SCIENCE

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 […]

The distance between prosthetic and real is shrinking. Thanks to advances in batteries, brain-controlled robotics, and AI, today’s mechanical limbs can do everything from twist and point to grab and lift. And this isn’t just good news for amputees. “For […]

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt heads to Capitol Hill Thursday for two separate hearings, ostensibly to answer questions about his agency’s budget. But House lawmakers—both Republican and Democrat—will instead focus on a series of scandals that have turned the agency upside […]

If I told you that flatworms had invaded France, you might say, c'est la vie. A worm is a worm, after all. But then I’d tell you they’re also known as land planarians, and you might think that sounds rather […]

This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Engineer Jim Southerland was hired by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1971 to join the nascent war on air pollution. He came to relish the task, investigating orange […]