Copper, a tan-and-brown mixed-breed, spent October fighting for his life. The Missouri dog first got sick on October 7, a light cough quickly progressing into a wet hacking one, loss of appetite, and lowered blood oxygen levels. When antibiotics didn’t help, he was admitted to the ICU at his local …
Read More »Inside India’s Gargantuan Mission to Clean the Ganges River
In the mornings in Varanasi, the air on the banks of the Ganges fills with the scent of burning bodies. On the steps of the Manikarnika ghat—the holiest of the city’s stepped riverbanks, upon which Hindu dead are cremated—the fires are already lit, and mourners assemble by the hundred to …
Read More »Dr. Ishwaria Subbiah Is Reimagining Cancer Care
Some people struggle with what they want to be when they grow up. For Dr. Ishwaria Subbiah, the decision to be a doctor was so easy that she calls it a “no-brainer.” “Medicine was a way of life for me. I’m a third generation of doctors and second generation of …
Read More »Cicadas Are So Loud, Fiber Optic Cables Can ‘Hear’ Them
One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick …
Read More »Dr. Dara Norman Wants to Bring More People Into Science
What does access mean to you? What about scientific merit? What are the things you take for granted that you aren’t even aware of because of your privilege? For Dr. Dara Norman, who is deputy director of the Community Science and Data Center at NOIRLab and the incoming president-elect of …
Read More »The Weirdest Reason the Poles Are Warming So Fast? Invisible Clouds
If you had lived some 50 million years ago and taken a trip to the poles, you would have found lush forests and creatures like crocodiles instead of miles-thick ice sheets. That’s because during the Eocene, greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than they are today, leading to a natural …
Read More »How to Set Your Thermostat—According to Science
The house in New Jersey came with a menagerie of control panels. Pallid little rectangles with fuzzy LCD screens, of varying brands and designs. Some were decades old, and there were six of them in total, dotted around various rooms. Joe Truncale, a customer engineer at Google, remembers trying to …
Read More »A Cutting-Edge Cancer Treatment May Cause Cancer. The FDA Is Investigating
The US Food and Drug Administration says it is investigating cases in which some patients who received a type of cutting-edge cancer treatment later developed new cancers. Known as CAR-T cell therapy, the treatment involves removing certain immune cells called T cells from patients and genetically modifying them to find …
Read More »A Life-Extension Drug for Big Dogs Is Getting Closer to Reality
There’s a well-established inverse relationship between a dog’s size and its expected lifespan. Bernese mountain dogs and Great Danes live just six to eight years, for example, while corgis can live up to 15 years and Chihuahuas up to two decades. San Francisco biotech company Loyal wants to close that …
Read More »Dr. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski Will Change How You Think About Space
The universe is a hologram. At least, that’s one of the central ideas in celestial holography, which is what Dr. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski works on. She’s the founder and principal investigator of the Celestial Holography Initiative at the Perimeter Institute. The Universe Is a What? Yes, you read that right: …
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