In a bright warehouse in the heart of Northern California’s cannabis country, a metal gate slowly peels up. “Also Sprach Zarathustra”—the iconic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey—blares as the room behind is revealed. A mob of marijuana farmers and […]
It's tough being a parent. Sometimes I try to help my kids with their physics homework because I like to pretend that I'm sort of OK with physics. Recently, my daughter wanted me to check her answer for this question. […]
In the early 2000s, a small community of coder-cosmologists set out to simulate the 14-billion-year history of the universe on a supercomputer. They aimed to create a proxy of the cosmos, a Cliffs Notes version in computer code that could […]
At 48 years old, Kersti Kaljulaid is Estonia’s youngest president ever, and its first female president. A marathon runner with degrees in genetics and an MBA, she spent a career behind the scenes—mostly as a European government auditor—before being elected […]
You really gotta feel for the koala. It lives exclusively on poisonous eucalyptus leaves, which limits its feeding options. Habitat destruction has splintered the species into isolated populations. And as if that weren’t enough, koalas are suffering a chlamydia epidemic. […]
The human gut is a 30-foot-long black box. Well, black tube. For decades doctors have been trying to decode the dark, slimy terrains of the GI tract—probing both ends with cameras and scopes and liters of oral contrast liquid. But […]
It looked like just another conference call. A panel of suited men sat at a table, large white name tags and water bottles before them. The man in the center, illuminated by fluorescent lights, spoke to a camera in front […]
The city of Richmond, Calif. juts into the San Francisco Bay like the head of a rhinoceros looking west across the water, toward San Quentin State Prison and the tony towns north of the Golden Gate. It’s a low, industrial […]
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 […]
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 […]