Meet The Four-Dimensional Numbers That Led to Modern Algebra
Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial position of the hour hand on the plane is multiplied by another constant number. But is a similar trick possible for describing rotations…
A Faulty Booster Might Have Sabotaged a Soyuz Rocket Launch
A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make a dramatic landing after their ride to space, a Russian Soyuz rocket, failed minutes after takeoff. The incident caused the crew to initiate emergency abort procedures, landing a few hundred miles away from the launch site. Both Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin are safe.…
What Termites Teach Us About Robot Cooperation
At a glance, a single worker of the genus Macrotermes is not a very complex creature—less than half an inch long, eyeless, wingless, with an abdomen so transparent you can spot the dead grass it ate for lunch. Put it in a group, though, and it may pile up pinhead-sized balls of mud, one after…
As Snow Disappears, the Sierras and Rockies Are Shrinking
The mountains of the High Sierra and the Rockies are, in effect, shrinking, according to a new analysis of the nation’s snowpack over the past 36 years. These places are experiencing a shorter winter with less snow, just like regions closer to sea level. That’s not good news for ski resorts and snowmobilers, as well…
How a Team of Experts Quelled Colorado's Enormous Spring Fire
I first heard about Colorado’s Spring Fire on July 1, when I was driving back from a camping trip. My mom texted me from her home in Florida: “How close are these fires?” I pulled over to a rest stop, called up the federal disaster website Inciweb, and sent her back a screenshot of the…
Watch Blue Origin Launch a Rocket Stuffed With NASA Gear
Update: This launch, which took place on January 23, 2019, was successful, with the company landing both the rocket's booster and its crew capsule. Blue Origin is planning to soon launch its New Shepard rocket on its tenth mission from the company's Corn Ranch landing pad in West Texas. The vehicle will carry a bevy…
6 Terrific Books for Getting Girls Into Tech
WIRED ICON Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube NOMINATES Geetha Murali, CEO of Room to Read Geetha Murali’s mother grew up in Chennai, India, in a family in which child marriage was common. When she was 13, she rebelled and went to school instead. “Education became a driving force in her life,” Murali says. “She instilled…
This Bomb-Simulating US Supercomputer Broke a World Record
Brad Settlemyer had a supercomputing solution in search of a problem. Los Alamos National Lab, where Settlemyer works as a research scientist, hosts the Trinity supercomputer—a machine that regularly makes the internet’s (ever-evolving) Top 10 Fastest lists. As large as a Midwestern McMansion, Trinity’s main job is to ensure that the cache of US nuclear…
New Space Robots Will Fix Satellites, or Maybe Destroy Them
People in the satellite industry are fond of automobile analogies. Like this one: Imagine that you buy a car and need it to run for 15 years, but you can’t change the oil or replace the alternator, let alone refuel it. That, they say, is the state of satellites. Once they’ve slipped the surly bonds…
3 Smart Things: What You Might Not Know About Attention
1. We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of…