Science, Spoken

“Who are we?” That impossible question opened the 2015 public letter announcing a well-heeled SETI project called Breakthrough Listen. Dozens of people—scientists, astronauts, and also a producer, a chess champ, and a soprano—signed the note, which kicked off a $100 million effort by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to catch signals from alien civilizations. That quest, Milner and the signatories hoped, would answer that existential query. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I can't help myself. When I'm out in the real world and I see something cool, I have to turn it into a physics problem. It's just what I do. In this case, I was changing planes in the Atlanta airport. Like many other airports, Atlanta has a mini subway to take you between terminals. You walk in, the doors shut and then it accelerates up to some traveling speed. At some point it slows down and stops so that you can get off and catch your plane. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The baby was still in diapers when the first blister appeared, ballooning red and angry from his pale, newborn skin. Soon, they became a regular feature on the map of his body, along with deep creases in his face when he howled out in pain. A doctor told the parents his LAMB3 gene had a glitch—his body wasn’t making enough of a protein to anchor the outer layer of his skin to the inner ones. For seven years they kept the blisters at bay. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the aftermath of the massacre of 26 people in a small-town Texas church, you might have seen that the killer used a gun called an AR-15. It’s a popular weapon—relatively easy to use, endlessly customizable, military in appearance. How popular? It’s the same gun that a killer used in the massacre of 58 people at a Las Vegas concert last month, and by the killer who murdered 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando, and the one at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If Jonathan Rothberg has a superpower, it’s cramming million-dollar, mainframe-sized machines onto single semiconductor circuit boards. The entrepreneurial engineer got famous (and rich) inventing the world’s first DNA sequencer on a chip. And he’s spent the last eight years sinking that expertise (and sizeable startup capital) into a new venture: making your smartphone screen a window into the human body. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s a fallish day in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, the rural home of Green Bank Observatory and the world’s largest fully steerable telescope. Rippled clouds hang low over the site’s hulking 100-meter radio dish, itself undergirded and overhung by bright white scaffolding. The browning leaves are nearly gone. And the visitor center director, Sherry McCarty, has agreed to give me the astronomy center’s new SETI tour ($40, reservations required). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Recently, I gave my introductory physics course a fairly standard problem, based on the Matter and Interactions textbook. I've modified the question, but it goes something like this: You have a spacecraft with a mass of 100 kilograms, moving near Mars (the planet, not the candy bar). At one point, it is traveling at a speed of 1,100 m/s, flying 5 x 107 meters from the center of the planet. At a later point, the spacecraft reaches a new altitude, flying 8.6 x 107 meters from the center. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

From the air, the largest glacier on the biggest ice sheet in the world looks the same as it has for centuries; massive, stable, blindingly white. But beneath the surface it’s a totally different story. East Antarctica’s Totten Glacier is melting, fast, from below. Thanks to warm ocean upwellings flowing into the glacier—in some places at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second—it’s losing between 63 and 80 billion tons of previously frozen fresh water every year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When someone takes their own life, they leave behind an inheritance of unanswered questions. “Why did they do it?” “Why didn’t we see this coming?” “Why didn’t I help them sooner?” If suicide were easy to diagnose from the outside, it wouldn’t be the public health curse it is today. In 2014 suicide rates surged to a 30-year high in the US, making it now the second leading cause of death among young adults. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

By any measure, the fires that tore through Northern California were a major disaster. Forty-two people are dead, and 100,000 are displaced. More than 8,400 homes and other buildings were destroyed, more than 160,000 acres burned—and the fires aren’t all out yet. That devastation leaves behind another potential disaster: ash. No one knows how much. It’ll be full of heavy metals and toxins—no one knows exactly how much, and it depends on what burned and at what temperature. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's Halloween time. For many, this time of the year means there are lots of cool costumes. For others, it's all about the candy. Now, I'm not a big fan of candy—but I am a big fan of analyzing stuff. So here we go: I'm going to look at the energy density for candy. Sure, I could just look this up—but it's much more fun to determine it for myself. Let's get started by going to the store. I am going to look at a bunch of different candy options and get some data. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Late at night, I tend to flip through the channels just to see what's up. If there's a good movie on, I might watch part of it—and recently, I stumbled on Iron Man 3. I know what you're gonna say—that's a terrible superhero movie. But I disagree. Fantastic Four, now that's a terrible superhero movie. Iron Man 3 wasn't so bad. Especially not that part where Tony Stark has to go to the store and MacGyver his way into a temporary suit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Stay on target. That’s the mantra you hear in labs and biotech companies around the world as they snip away at DNA. All the techniques for gene editing—from the famous Crispr-Cas9 to the older TALENs and zinc-finger nucleases—share a problem: Sometimes they don’t work. Which is to say, they have “off-target effects,” changing a gene you don’t want changed or failing to change a gene that you do. And DNA is not something you want poorly rewired. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Half-eaten doughnuts hit the bottom of waste bins around the world this week, as news feeds spread word of a new dietary danger. Yes, headlines declared, a new study shows that sugar is the favorite food of cancer. Cancer. “This link between sugar and cancer has sweeping consequences,” wrote Johan Thevelein, a Belgian biologist and co-author of the study published last Friday in the journal Nature Communications. Sweeping is right. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Paperclips, a new game from designer Frank Lantz, starts simply. The top left of the screen gets a bit of text, probably in Times New Roman, and a couple of clickable buttons: Make a paperclip. You click, and a counter turns over. One. The game ends—big, significant spoiler here—with the destruction of the universe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I'll be honest—I don't know as much about DC superheroes as Marvel superheroes. Still, I'm pretty excited about the upcoming DC movie Justice League. As a kid, I dressed up as Aquaman; my mother was pretty good at making stuff and so she made costumes for me and my two brothers. The other two costumes were Robin and Superman—the unifying theme being that they don't have complicated masks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The pandemic of sexual harassment and abuse—you saw its prevalence in the hashtag #metoo on social media in the past weeks—isn’t confined to Harvey Weinstein’s casting couches. Decades of harassment by a big shot producer put famous faces on the problem, but whisper networks in every field have grappled with it forever. Last summer, the story was women in Silicon Valley. Last week, more men in media. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When a raindrop falls in San Francisco, it has two choices: flow east into the San Francisco Bay, or west into the Pacific Ocean. A ridgeline divides the city into two, slicing through the Presidio, hugging the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, and skirting Twin Peaks. As the land drops off in either direction, the elevation difference doesn’t just drive raindrops downhill—it also moves human waste. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Three years later, in 2005, Ishiguro unveils Repliee Q1 Expo to the public. Modeled on a grown woman (a popular Tokyo newscaster) and produced with better funding, this version can move its upper body fluidly and lip-synch to recorded speech. Ishi­guro’s lab conducts several studies with it; the results are featured in a major Japanese robotics journal; the lab is filmed for television; he hears about a copycat android in South Korea. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One of the great things about movies set in space is that the writers have the opportunity to come up with some fantastically crazy situations. Just look at the planet Sovereign, revealed at the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Don't worry about why the Guardians are on this planet too much—instead, let's just focus on the planet itself. It looks something like this: It's fantastically awesome—and I'm OK with that. However, there is a small physics problem here. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nick Goldschmidt has been lucky so far. A wildfire has burned more than 8,000 acres just north of his vineyards in Geyserville, California, but so far his vines are OK. So is his house in Healdsburg, roughly midway between Geyserville and a 36,000-acre fire that destroyed more than 2,800 homes in Santa Rosa. But now, amid the charred, empty spaces that scar northern California’s winegrowing region, under skies yellowed by smoke, Goldschmidt has a race to win. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every 95 minutes, the Chinese satellite Zhuhai-1 02 makes a full pass around the planet, its solar-panel arms extending from its boxy body as it observes Earth. Sometimes, its path takes it over Pueblo, Colorado. There, more than 300 miles below, Mike Coletta’s receiving station can pick up Zhuhai’s transmissions. Because as sophisticated as space technology is, the terrestrial tech necessary to make contact with celestial satellites is surprisingly low. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

No one knows what sparked the violent fires ablaze in the hills of California wine country. In the last five days, the flames have torched more than 160,000 acres across Napa and Sonoma counties, reducing parts of Santa Rosa to piles of cinder and ash and leaving more than 20 dead and hundreds missing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Blame the wind, if you want. In Southern California they call it the Santa Ana; in the north, the Diablos. Every autumn, from 4,000 feet up in the Great Basin deserts of Nevada and Utah, air drops down over the mountains and through the canyons. By the time it gets near the coast it’s hot, dry, and can gust as fast as a hurricane. Or blame lightning, or carelessness, or downed power lines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

America is entering a period that may one day be known as The Great Forgetting. Alzheimer’s, a disease defined as much by the accumulation of mental lapses as by tangled proteins in the brain, is an ailment of the aging. Sixty-five-year-olds have a one in 10 chance of a positive diagnosis. By age 85, the odds jump to one in three. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every week, two million people across the world will sit for hours, hooked up to a whirring, blinking, blood-cleaning dialysis machine. Their alternatives: Find a kidney transplant or die. In the US, dialysis is a roughly 40-billion-dollar business keeping 468,000 people with end-stage renal disease alive. The process is far from perfect, but that hasn't hindered the industry's growth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At one point in the past, I was a teenager. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true. During that time, I thought about teenager things. In particular, I recall thinking about and wanting a super fast car. Maybe a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. At lunch my friends and I would argue about the best cars (THE BEST), and what we wouldn't give to drive them. Today I drive a minivan. Nothing wrong with that. Now that I'm older, I care more about fuel efficiency and safety than speed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The 007-meets-the-X-Files adventures in Cuba continue. Last week the US Department of State recalled non-emergency personnel and families home from the embassy in Havana, citing injuries and illness among 21 people—“hearing loss, dizziness, headache, fatigue, cognitive issues, and difficulty sleeping” according to a statement from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Those 21 people weren’t just cultural attaches. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The way the Nobel Committee tells it, the story of this year’s physics prize begins like a certain 1970s space opera. “Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, two massive black holes engaged in a deadly dance,” said physicist and Nobel committee member Olga Botner at today's prize announcement. The pair spiraled toward each other, colliding to form an even bigger black hole with a mass 62 times that of Earth's sun. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today, the Nobel committee kicked off its 2017 season by awarding the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three scientists for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms. The Americans—Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young—used fruit flies to isolate a gene that dictates the biological clock ticking away inside all living organisms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After the deluge comes the deluge. First Hurricane Irma raked Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in early September, and then two weeks later Hurricane Maria did the same, leaving 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico without clean water, communications, or electricity, amid damaged buildings and floodwaters. Aid is finally reaching the islands—fuel for generators, water, medical supplies, food—but disasters always breed disasters. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Sixty years ago, a team of scientists went looking for yellow fever in the jungles that line the northwestern edge of Lake Victoria. What they found instead, in the blood of a rhesus monkey, was a new virus, one they named for the area’s dense vegetation: Uganda’s Zika Forest. Within a few years, Zika virus was showing up in humans, causing a pink rash and mild flu-like symptoms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What is temperature? This question comes up quite a bit—especially in introductory science courses. The most common answer is something like this: Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in an object. When temperature increases, the motion of these particles also increases. It's not a terrible definition, but it's not the best either. There are plenty of other crazy things about temperature that you should probably know. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At Tesla, Peter Carlsson spent nearly five years at Elon Musk’s side, locating various parts of the Model S as the electric car company's global supply chain manager. "The overarching goal of Tesla is to help reduce carbon emissions, and that means low cost and high volume," Musk said back in 2006. "We will also serve as an example to the auto industry, proving that the technology really works and customers want to buy electric vehicles. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday night, residents of the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Westwood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and parts of the San Fernando Valley experienced a mild earthquake—a magnitude 3.6. Most people slept through the temblor and no damage was reported. But a select group of 150 LA residents got a text alert on their mobile phone a full eight seconds before the quake hit at 11:10 pm—enough time for people to drop, cover, and hold on. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Alexander Fleming came back from a Scottish vacation in the summer of 1948 to find his London lab bench contaminated with a mold called Penicillium notatum, he kicked off a new age of scientific sovereignty over nature. Since then, the antibiotics he discovered and the many more he inspired have saved millions of lives and spared immeasurable suffering around the globe. But from the moment it started, scientists knew the age of antibiotics came stamped with an expiration date. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the morning of August 21—the day of the solar eclipse—five archaeologists and I piled into two SUVs and drove an hour northwest of Tucson, into the thick of the Sonoran Desert. Turning off-road, we reached a yellow expanse inside Ironwood Forest National Monument through a series of latched gates. We brought eclipse glasses, but the quarter-sliver of the sun was just a sideshow. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you’re trying to get in shape and you want a tiny, wrist-bound computer to help you do it, you have more options than ever before. Fitness trackers come in all shapes, colors, and price tags, with newfangled sensors and features to stand out to customers. But for doctors and scientists studying how exercise can help people deal with disease, the landscape is much simpler. There’s Fitbit, and then there’s everyone else. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For the last 100 years, ever since German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to pluck fertilizer out of thin air with brute-force chemistry, farmers have relied on an imperfect product to make their plants grow: fertilizer. Production of the stuff burns through 3 percent of the world’s natural gas annually, releases tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and runs off into rivers and streams and aquifers. Relying on fossil fuels to grow food was never exactly sustainable. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Maybe the United States is sticking with the Paris Climate Agreement? Maybe it isn’t? But even if the US bails out of the international accord to limit climate change, well, nations aren’t the only players. If every city with a population over 100,000 stepped up, they could account for 40 percent of the reductions required. But that’s no small if. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The commissions are coming. Hurricane season hasn’t ended, but forensics waits for no one, so the after-action reports on Harvey and Irma have to get started. The relevant agencies—local and perhaps federal, plus maybe some national academies and disaster responders—will all no doubt look at themselves and others to see what went right or wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Antarctica’s summer season is about to begin, which means hundreds of scientists are preparing to head south to conduct experiments on melting glaciers, migrating penguins, and elusive neutrinos. But so, too, will the support staff of the United States Antarctic base, McMurdo Station, population 1,100. McMurdo is a company town of sorts: It has its own air traffic controller, machine shop, IT help desk, dormitory housing, three bars, yoga classes, hiking trails—and fire department. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The gray clapboard house on the two-lane road in a western suburb of Boston looked, in fall 1974, the way you would expect a comfortable old Massachusetts house full of children to look. It was rambling and tall, made out of a house and a barn butted together. There were other barns out back, down a long gravel drive that stretched to a grove of trees: small sheds and one big building, 200 feet on the long side, painted an iconic barnyard red. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Like many other surgery patients, Hayley Anthony has a daily physical therapy regimen. But unlike other post-ops, the 30-year-old marketing consultant is recovering from a procedure she helped invent. Five months ago, she became one of the first people in the world to have a piece of tissue incised from the cavity of her abdomen and turned into a vagina. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I am going to make a prediction. As people start to get bored with their fidget spinners, they are going to start playing with these double pendulum fidget spinners. The normal spinner has a bearing in the center of some object such that you can hold it and spin it—moderately cool, I'll admit. But the double pendulum spinner has two bearings with two moveable arms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ash is raining down on the city of Portland. Thousand-degree fireballs are forcing evacuations near Salt Lake City, Seattle, and parts of Northern California. In Missoula, Montana, the sun burns a bloody red even even at high noon. These days, the American West looks less like an Ansel Adams postcard and more like the kingdom of Mordor. Across nine states, nearly 1.5 million acres are on fire. And according to President Trump’s natural resources czar, you can blame it all on the hippies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

These days, the only thing more American than apple pie is eating an animal raised on antibiotics. Eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the US go not to human patients, but to the nation’s plate-bound pigs, cows, turkeys, and chickens. As these wonder drugs became a mainstay of modern agriculture, factory farms began churning out another, far less welcome commodity—antibiotic resistant bacteria. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I have many jobs, but one of my favorite is finding crazy stuff on the internet and using physics to see if it is real or fake. In this case we have a video that shows a drone carrying a human in a hammock. I'll go ahead and say it—this is probably fake. The Physics of Drones You can't tell if the video is real or fake without first understanding the basics of drone flight. In particular, we need to look at the physics of what makes a drone hover. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the ever-more masochistic world of wellness-boosting, pound-shedding diets, the latest trend involves putting your body into a controlled state of starvation known as “ketogenesis,” by cutting out nearly all carbs. If that doesn’t sound like your particular brand of torture, guess what? You’re already on it. Well, at least while you’re sleeping. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This morning around 7 am, the engines of a massive, beluga-bodied helicopter cut on with a rumble. The hum harmonized with the reverberations of Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles. As the Chinook’s two enormous rotor blades started to spin, blasting hot vapor smudged the monochrome stripes of pavement, desert floor, mountain ridge, and sky above NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. And then, finally, the copter began to levitate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices