California continues to take stock of its unprecedented conflagrations—between the Camp Fire in the north, which on its own is the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history, and the Woolsey Fire in the south, 91 lives have been lost so far, with hundreds more still missing. As firefighters keep battling the blazes, a…
In February 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted through low clouds, pushing a Dragon capsule toward orbit. Among the spare parts and food, an important piece of scientific cargo, called SAGE III, rumbled upward. Once installed on the International Space Station, SAGE would peer back and measure ozone molecules and aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere.…
To date, California's Ranch fire—the (much) larger of the two wildfires that make up the Mendocino Complex fire—has consumed more than 360,000 acres of Northern California, making it the largest conflagration in state history. It was probably wind that taught the nascent Ranch fire to walk and search for food, to glut itself on timber…
Score one for the quantified self-surveillance movement. Last week, the US Food and Drug Agency approved the first-ever, over-the-counter digital contraceptive—a polished and almost preternaturally upbeat mobile app called Natural Cycles. Basal body temperature readings and monthly menstruation data feed into an algorithm that tells users whether or not they should be having unprotected sex.…
Today, with a software update, Apple switched on two highly anticipated features of its popular wearable: The first uses optical sensors to detect irregular heart rhythms on Apple Watch Series 1 and later iterations. The second enables wearers of Apple Watch Series 4 to record an electrocardiogram, or ECG, directly from their wrist. The features…
Day after day, you pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, whether you’re driving or turning on lights or eating meat. You can’t help it, because, really, no human can. But I bet you haven’t stopped to think about how the simple act of pooping is also part of the problem: Worldwide, wastewater treatment facilities account…
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 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.…
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…
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…