I remember the first time I had to deal with a faulty relay. My garage door opener had stopped working, and my kids were tired of going out in the rain to open the garage door manually. (It's my job […]
In 2003, San Francisco set the lofty objective of getting to zero waste by 2020. By that timeline, the city should soon be performing a ceremonial burial for the last pair of broken headphones and closing down its moldering landfills. […]
One day humans will have a permanent presence on the moon. Right? One day it's going to happen. So, how are we going to live on the moon? And maybe a more important question—how are we going to move around […]
If aliens are trying to talk to us (or even if they are not), Jill Tarter will be the one to find them. She cofounded the SETI institute in 1984 and ran its research center for many years. She was […]
It’s not every day that industrial machining sends you into a fit of joy. But today could be that day. If you spend time on the internet, you might have come across GIFs of metal parts fitting together so precisely […]
The Moon is a pretty barren place. Sure, there are a few buggies, some golf balls, a flag, urine bags, a family photo. But it’s mostly empty. If a company called ispace has its way, though, Earth’s closest space neighbor […]
Would you like to do a simple but slightly dangerous physics demo? It will be fun. You just need a basketball and a tennis ball (or any two bouncy balls of different mass). Hold the basketball above the ground with […]
More than 130 years ago, at the first Olympic Games in Athens, Boston University law student Thomas Burke took his mark at the 100-meter dash not in a standing position, but a crouch—what was then considered an unusual starting stance. […]
Los Angeles derives much of its charm from its diversity, both of its people and its amenities—rolling hills here, lovely architecture there, a national forest to the north and legendary beaches to the west. But much of it is in […]
Of all the big, world-remaking bets on the genome-editing tool known as Crispr, perhaps none is more tantalizing than its potential to edit some of humanity’s worst diseases right out of the history books. Just this week, Crispr Therapeutics announced […]