Ash is raining down on the city of Portland. Thousand-degree fireballs are forcing evacuations near Salt Lake City, Seattle, and parts of Northern California. In Missoula, Montana, the sun burns a bloody red even even at high noon. These days, […]
I am going to make a prediction. As people start to get bored with their fidget spinners, they are going to start playing with these double pendulum fidget spinners. The normal spinner has a bearing in the center of some […]
"Nadie te quita lo bailado.” (No one can take from you what you’ve danced.) For Federico Ardila, this Latin American expression epitomizes his approach to life and mathematics. It’s the driving force behind the parties he DJs in venues across […]
This story originally appeared on Project Earth and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A controversial study of the electric grid, requested by Energy Secretary Rick Perry in April, is finally expected to be released this month. And to some experts, its exact […]
After the deluge comes the deluge. First Hurricane Irma raked Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in early September, and then two weeks later Hurricane Maria did the same, leaving 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico without clean water, […]
Some 130 million years ago, two extremely dense balls of matter collided into each other. These two neutron stars, the city-sized cores of deceased giant stars, spiraled inward and merged to become a giant fireball. In the collision, they generated […]
Earlier this year, Collin Smith came into possession of an "intelligent" first aid kit. When he did, the first thing he did was try to outsmart it. The kit in question was the Comprehensive Rescue System, a sturdy, gray, 17-pound […]
Editor's note: This is part of our series HardWIRED: Welcome to the Robotic Future, in which we explore the fascinating machines transforming society. A central tension in robotics is that while humanity created the robot in its image—the classic humanoid […]
In an ordinary hospital room in Los Angeles, a young woman named Lauren Dickerson waits for her chance to make history. She’s 25 years old, a teacher’s assistant in a middle school, with warm eyes and computer cables emerging like […]
For the first time, humans have detected an interstellar asteroid—a space rock they're calling 'Oumuamua, which is a Hawaiian word meaning "scout." It's the only object we've ever seen that entered the solar system from beyond our little collection of […]