Science, Spoken

Of all the Star Wars tropes fans love—the scoundrels, the weird foods, the planets dominated by a single biome—the best one might just be the face-off. Not the battle itself, but the fermata beforehand: Two combatants, gazes locked on each other, knowing that it's about to go down. Most of the time, the ensuing struggle goes the way you want it to. This time, though, is not that time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Compared to the swooping architecture of other fine-art institutions, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (aka Mass MoCA) is a hulking, big-boned anomaly. “We don’t just collect art and hang it on white walls,” says director Joseph Thompson. The cavernous complex displays works that couldn’t fit anywhere else. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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First comes the unscratchable itching, and the angry blossoming of hives. Then stomach cramping, and—for the unluckiest few—difficulty breathing, passing out, and even death. In the last decade and a half, thousands of previously protein-loving Americans have developed a dangerous allergy to meat. And they all have one thing in common: the lone star tick. Red meat, you might be surprised to know, isn’t totally sugar-free. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The return of the bicycle to the modern urban transport paradigm continues unabated. All over the world, citizens are rediscovering the benefits of cycling. Cities are responding by building the infrastructure to serve and keep them safe. This rush to increase cycling levels and improve the quality of city life is the greatest movement in global urbanism. Of course, not all cities are equal. Some charge ahead, while others lag. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For nearly a century, Herman Miller built a business by getting people to sit down, introducing iconic objects like the Aeron Chair and the classic Eames Lounge. But the company's newest product, Live OS, suggests that maybe it’s time to stand up. Live OS is not a line of furniture, but a cloud platform that tracks how people make use of office space. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Artificial intelligence is not a contact sport. Not yet, at least. Currently, algorithms mostly just compete to win old Atari games, or accomplish historic board gaming feats like pwning five human Go champions at once. These are just practice rounds, though, for the way more complicated (and practical) goal of teaching robots how to navigate human environments. But first, more Atari! Vicarious, an AI company, has developed a new AI that is absolutely slammin' at Breakout, the paddle vs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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On a clear, sunny day at a vineyard in the northern California town of Ukiah, a most unusual train chugs through a field of barely budding syrah grapes. Well, it doesn't chug so much as whoosh because this train—actually, a one-sixth scale train—doesn't rely upon a diesel engine or electricity to get around. It uses vacuum power and heavy duty magnets. The 89-year-old man who built it believes it could change how the world moves. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The internet loves videos of motorcyclists doing crazy things on the autobahn. This one seems especially popular. From what I can gather, the rider is hauling along when a car cuts him off, requiring some sudden emergency braking. Let me show you how out of control I can get with the physics in this video. And don't worry—I've got a homework question for you at the end. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The robot is building a tesseract. He motions at a glowing cube floating before him, and an identical cube emerges. He drags it to the left, but the two cubes stay connected, strung together by glowing lines radiating from their corners. The robot lowers its hands, and the cubes coalesce into a single shape—with 24 square faces, 16 vertices, and eight connected cubes existing in four dimensions. A tesseract. This isn’t a video game. It’s a classroom. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A metronome ticks time. Not for the student, but for the teacher, who plays a short piano melody. Without missing a measure, the student follows with an improvised, yet derivative, cello run. The student plays the same run again, and then again. “I have it looping, actually, so you can hear the response over and over again,” says the teacher, Jesse Engel, a computer scientist with Google Brain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I must admit to being pretty excited about Wonder Woman.Although I read a lot of comic books when I was younger, I favored Marvel over DC, so everything I know about Wonder Woman came from the TV show starring Linda Carter. It sounds likeWonder Woman might be the best superhero movie so far. Like all superhero movies, Wonder Woman provides an opportunity to do a littlephysics. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When it comes toCrispr, the bacterial wünderenzyme that allows scientists to precisely edit DNA, no news is too small to stir up some drama. On Tuesday morning, doctors from Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Iowa published a one-page letterto the editor of Nature Methods—an obscure but high-profile journal—describing something downright peculiar. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Internet of Animals has arrived. No, not like cat-stalking zucchini gifs and skateboarding bulldog snaps (those are so 2015). Across the country, farmers are building actual connected networks of cows, pigs, and chickens. Using everything from microphones, accelerometers, and GPS trackers totemperature, glucose, and skin conductivity sensors, farmers can now track and monitor their flocks and herds with the flick of a finger. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It started with vomiting and a fever. But a few days later, five-month old Liam was in the emergency room, his tiny body gripped by hourly waves of seizures. X-rays and MRIs showed deep swelling in his brain. When an infectious disease specialist at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center diagnosed Liam with Powassan virus in November, he became the first recorded case in state history. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Trump’s proposed 2018 budget will never actually determine how the government spends your money: Potus proposes and Congress disposes. But that’s no reason for relief. In fact, it makes this document even more of a nightmare. It doesn’t direct funding, but it does put the Trump administration’s underlying philosophy of governance on display. And it’s a harsh one. The science cuts make this most visible. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

All good things must come to an end, and Eruptions on WIRED ends today. It has been a great 5-plus years of reporting on volcanoes here, but nothing lasts forever (even geologically). There are a pile of people to thank at WIRED for all the help I’ve gotten over the years: Nick Stockton, Nadia Drake, David Mosher, Katie Palmer, all the former WIRED Science bloggers, all the great folks at WIRED’s photo department, Katie Davies, and Adam Rogers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

From the outside, the Lost Spirits Distillery is just another boxy, early-20th-century building along the frayed edge of downtown Los Angeles. At first the inside appears similarly uninspired: deep and unfinished, littered with cardboard boxes, plumbing fittings, spools of wire, inscrutable items made of copper, a forklift. The usual crap. But what’s this then? A heavy black curtain bisects the industrial space from floor to ceiling, nearly from the front door to the back. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Carbon dioxide is one hell of a molecule. Perhaps you only know it as the stuff humans exhaleand plants inhale, or the primary culprit for climate change. But CO is capable of so much more. For instance, some engineers think it could help make the power industry a little greener. Now, you’re probably thinking this is atwist on carbon capture and storage. Nope. It’s about turbine generators—the enormous machines that convert heat into electricity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At 4 pm local time on May 25, Rocket Lab’s Electron stood on the company’s private launch pad on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Perched on the edge of an eroding cliff, pointing toward the sky from the southern tip of the world, the little rocket—just 56 feet tall and 4 feet wide, meant to carry similarly small satellites—looked ready for its first trip to space. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When astronaut Peggy Whitson pushed out of the International Space Station’s airlock on Tuesday morning, she was floating into history. Stipulated, Whitson was already a badass. But this extra-vehicular activity—an EVA, NASAspeak for a spacewalk—was Whitson’s 10th. That ties her for the American record. A PhD biochemist before she became an astronaut, Whitson has now spent more time in space outside a spacecraft than all but two other human beings. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Roger Moore died today. Now, you could argue that Moore was not the best James Bond, and I'd be willing to have that discussion at some point, but I think everyone agrees he made significant contributions to the 007 canon. I certainly think so, if only because when I was a kid, Moore was the James Bond I saw in movie theaters. Sean Connery was the James Bond who appeared on television with older, outdated gadgets. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Bakul Patel started as a policy advisor in the US Food and Drug Administration in 2008, he could pretty much pinpoint when a product was going to land in frontof the reviewers in his division. Back when medical devices were heavy on the hardware—your pacemakers and your IUDs—it would take manufacturers years to get them ready for regulatory approval. FDA reviewers could keep up pretty well. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Physicists and philosophers seem to like nothing more than telling us that everything we thought about the world is wrong. They take a peculiar pleasure in exposing common sense as nonsense. But Tim Maudlin thinks our direct impressions of the world are a better guide to reality than we have been led to believe. Not that he thinks they always are. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If civilization still exists a centuryfrom now, Earth ought to throw a parade for pension funds. For all their fiscally conservative stodginess, the people tasked with safeguarding your nest egg are forcing the financial world to pay attention to climate change. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Not all girls grow up to be mothers. Sometimes they choose not to be, and sometimes circumstances take those choices away. A superfluity of cancers and genetic diseases can destroy women’s ovaries. Or treatments like radiation—used to save a woman’s life—can render those egg-producing organs useless. Ovaries also mediate female hormones. Without them, young patients might never go through puberty; grown women could enter menopause early. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One day, a woman is spending her Saturdays doing her normal Saturday stuff—blueberry pancake brunch, curling up on the couch with the cat reading a novel, grabbing a beer with friends. By the next, her life is suddenly and completely about keeping a screaming, floppy, red-faced, cone-headed thing alive using fluids secreted from her chest. Happy birthday to that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Skip Suva is a fidgeter. When he worked at paper-intensive administrative jobs, he’d doodle incessantly; when he started a coding career last year, he took up fiddling with an SD-card reader that made pleasant snick noises. “Popping the SD card out and clicking it back in,” he laughs. His fidgeting can seem like a crazy tic, Suva admits. But it helps him focus. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fifteen years ago, Kevin Tracey sat in a Washington DC conference room surrounded by officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They’d been paying the neurosurgeon to study how doctors could stimulate the vagus nerve—a long nerve that controls everything from blood pressure to sexual arousal—to treat inflammation associated with PTSD. Now they wanted to know: Could he stimulate anything else into submission? He searched his brain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When I was young, there was no such thing as the world wide web or video streaming. If you wanted to watch something, you had to wait until it appearedon television. Sometimes you might think,“Hey, I think I’ll watch a show” and flip the channels until you found something interesting. This is how I discoveredThe Mechanical Universe … And Beyond. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Cassini space probe is going to dive through Saturn’s rings again on Wednesday, the third of a planned 22 orbits threading that planetary needle as the probe continues a ballistic death-drop inward. And like the first ring-crossing two weeks ago, this one required a bit of complicated piloting. Remote-controlling a robot spaceship from 750 million miles away ain’t like dusting crops, as Han Solo might say. (RIP.) (Spoilers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Brian Greene is one of those physicists. You know the type: Blessed with a brain capable of untangling the mysteries of the universe,and a knack for clearly explaining it all to the rest of us schlubs. His enthusiasm for doing these things keeps him quite busy, what with the three best-selling physics books for grown-ups, a children’s book about time dilation(!), a fewTV specials, and, of course, a TED talk. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fidget spinners are the new Rubik’s Cube. Or maybe the new Tamagotchi. Or … I don’t know. Pick your fad. You see these toys, ostensibly designedto help kids fidgety concentrate, everywhere now. Seriously. Everywhere. Afidget spinner is basically a small bearing mounted in a piece of plastic or other material. You hold it and spin it. I guess it’s sort of amusing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I did it. On Saturday afternoon, a few hours after Eliud Kipchoge ranastunning, historic marathon in two hours and 25 seconds in Monza, Italy - narrowly missing his goal of breaking the two-hour marathon mark for Nike's Breaking2 initiative, but obliterating the current world record and everybody's idea of what is possible in the sport - I ran a half-marathon on the same course in 1:26:52. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I have a tradition of doing a little analysis on one of my favorite movie franchises to celebrate Star Wars Day (May the Fourth Be With You). Given thatRogue One: A Star Wars Storyrecently appeared on DVD and various streaming services, I think its OK to look at that film without worrying about spoilers. In this case, I will calculate Darth Vader’s power output as he uses the Force. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the background of Colorado Springs, Pike’s Peak dominates the sky. But just to that mountain’s southeast looms another geological ripple. Cheyenne Mountain—a rounded, rocky thing that rises 9,565 feet above sea level—looks wild and quiet. But deep inside the mountain, a crew of humans toils in one of the nation’s most secure military installations. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Energy is the answer to so many questions. Pull back a spring-powered toy car and rolls forward. Why? Energy. You used your phone all day and it suddenly shut down. Why? No energy. A child eats six bags of M&Ms and runs around screaming and giggling because he has energy. But then he doesn’t want to clean his room because he has no energy. But what is energy? Ah… that is the real question. To answer it, let me start with a story about three friends, Alby, Bobby, and Cami. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the outskirts of Bangalore one morning last summer, a sullen young man named Manjunath stood high atop a cocoa-colored 1,850-gallon tanker truck, waiting for its belly to fill with water. The source of the liquid was a bore well, a cylindrical metal shaft puncturing hundreds of feet down into the earth. An electric pump pulled the water up from the depths and into a concrete cistern; from there, a hose snaked across the mud and weeds and plugged into Manjunath’s truck. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Stem cell biologists are basically modern day witches. While they’re not exactly taking a creepy fetal Lord Voldemort and turning him into noseless Ralph Fiennes, these scientists can use tinctures and concoctions to grow incredible things from just a few human skin cells. One of those things is a brain ball, a collection of stem cells that biologists have coaxed into a bobbing tangle of living neurons. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The genome of barley—the grain that’s the soul of beer and whiskey—is weird. The commodity crop has just seven pairs of chromosomes (compared to your 23, assuming you are a human being) but twice the size of your genome overall, with the vast majority of the sequences repeating themselves. And you care because (making the same assumption again) you care about beer and whiskey, even just in the abstract. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You might look at an overhead power line and see an engineering problem. After all, those transmission towers are impressively huge. But if you've ever seen those cables, you probably noticed they seem to hang fairly low. Why they hang low is a great physics question that can be modeled with masses and springs. Basic Model For a Hanging Cable Let's start by creating a model. Suppose I string a cable between two points so it is supported horizontally from theends. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Peaceful, orderly, rational, and with a lot of signs too clever by half (actually, 0.56932 according to our measurements)—that’s how scientists march on Washington. It’s also how they march in more than 600 of them all over the world on Saturday, with even a few wintering-over researchers in Antarctica signaling their support. The movement covered all seven continents. The March for Science was controversial almost from its inception. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, a kilometer-wide asteroid whizzed by within about a million miles of this planet—about four and half times the distance between the Earth and the moon. A near miss? Not really. The odds of 2014 JO25 actually hitting Earth were around one in a million. The safer bet is on science. As in, how much of it astronomers were able to gather from the close pass of such a huge space rock. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ugh, you’re not going sign up for Project: Baseline, are you? That new, 10,000-person health study Google’s putting together? Well, OK, not Google, but Verily. Which used to be Google Life Sciences, and is part of Alphabet, the company that used to be called Google but now owns Google. (So, Google. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

That image above, depending on what your job is, could well be considered not safe for work. What you’re looking at is a giant shipworm—a scientific legend that can grow to over five feet long. It’s actually a super-elongated mollusk, one that grows vertically in sediment, excreting a thick shell and poking two siphons out of the muck. It is, as biologists note, really weird. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Steve Wozniak is one half of Silicon Valley’s most prototypical founder’s myth. But whereas Steve Jobs went on to define what it meant to be a modern founder—the turtleneck uniform, the keynote showmanship, the scorn for formal education and steamrolling managerial style—Woz just became a wealthier version of his former self. That is, a gigantic nerd. In case you clicked this article out of blind curiosity, here’s a quick recap on Woz. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Radioactive material gets a bad rap, what with radiation and fallout and nuclear waste and all. But it offers some practical uses. One of the coolest (OK, maybe the coolest) is using radioactive carbon to determinethe age of old bones or plants. To understand this, you mustfirst understand radioactivity and decay. When an element undergoes radioactive decay, it creates radiation and turns into some other element. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As part of WIRED’s exclusive look at Breaking2, Nike’s attempt to break the two-hour marathon mark next month in Monza, Italy, our writer is using the same training regime, apparel, and expertise as Nike’s three elite athletes to try to achieve his own personal milestone: a sub-90-minute half-marathon. This is the fourth in a series of monthly updates on his progress. Last week, I travelled for work to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices