Tag Archives: science

For Karen Sarkisyan, there are few things more awe-inspiring than a dark room full of glowing petunias. He wants more people to experience that magic and envisions a future lush with bioluminescent plants, like in the 2009 movie Avatar. “I think there’s just a sense of intrinsic excitement about things …

I see you, reader. You drink the probiotic seltzer, with its gut-improving bacteria, and the fiber-filled prebiotic. You regularly consume eclectic fermented foods and burly amounts of kale to diversify those precious microbes in your digestive tract. Because, after all, what isn’t the microbiome responsible for? It’s been all the …

About 10 years ago, Žiga Avsec was a PhD physics student who found himself taking a crash course in genomics via a university module on machine learning. He was soon working in a lab that studied rare diseases, on a project aiming to pin down the exact genetic mutation that …

The World Health Organization (WHO) is taking on the world’s worst killer, laying out its first plan to conquer hypertension—a level of high blood pressure that affects one in every three adults globally. That figure has doubled since 1990. It’s now up to 1.3 billion people. High blood pressure might …

Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink has announced it is one step closer to putting brain implants in people. Today, the company stated that it will begin recruiting patients with paralysis to test its experimental brain implant and that it has received approval from a hospital institutional review board. Such …

Over the years, archaeologists have unearthed many offerings at the Templo Mayor, located at the heart of the ancient Aztec, or Mexica, capital of Tenochtitlán and adjacent to contemporary Mexico City’s cathedral. The most recent, the 186th to date, was announced in August: a stone chest filled with objects from …

It’s late August, and Italy is in the middle of its third record-setting heat wave of the summer, but at the bottom of the slopes in Fai della Paganella, a small ski resort in the Dolomites, a queue is forming for the chairlift. Instead of ski jackets and bobble hats, …

Given the ceaseless procession of disasters this summer—from heat domes to hurricanes to the fiery destruction of Lahaina—the slow-motion disaster of plastic pollution may not be top of mind. But the United Nations recently released a “zero draft,” or the principles under consideration, of what could become one of the …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate it so that it points in every …

TenochtitlÁn has been rebuilt, or at least a 3D version of it has, and the fascinating work has quickly gone viral. Digital artist Thomas Kole, originally from Amersfoort, Netherlands, has re-created the capital of the Aztec, or Mexica, empire with so much detail that it looks like a living metropolis. …