No one knew exactly when the girl would die, but everyone knew it would be soon. A 12-year-old with end stage cancer, the child's parents had recently moved her from the hospital to her home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Some days later the girl's breath quickened, and her father phoned the family's hospice…
It’s hard to measure water from a fire hose while it’s hitting you in the face. In a sense, that’s the challenge of analyzing streaming data, which comes at us in a torrent and never lets up. If you’re on Twitter watching tweets go by, you might like to declare a brief pause, so you…
Poke a hole in a human and something remarkable happens. First of all, you go to jail. But meanwhile, the wound heals itself, filling in the missing tissue and protecting itself from infection. Poke a hole in a robot, however, and prepare for a long night of repairs. The machines may be stronger than us,…
When someone walks or rolls into the emergency department at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles with food stuck in their throat, the ER staff calls someone like Brennan Spiegel. As a gastroenterologist, food-pulling-out is something he’s uniquely equipped to do. So when he got the call one day to see a young man admitted with…
The best sources of information are organized according to what you want to know and how you wish to know it. Want some fresh perspective on humanity's place in the tree of life? I recommend the Hillis Plot, a circular map of evolutionary relationships between thousands of animal, botanical, and microbial species. If it's straight…
Every 95 minutes, the Chinese satellite Zhuhai-1 02 makes a full pass around the planet, its solar-panel arms extending from its boxy body as it observes Earth. Sometimes, its path takes it over Pueblo, Colorado. There, more than 300 miles below, Mike Coletta’s receiving station can pick up Zhuhai’s transmissions. Because as sophisticated as space…
This week’s space photos take us on a mini tour of the solar system. First up is that bright nuclear fusion reactor in the sky, our sun. This week NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory captured a colossal coronal hole, a magnetic opening in the sun that spits out solar wind laced with highly charged particles. When…
To non-pilots, landing an aircraft in a crosswind looks all but impossible. When the wind is perpendicular to the direction of motion of the plane, the plane has to aim in one direction—its wheels not lined up with the runway—so it moves in another. To pull it off, the pilot must quickly change the orientation…
In a room at Northwestern Medicine Chicago Proton Center, Robert Johnson keeps a small collection of plastic heads. At first glance, they look like they’ve been lopped off the top of department store mannequins. But they’re more lifelike than that—made of materials that mimic bone, flesh, and brain. “One of them even has a gold…
In September 2014, astronomers saw a dimming point of light in a small galaxy half a billion light-years away. It looked like an ordinary supernova—a dying star that exploded and whose light was now petering out. But the following January, Zheng “Andrew” Wong, a student intern at Las Cumbres Observatory in Goleta, California, noticed that…