Everyone should probably know that I'm obsessed with both physics and smart phones. If I can use my phone for a physics experiment, I'm good to go. That's exactly what I am going to do right now—use some physics to find the location of the accelerometer in the iPhone 7. Your smart phone has a…
For the first time since July 25, a Falcon 9 sits perched atop SpaceX’s California launch pad, ready to fly. Its mission: to deposit an Argentinean Earth-observing satellite, dubbed SAOCOMM-1A, into orbit. What’s new with this flight is that SpaceX will attempt to have the rocket touch down in the middle of a new landing…
Q: One of my relatives wants to get into cannabis (which is legal in their home state, of course). Should I tell them to smoke weed or do edibles? A: Ah, the joys and terrors of exploring cannabis. We’ve all heard tales about overdoing it—maybe like me you once stood in line at an ice…
Los Angeles doesn’t have a great environmental reputation. It’s the car capital of the United States. It’s famous for its curtains of smog, and for stealing a bunch of water once. But the city is in the midst of a metamorphosis. With fewer, yet stronger storms on the horizon, it’s begun an ambitious plan to…
Slime molds are among the world’s strangest organisms. Long mistaken for fungi, they are now classed as a type of amoeba. As single-celled organisms, they have neither neurons nor brains. Yet for about a decade, scientists have debated whether slime molds have the capacity to learn about their environments and adjust their behavior accordingly. Quanta…
Wild lands are practically worthless. They’re not worthless to the things that live in them, of course. They love ‘em. And they aren’t worthless aesthetically, if that’s your bag. Any place with plants slurps up carbon dioxide, providing a bulwark against climate change. And they probably have value as a matter of public health; some…
On Sunday night, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dropped an urgent report on the state of global warming. Simply put: The laws of the physical universe say that we can keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the optimistic goal set out in the Paris Agreement, but we’re quickly running…
On the surface, a so-called slab avalanche doesn’t make sense. Take a good look at the rendering above. The snowman represents a skier or snowshoer venturing where they shouldn’t. It barely disrupts the snow, but uphill the accumulated powder suddenly snaps and flows down the hill, devouring our brave test subject. Avalanches are awesome, in…
Every minute, a dumptruckful of plastic plops into the world's oceans. That's eight million metric tons every year1. Once waterborne, whatever doesn't wash ashore eventually breaks down into itty bits. The puniest pieces—the ones smaller than 5 millimeters wide—are called microplastics, and their fates are numerous. Some glob onto an Alaska-sized gyre of plastic debris…
In 2013, Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page announced the formation of a new Alphabet entity dedicated to solving the pesky puzzle of mortality. Since then, the billion-dollar longevity lab known as Calico—short for California Life Company—has been trying to tease apart the fundamental biology of aging in the hopes of one day defeating death.…