Science, Spoken

Everyone knows I like to analyze the trailers of upcoming movies—in particular, movies that I'm excited about. In this case, it's Incredibles 2. I have high hopes for this one since the first Incredibles was really great. In the trailer, we see Mr. Incredible doing his job—helping out with math homework (that's one of the things dads do). Here is how that goes down. Dash: "That's not the way you're supposed to do it, dad. They want us to do it this way." Mr. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2007, I spent the summer before my junior year of college removing little bits of brain from rats, growing them in tiny plastic dishes, and poring over the neurons in each one. For three months, I spent three or four hours a day, five or six days a week, in a small room, peering through a microscope and snapping photos of the brain cells. The room was pitch black, save for the green glow emitted by the neurons. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Twenty-seven years ago, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed a strange correspondence: Numbers emerging from one kind of geometric world matched exactly with very different kinds of numbers from a very different kind of geometric world. To physicists, the correspondence was interesting. To mathematicians, it was preposterous. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an entire building. Its lasers, mirrors, and lenses are split among three laboratories, two of them at opposite ends of the L-shaped building. The whole thing is strung together with almost 900 feet of optical fiber. “It’s a prototype system,” the mathematician explains. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In January 2017, what started as a subreddit thread about the new White House scrubbing all mention of climate change from its official government website became, just three months later, the single biggest pro-science demonstration in the history of humankind. On April 22, more than a million people across all seven continents took to the streets (and dirt roads and snowfields) to declare themselves, not dispassionately, for the fundamental political value of science. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There is a lot of junk floating out in space, and it’s a problem we’ve been talking about, in fits and spurts, since the 1960s. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Amy Webb (@amywebb) is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the chief executive of the Future Today Institute, a strategic foresight and research group in Washington, D.C. Space junk was the topic of my middle school futurists' society challenge. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Until recently, Fergal Mullaly worked for the science office of the Kepler space telescope, the planet-hunting satellite that has verified more than 2,600 planets so far. “We have this really strong emotional desire to be able to point to a place in the sky and say, ‘That star there has a planet around it,’” he says. For the four years of its main mission, from 2009 to 2013, Kepler fixed its gaze on one region of the sky and watched the light from its stars. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most mornings when I step out of my San Francisco apartment, I hear the waves, the seagulls, and occasionally kids yelling out the window across the street. But over the past few weeks, the murmur of Ocean Beach has been cut with a low mechanistic rumble. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Is Elon Musk crazy or just awesome? This week, the serial CEO (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink) posted on Twitter about yet another one of his ventures, the super fast tube-based transportation system called hyperloop. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/982826517443915776Is this even possible? Let's do some quick calculations. First, what is the speed of sound? I am assuming that Elon is referring to the speed of sound at sea level (and not speed of sound in a low pressure tube). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The last time I looked at random walks, I used them to calculate the value of Pi for Pi Day. But what is a random walk, really? A mathematician will tell you that it's a stochastic process—a path defined by a series of random steps. It's a pretty abstract concept, but I want to show you how it can reveal something fundamental about life itself—the proteins that make up you and me and everything around us. So let's start with the simplest random walk, in one dimension. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

During a recent Uber ride, Madhuri Hegde’s driver asked her what she did for a living. The chief scientific officer for laboratory services at PerkinElmer, she prepared to bore him with a description of the tests her company had developed—most recently to flag serious genetic disorders. Instead, he was intrigued. “Where can I get one of those?” he asked. For years, PerkinElmer has only offered that clinical test to doctors. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A few rules for the cleanroom where NASA’s new InSight Mars lander waits for launch. One, if you must sneeze, sneeze away from the spacecraft. Two, if you drop anything, let one of NASA’s escorts pick it up for you. Three, do not under any circumstances cross the black-and-yellow-striped tape and touch the spacecraft. Oh also—an engineer tells a dozen media in a conference room at Vandenberg Air Force Base—do not lick the spacecraft. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Rock-Paper-Scissors works great for deciding who has to take out the garbage. But have you ever noticed what happens when, instead of playing best of three, you just let the game continue round after round? At first, you play a pattern that gives you the upper hand, but then your opponent quickly catches on and turns things in her favor. As strategies evolve, a point is reached where neither side seems to be able to improve any further. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Around 2013, plastic surgeons like Boris Paskhover started to notice a bizarre trend in their doctor’s offices. More and more young patients—under 40, as young as 20—were asking for nose jobs. In Paskhover’s office in New York, new patients would plop down, hand over their phone, and complain about how their schnoz looked in selfies. In turn, Paskhover would hand them a mirror and tell them to take a look. “This is what you really look like,” he says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Getting older is supposed to give you perspective. But for one out of five people over the age of 65, it does the opposite. Macular degeneration is a common progressive eye condition, one that thins and breaks down a tissue behind the center of the retina. Without that tissue, the light-sensing cells it supports atrophy and die, making it impossible to get a clear picture of anything straight ahead of you—like, say, the faces of your loved ones or anything past your steering wheel. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's tough being a parent. Sometimes I try to help my kids with their physics homework because I like to pretend that I'm sort of OK with physics. Recently, my daughter wanted me to check her answer for this question. Where do you weigh more, at the equator or at the North Pole? Oh boy. I'm not sure what answer to give. OK, I think I know the answer and I also think I know the answer that the teacher wants (and these two answers might not be the same). Really, it's not the best question. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Step one: Gently suck up the bumblebees with a special vacuum. Step two: Place them in the fridge to chill until they’re immobilized. Step three: Remove bees and superglue a sort of tiny, simplified QR code on their backs. Superglue what, you say? Yes, QR codes—a pretty significant upgrade for entomologists. Researchers used to stand over colonies, laboriously tracking the behavior of individual bees. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Scientists, environmentalists, and anyone who lives within a hundred miles of the winding Mississippi River will tell you—have told you, repeatedly, for 150 years—that efforts to tame the river have only made it more feral. But scientists would like more than intuition, more than a history of 18th-century river level gauges and discharge stations, more than written and folkloric memory. They would like proof. Luckily, rivers inscribe their history onto the landscape. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman was busy. He was busy winning the Nobel Prize, and he was busy learning to draw. One day during that productive time in his life, he saw astrophysics student Virginia Trimble striding across Caltech's campus and thought, There's a good model. Soon, she was posing for him a couple Tuesdays a month, in exchange for $5.50 each session and a lot of physics talk. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Biotech has been betting big on Crispr, the gene-editing technique that promises to snip away some of humanity’s worst diseases. But last May, a small case study suggested the much-hyped technology might actually be quite dangerous—and pop went the Crispr bubble, briefly tanking shares of Crispr companies like Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, and Crispr Therapeutics. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was 1968. I was 8 years old. The space race was in full swing. For the first time, a space probe had recently landed on another planet (Venus). And I was eagerly studying everything I could to do with space. Then on April 2, 1968 (May 15 in the UK), the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was released—and I was keen to see it. So in the early summer of 1968 there I was, the first time I’d ever been in an actual cinema (yes, it was called that in the UK). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The first human brain balls—aka cortical spheroids, aka neural organoids—agglomerated into existence just a few short years ago. In the beginning, they were almost comically crude: just stem cells, chemically coerced into proto-neurons and then swirled into blobs in a salty-sweet bath. But still, they were useful for studying some of the most dramatic brain disorders, like the microcephaly caused by the Zika virus. Then they started growing up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

George Church towers over most people. He has the long, gray beard of a wizard from Middle-earth, and his life’s work—poking and prodding DNA and delving into the secrets of life—isn’t all that far removed from a world where deep magic is real. The 63-year-old geneticist presides over one of the largest and best-funded academic biology labs in the world, headquartered on the second floor of the massive glass and steel New Research Building at Harvard Medical School. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Physicists don’t know much about dark matter. They can’t agree on what it’s made of, how much a single particle weighs, or the best way to construct a Play-Doh diorama of it. (How would you do it? Dark matter is invisible—light doesn’t interact with it at all.) Nobody has ever caught a dark matter particle on Earth. But after 30-plus years of telescope observations, most researchers do agree on one thing: The universe contains a lot of it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

No one knows exactly when or where China's abandoned Tiangong-1 space station will return to Earth. But the map on Ted Muelhaupt's computer gives him a better idea than most. "I'm looking at it right now, and it's telling me the vehicle's not gonna land in Quito," he says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“I am a bit concerned about your telomeres,” the doctor told me, evenly. Telomeres are the caplike segments at the ends of the strands of DNA that make up your chromosomes—think of the plastic aglets at the ends of a shoelace—and some of mine, he could see, were not as long as he would have liked them to be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Resomator stands monolithic in the corner of a room on the ground floor of a building at UCLA. It’s as sterile as a hospital in here, but every patient is already dead. This is the penultimate stage of their time under the care of Dean Fisher, director of the Donated Body Program at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The eyes are unwell. Their childhood suppleness is lost. The lenses, as we log hours on this earth, thicken, stiffen, even calcify. The eyes are no longer windows on souls. They’re closer to teeth. To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ever wonder how a mirror works? If you want to find the path that light takes when reflecting off a surface, you could use Fermat's Principle. This states something like this: The path that light takes is the path that takes the least time. When going from point A to point B, light will travel along the path that takes less time than any other options. I actually used this idea in a question for my students learning about the variational principle with a question using Fermat's Principle. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Millennials, we’re assured by endless headlines, are the people most addicted to their devices. Addled by social networking, obsessed with taking selfies and hustling for likes, youngsters can’t put their damn phones down. Amirite? Nope. That is wrong. The data suggests that the ones most hooked on their devices are those graying GenXers. Research by Nielsen, for example, found that Americans aged 35 to 49 used social media 40 minutes more each week than those aged 18 to 34. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the hills near Santa Barbara, something funky is growing. No, it’s not the newest strain of bubba kush. It’s coffee, sprouting farther north than it should be. Coffee belongs in the tropics—it doesn't like cold snaps. But here at Frinj Coffee, a special variety called geisha flourishes. And it’s about to get a whole lot more special—thanks, actually, to cannabis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I don’t think I’m the only parent who frets about their kids’ screen time. The Phineas and Ferb binges. Saturday nights playing Uncharted. It’s all turning their brains to sausage, right? Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik wants us to take a deep breath—and focus less on how much kids use tech and more on how kids can use tech to their advantage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After a wimpy winter, spring break has arrived, and skiers and snowboarders from Maine to Mammoth Lakes are stoked. More than 18 feet of snow has dropped at Squaw Valley, Calif., in March; Utah’s famed powder resorts have finally broken the 100-inch mark; and New England has been pummeled by four big storms pushing closing dates to late April. At the same time, there are warning signs about the future of the sport. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Paul ErdÅ‘s, the famously eccentric, peripatetic and prolific 20th-century mathematician, was fond of the idea that God has a celestial volume containing the perfect proof of every mathematical theorem. “This one is from The Book,” he would declare when he wanted to bestow his highest praise on a beautiful proof. Never mind that ErdÅ‘s doubted God’s very existence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

More than a decade ago, researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge began recruiting young, healthy Louisianans to voluntarily go hungry for two years. In addition to cutting their daily calories by 25 percent, the dozens who enrolled also agreed to a weekly battery of tests; blood draws, bone scans, swallowing a pill that measures internal body temperature. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Montecito is coming back to life this morning. The 9,000 person town to the east of Santa Barbara has been empty since Tuesday, when mandatory evacuations forced residents out of their homes for the fifth time in four months. This week it was a channel of tropical moisture called the Pineapple Express, dumping bands of intense rain and triggering flash floods throughout Southern California. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Chevron would like you to know that it believes in climate change. It also believes people cause it by burning carbon-based fuel—the kind Chevron extracts from the ground, refines, and sells. In fact, Chevron believes all this so hard that today its lawyer said so, in a federal court in San Francisco. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Yup. They’re right. That’s not as up-is-down as it might sound; Chevron representatives have said as much before. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Do you like a planet that hasn’t yet melted? Do you like sushi? How about breathing? Then you’re secretly in love with plankton, tiny marine organisms that float around at the mercy of currents. They sequester carbon dioxide and provide two thirds of the oxygen in our atmosphere and sacrifice themselves as baby food for the young fish that eventually end up on your plate. Yet science knows little about the complex dynamics of plankton on ocean-wide scales. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you think your on-the-job training was tough, imagine what life is like for newbie surgeons. Under the supervision of a veteran doctor, known as an attending, trainees help operate on a real live human, who might have a spouse and kids—and, if something goes awry, a very angry lawyer. Now add to the mix the da Vinci robotic surgery system, which operators control from across the room, precisely guiding instruments from a specially-designed console. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“Want to come to a quantum computing party?” I wasn’t expecting the question. My brain was hurting: I’d just finished an hour-long interview with Jarrod McClean, a Google quantum computing scientist, and I was mentally planning to write up my notes. His talk had caught my attention the day before: McClean spoke animatedly, bobbing a magnificent head of shoulder-length ringlets, as he pointed at equations and diagrams on a PowerPoint presentation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It might not be apparent unless you're driving through the mid-longitudes of Interstate 70, but around 40 percent of the land in the United States is farmland. Understanding what happens on that acreage is complicated—for individual farmers and agricultural conglomerates. Understanding how to improve what’s going on is even harder. That’s why Granular—a farm software business under the agriculture division of DowDuPont—penned a deal with Planet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This year, nearly 1.7 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer. Most will find out in the usual way; after having tiny blobs of tissue slurped up through a needle, smeared and stained on a slide, and put under the discerning eye of a pathologist. But starting this week, Medicare patients with advanced cancers will have access to a more 21st century diagnostic: Their cells can now be sequenced, matching patients with the drugs most likely to make a difference. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you want to avoid getting sick on a plane, the worst place to sit, according to Charles Gerba, is along the aisle. The issue is exposure—not just to other passengers, but anything they touch. That means obvious hot spots (arm rests, tray tables, in-flight magazines) and less-obvious ones like aisle seats, which people use to steady themselves as they move about the cabin, frequently on their way to and from a lavatory. Oh right, lavatories. Don't get Gerba started on those. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The bionic hand closes slowly. Its slender metal digits whirr as they jitter into a loose fist, as though they are wrapping around an invisible baton. "OK, closed," says the test subject. The test subject is Amanda Kitts. In 2006, a Ford F350 hit her Mercedes sedan head-on. The collision rent the truck's tire from its chassis and shoved the axle into Kitts' car, where it nearly severed her arm. "It wasn't completely off, but it was mincemeat," she says. "There was no saving it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the early 2000s, Greg Wyler, former founder of a semiconductor company, was laying fiber in Africa. He wanted to do something that mattered. Semiconductors didn’t matter, you know? But linking people to each other and to information did, he thought. “The lesser educated version of myself said, ‘Fiber is the answer,'" says Wyler. "'I’ll run it everywhere.’” He didn’t run it everywhere, though he did run it quite a few places in Africa. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It took ten years to build the Maverick, a dorm-fridge-sized box that takes in a cartridge with a little bit of blood—more than a drop but, you know, not a pint, either—and spits out new knowledge. On the cartridge is a silicon chip carved with antibody-lined channels; if any of a range of molecules that signal things like celiac disease are floating around, they stick to the antibodies, changing the way the channel reflects infrared light. The machine goes ping. (Not literally. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s hard to pick which species to save in Brazil right now. Yellow fever is tearing through primate populations, wiping out squirrel and howler monkeys. Poachers are nabbing giant anteaters for meat and blue macaws to sell as exotic pets. But conservation biologist Rogério Zacariotti wants to save a venomous yellow viper—the golden lancehead. But the snake isn't making it easy for him. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For arguably the most famous physicist on Earth, Stephen Hawking—who died Wednesday in Cambridge at 76 years old—was wrong a lot. He thought, for a while, that black holes destroyed information, which physics says is a no-no. He thought Cygnus X-1, an emitter of X-rays over 6,000 light years away, wouldn’t turn out to be a black hole. (It did.) He thought no one would ever find the Higgs boson, the particle indirectly responsible for the existence of mass in the universe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On March 4, an embryologist at Pacific Fertility Center was doing a routine walk-through of the clinic’s collection of waist-high steel tanks, each one filled with thousands of liquid nitrogen-bathed vials of frozen sperm, eggs, and embryos. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It is once again Pi Day (March 14—which is like the first digits of pi: 3 and 14). Before getting into this year's celebration of pi, let me just summarize some of the most important things about this awesome number. Outside the US, Pi Day should probably be July 22 (22/7)—this fraction is a surprisingly good estimate of pi. You can find the value of pi with a mass and a spring. The value of pi is related to the local gravitational field. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices