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,…
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…
It’s that time of the year again, when massive winter storms lash the eastern United States and your uncle posts on Facebook about how it proves climate change is a hoax. After all, why would you still need a good coat on a warming planet? The fallacy is, of course, that weather is not the…
In the early 2000s, Alex Pentland was running the wearable computing group at the MIT Media Lab—the place where the ideas behind augmented reality and Fitbit-style fitness trackers got their start. Back then, it was still mostly folks wearing computers in satchels and cameras on their heads. “They were basically cell phones, except we had…
The Mississippi River—it’s a big deal, OK? The combined ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans move more cargo, ton for ton, than any other US port. So figuring out the Mississippi’s hydrodynamics—the way its water, silt, and sand ebb and flow—matters. Matters so much, in fact, that Louisiana has dropped $18 million on a…
Academics have been cast in a slow-motion horror movie for the past couple of years, as superstar scientist after superstar scientist has been pushed from his pedestal for allegations of sexual harassment. Societies and universities have tried to determine what to do—academe-style fixes like panels, workshops, and policies. None of that ivory-tower work cued the…
Chevron would like you to know that it believes in climate change. It also believes people cause it by burning carbon-based fuel—the kind Chevron extracts from the ground, refines, and sells. In fact, Chevron believes all this so hard that today its lawyer said so, in a federal court in San Francisco. Intergovernmental Panel on…
No human, or team of humans, could possibly keep up with the avalanche of information produced by many of today’s physics and astronomy experiments. Some of them record terabytes of data every day—and the torrent is only increasing. The Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope slated to switch on in the mid-2020s, will generate about…
Last November, Apple Watch owners began receiving recruitment emails from Apple. The company was looking for owners of its smartwatch to participate in the Apple Heart Study—a Stanford-led investigation into the wearable's ability to sense irregular heart rhythms. Joining was simple: Install an app and wear your watch. If the watch's optical sensors detected an…
Silicage ('sil-i-'kāj)n. A nanostructure made of silica that may provide a safer carrier for gene therapy. Viruses are nature’s Trojan horses—they replicate by smuggling their genes into a host’s cells, turning them into mini virus factories. So in the late ’80s, researchers got the clever idea of sucking out the viral innards and inserting good…