It's time for another look at the Ant-Man and the Wasp trailer. Previously, I considered what would happen if you shrunk a building to the size of a suitcase while its mass stayed constant. But now I want to look at the van that gets tiny. So here's the scene (as far as I can…
I can’t sit here and guarantee you a robot won’t take your job one day—capitalism kind of has a thing for automation. What I can tell you is that in the near future, robots will be doing jobs that no one wants to do. For instance, risking your life doing rescue operations after mining disasters.…
For the past several years, Nenad Bursac has been trying to make muscles from scratch. A biological engineer at Duke, Bursac came close in 2015, when his lab became the first to grow functional human skeletal muscle in culture. "Functional" being the operative word. Like the muscle fibers in, say, your bicep, the tissues could…
In a China Global Television Network video from 2003, taikonaut Yang Liwei leans back in his orbital capsule, the overstuffed stripes of his spacesuit legs filling the frame. His helmet shield is up, so the viewer can gaze into his eyes as he speaks: “Greetings to people around the world!” His eyes move leftward, out…
Continuing their quest to make me feel even worse about being a lazy human, robots can now do sit-ups and push-ups and something called a back extension, which I had to look up because that’s how lazy I am. Today in Science Robotics, researchers from the University of Tokyo show off a humanoid that is…
This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The creation of Camp Century, from the outset, was an audacious scheme. Under the thick ice of Greenland, a scant 800 miles from the North Pole, the US military built a hidden base of ice tunnels, imagined as an extensive network of railway tracks,…
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Cargo-shipping regulators have struck a historic deal to set their dirty fuel-burning industry on a low-carbon course. On Friday, the International Maritime Organization agreed for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions from global shipping. The nonbinding deal marks a critical shift for the…
For years now, the US Department of Agriculture has been flirting with the latest and greatest DNA manipulation technologies. Since 2016, it has given free passes to at least a dozen gene-edited crops, ruling that they fall outside its regulatory purview. But on Wednesday, March 28, the agency made its relationship status official; effective immediately,…
It's that World Cup time of the year—so that means it's also time to talk about soccer physics. What about the impossible kick? The "impossible" kick has a ball leave the ground and then take a curved path while in the air. Of course it's not actually impossible, but it is difficult to pull off.…
The bets on liquid biopsy keep getting bigger. Last month, Silicon Valley unicorn Grail Inc. raised a third round of financing to develop its blood-based tests for early cancer detection. That brings its total up to $1.5 billion since 2016, putting it among the top three most heavily funded private biotech companies in the US.…