desert has blossomed nowhere more than the St. George area, in the state’s southern reaches. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Alan Beam was sitting in his office reviewing lab reports when Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes poked her head in and asked him to follow her. She wanted to show him something. They stepped outside the lab into an area of open office space where other employees had gathered. At her signal, a technician pricked a volunteer’s finger, then applied a transparent plastic implement shaped like a miniature rocket to the blood oozing from it. This was the Theranos sample collection device. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The 6-foot-long, 140-pound Chinese giant salamander is a being that defies belief—and seemingly the laws of the physical universe. It’s the largest amphibian on the planet, a gargantuan (though harmless) beast that rests on river-bottoms hoovering up fish. Once it grows big enough, not many critters dare touch it—save for, of course, humans. Particularly the conservationists who are working to save the creature. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices