Alexander von Humboldt began his working life as a mine inspector for the Prussian government. But in his late twenties, he left his government gig and set off to explore Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru with botanist Aime Bonpland. He did an astounding amount of work during his travels, in pursuit of his hypothesis […]
Amy Mitchell started getting sick in 2012. Dizzy spells and fatigue became a part of her daily life, followed by numbness in her limbs and painful muscle spasms. After half a dozen doctors over two years couldn’t tell her what was wrong, she sent away for a 23andMe kit. At the time, the consumer DNA-testing […]
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you can bypass the cheese display at the Goose Island Whole Foods in Chicago, there’s a strange sight out the building’s back doors. In the river below float 80 coconut-fiber beds, replete with native grasses, shrubs, and even river birch trees. Most days, you’ll […]
For the past two years, researchers at Northwestern University have been analyzing the habits of tens of thousands of scientists—using Dropbox. Looking at data about academics' folder-sharing habits, they found the most successful scientists share some collaboration behaviors in common. And on Friday, they published their results in an article for the Harvard Business Review. […]
This isn't actually a real Iron Man suit. But it does fly. It's a flying suit made by Gravity Industries, a young British startup that builds what they call 'jet suits.' The system uses six kerosene-powered jet thrusters to let a human fly around. Honestly, it just looks cool. This tweet states that it takes […]
When many people think of astronauts, they think of absurdly qualified men and women drifting through the cylindrical modules of the International Space Station, or floating beside its broad, golden solar arrays on an improbably serene spacewalk. The improbable thing about it being not the presence of a living soul in low Earth orbit (the […]
This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. At the end of July, Twitter user Alicia Santana posted a photo of a man sitting in a plastic folding chair in his yard. He’s looking away from the camera, towards a monstrous, orange cloud of smoke filling the sky beyond a wire […]
After the historic announcement in February 2016 hailing the discovery of gravitational waves, it didn’t take long for skeptics to emerge. The detection of these feeble undulations in the fabric of space and time by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was said to have opened a new ear on the cosmos. But the following […]
Call it the Great Convergence of Creepiness. The first bit, the uncanny valley, we’re all familiar with by now: If a humanoid robot looks realistic but not quite realistic enough, it freaks us out. So far that idea has been applied almost entirely to robot faces and bodies, but it’s less known as a phenomenon […]
SpaceX and Boeing are preparing to face off in an epic game of capture the flag. The winner not only wins bragging rights as the first private company to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station, but gets to bring home a piece of history: a small American flag that flew on both the first […]