Click:drupal agency Click:Modern Chandeliers 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 […]
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 […]
Is there any more daunting animal to study than the great white shark? Just you try attaching a radio transmitter or drawing a tube of blood from a two-ton, razor-toothed, meat-seeking missile. But scientific understanding of these iconic apex predators has been limited by technical challenges as much as human bias for studying species that […]
This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2012, North Carolina legislators passed a bill that barred policymakers and developers from using up-to-date climate science to plan for rising sea levels on the state’s coast. Now Hurricane Florence threatens to cause a devastating storm surge that […]
Q: Did the CDC really just ban… romaine lettuce? A: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t ban lettuce or recall it—it doesn’t have the regulatory power to do either of those things—but two days before Thanksgiving, it put out an unusually strong statement telling Americans to toss any romaine lettuce in any form: […]
When I was in high school in the early 2000s, I spent a week of my summer vacation shadowing a pathologist at the local hospital. Every day in his basement office was basically the same; he’d focus his microscope on a slide of tissue, squinting for minutes at a time, methodically making notes about the […]
A group of apes is called a shrewdness; a group of ferrets is called a business; a group of small satellites is called a constellation. And Spire is the name of one shrewd business with a constellation of small satellites. More than 60 of its sats are up in orbit, collecting information about the weather, […]
