Britain's Next Megaproject: A Coast-to-Coast Forest
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Northern England is set to get a whole lot greener. On Sunday, the UK government unveiled plans for a vast new forest spanning the country from coast to coast. Shadowing the path of the east-west M62 Highway, the new forest will create a broad green…
Watch SpaceX Launch NASA's Next Earth-Observing Satellites
SpaceX is flexing its ridesharing muscles today as its flagship rocket—the Falcon 9—prepares to loft two sets of spacecraft: a pair of Earth-observing satellites for NASA and a set of five Iridium Next communications satellites. NASA’s identical twin spacecrafts, together dubbed the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On, will orbit the Earth in tandem, mapping…
Could a Vaccine Protect Football Players From Concussions?
It’s been a turbulent year for the NFL. Ratings plummeted 12 percent in the regular season, even more during the playoffs. It’s hard to know what hurt the league more, its public feuding with the White House over players protesting police brutality during the national anthem or the fact that people don’t watch TV anymore.…
A Classical Math Problem Gets Pulled Into Self-Driving Cars
Long before robots could run or cars could drive themselves, mathematicians contemplated a simple mathematical question. They figured it out, then laid it to rest—with no way of knowing that the object of their mathematical curiosity would feature in machines of the far-off future. Quanta Magazine About Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine,…
Salvia Leads Chemists on a Psychedelic Existential Journey
On August 2, synthetic organic chemist Ryan Shenvi stood before 300 people at the Natural Products and Bioactive Compounds conference and told them something he knew was sacrilegious: He’d synthesized salvinorin A, the active ingredient in the wildly intense hallucinogen salvia, and he hadn’t just copied a molecule, as synthetic organic chemists are wont to…
This Random Videogame Powers Quantum Entanglement Experiments
In October 2016, while working in Rwanda, a biologist named Jordi Galbany heard about a new online game on one of his favorite podcasts, a Catalan-language radio show called "Versió Rac 1." Playing was simple, he learned: All you did was frantically press 1’s and 0’s as randomly as possible. Galbany was in. Between days…
This Pi Day, Calculate the Value of Pi for Yourself
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…
Why Are CDC Disease Detectives in a Cave Crawling With Snakes?
The 18-foot pythons in Uganda’s Python Cave don’t bother Brian Amman too much. It’s the black forest cobras that worry him. “They're extremely venomous and known to be fairly aggressive,” says Amman, a disease ecologist with the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. A single bite from one of the 10-foot snakes can kill…
I Believe in Intelligent Design … for Robots
The beauty of evolution lies in two complementary forces: simplicity and complexity. From a simple rule—survival of the fittest—comes the astonishing array of critters that populate Earth. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got two legs or four legs or no legs at all, there’s no one right way to be on this planet. Same goes,…
NASA’s New Plan: Do More Science With Small Satellites
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…