Tag Archives: science

I’ve got a complicated relationship with my Roomba, Keith, who sometimes refuses to charge but also works his wheels off ridding my home of dust. I hate dust, both because I’ve got allergies and because a good chunk of the particulates are toxic microplastics. Modern humans wage an unwinnable battle …

When she considers how far she’s come, Dr. Paula Johnson sees the path that brought her from being a public school kid in Brooklyn to being the first Black woman president of Wellesley College and a tireless advocate for equity in medicine. It’s a path that refined her life’s work …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Our planet is doomed. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant—a star so big it will scorch, blacken and swallow up the inner planets. While red giants are bad …

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, …

A batter hits a baseball, NASCAR has a 21-car crash, or maybe Thor punches the Hulk. When one object collides with another, we can describe the interaction with an impact force. But putting a specific number on that force is actually quite difficult.Let’s go over some methods we can use …

Scrolling through social media can feel like a nightmare these days. You’re reading about the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war, and then you’re reading about the horrors of the war between Ukraine and Russia. You’re learning about the latest devastating climate news. Democracy is under threat in America. It can …

Federal regulators are being pushed to investigate whether Elon Musk deceived investors in his brain-chip startup Neuralink by omitting details about the gruesome deaths of at least a dozen animals who were surgically fitted with its implants. Four members of the US House of Representatives today alleged that Musk issued …

If founder Elon Musk’s vision comes to pass, later this decade SpaceX’s Starship could transport astronauts and private passengers to the moon—and perhaps a decade or two later, to Mars. Last weekend’s second near-orbital test flight of the huge rocket fared better than the first one on April 20, surviving …

Next week, world leaders will head to Dubai for the Conference of the Parties—the United Nations’ annual climate meeting—to finalize the first “global stocktake,” assessing progress toward the Paris Agreement’s goals. The UN Environment Programme is not mincing words about how far from those goals nations are. Today, ahead of …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. For a pathogen to make us sick, it must overcome a lot. First it has to enter the body, bypassing natural barriers such as skin, mucus, cilia, and stomach acid. Then it needs to reproduce; some bacteria and parasites can …