In Physics, Crossing a River Is Just Like Landing a Plane
To non-pilots, landing an aircraft in a crosswind looks all but impossible. When the wind is perpendicular to the direction of motion of the plane, the plane has to aim in one direction—its wheels not lined up with the runway—so it moves in another. To pull it off, the pilot must quickly change the orientation…
Yaeji's 'One More' Hops Languages, and Codes, With Purpose
Kathy Yaeji Lee creates in the multihyphenate. She’s a DJ, producer, singer, and occasional rapper who pilots between cultures as nimbly, and as wondrously, as she injects them with alternate life. On “One More”—a thump-shy club soother with a beat that never quite breaks free from its casing—the Korean-American wunderkind attempts to ground herself amid…
Physicists Try to Revive a Super-Safe, Decades-Old Cancer Treatment
In a room at Northwestern Medicine Chicago Proton Center, Robert Johnson keeps a small collection of plastic heads. At first glance, they look like they’ve been lopped off the top of department store mannequins. But they’re more lifelike than that—made of materials that mimic bone, flesh, and brain. “One of them even has a gold…
Don't Blame Fortnite for Activision Blizzard's Layoffs
In a year that's already seen mass layoffs across multiple media brands, what happened yesterday at videogame publisher Activision Blizzard somehow felt more like a reckoning. During an earnings call with investors, chief operating officer Coddy Johnson confirmed that despite "record revenues" in the fourth quarter of 2018, the company would lay off approximately 8…
A Crazy Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Dying Star
In September 2014, astronomers saw a dimming point of light in a small galaxy half a billion light-years away. It looked like an ordinary supernova—a dying star that exploded and whose light was now petering out. But the following January, Zheng “Andrew” Wong, a student intern at Las Cumbres Observatory in Goleta, California, noticed that…
All 141 Champions in League of Legends, Explained
Gone are the days of multiplayer videogames with a set roster of characters. Sure, people still play Team Fortress 2 more than a decade after its release, but its nine classes remain just as they were in 2007. Now, though, incessant updates and patches have turned the most popular titles into ever-evolving sagas, with ever-evolving…
Global Warming Predictions May Now Be a Lot Less Uncertain
If one is the loneliest number, two is the most terrifying. Humanity must not pass a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in global temperature from pre-industrial levels, so says the Paris climate agreement. Cross that line and the global effects of climate change start looking less like a grave situation and more like a catastrophe.…
Sea Level Rise Will Imperil Humanity's Future and Its Past
The modern human obsession with beachfront property is nothing new. For tens of thousands of years, our kind has been bonded to the coast and its bounty of food. Inland is alright, too, but nothing matches the productivity of the sea. The problem with coastal living is that while the food supply is relatively stable,…
The Climate-Obsessed Sci-Fi Genius of Kim Stanley Robinson
As one of the solar system's pre-eminent writers of climate change-driven, politically astute science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson wouldn’t be anyone’s prime suspect for a crime against nature. Yet here we are, standing at the edge of his plot in a community garden, and it’s bare except for some scrubby, dying shrubs and what looks…
How You Could Road Race—and Win—From Your Living Room
Dave McGillivray is an improbable advocate of virtual exercise. The race director of the Boston Marathon for 30 years, McGillivray estimates he's logged more than 150,000 miles in his lifetime, the overwhelming majority of them outside, and a formidable number of those in Forrest-Gumpian feats of endurance. In 1978, he ran from Medford, Oregon to…