Another week, another avalanche of things bombarding the collective psyche. "Like what?" you ask. For starters, everyone is mourning the death of actor Luke Perry, thinking about the legacy of Michael Jackson, and wondering if Ivanka Trump is getting off […]
If you're curious about bed bugs, radon gas, or toxic waste in landfills, the EPA website has got you covered. But if you are interested in climate change, you might better off going somewhere else instead—say over to NASA.gov or […]
Most parents dismiss videogames as a mind-dulling distraction from their kids’ studies. Little do they know all that buttonmashing could translate into a fat college fund. Over the past five years, esports have grown into an estimated $906 million industry, […]
Benefits of robots: 1. They never get tired. 2. They can lift very heavy things. 3. They can walk through (controlled) conflagrations on college campuses. At least, that is, the robots in and around roboticist Jessy Grizzle’s lab at the […]
You can get a drone in a wide range of sizes. Some of them fit in your palm (like the Syma X20) while others are quite large. But have you noticed anything about the flying time? Many of the super […]
It might not be apparent unless you're driving through the mid-longitudes of Interstate 70, but around 40 percent of the land in the United States is farmland. Understanding what happens on that acreage is complicated—for individual farmers and agricultural conglomerates. […]
Computers and iPhones don’t go to heaven. Instead, 80 percent of US electronic waste ends up in landfills or incineration furnaces. Materials scientist Victoria Chernow thinks that science will be able to change that. She says there might be a […]
Why would you build a slide like this? It's really long and it's really straight. When humans get to the end, they can't stop. I don't know what the designer was thinking—maybe the intent was to build a slide that […]
The shape on the screen appears only briefly—just long enough for the test subject to commit it to memory. At the same time, an electrical signal snakes past the bony perimeter of her skull, down through a warm layer of […]
At San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences, there's no shortage of natural wonders. You can visit a dome-encapsulated rainforest, observe the dizzying jellyfish in their tanks, or ponder a wave of sea lion skulls stuck to a wall. But those […]