My mom doesn't believe in the impossible. A Chinese immigrant and physics teacher, she arrived in the US with big dreams and limited English. During her first six months in the country, she would visit English-speaking friends to help her write checks—and when she got tired of that, she enrolled in an English class from 7 […]
Along with the roar of a grizzly bear and a crack of lightning, the sound of a tornado is among the most terrifying natural sounds on Earth. Depending on the twister and where you’re standing, it can sound like a hiss, a buzz, a rumble, or even a freight train. It’s the auditory manifestation of […]
Most people use Google's search-by-image feature to either look for copyright infringement, or for shopping. See some shoes you like on a frenemy's Instagram? Search will pull up all the matching images on the web, including from sites that will sell you the same pair. In order to do that, Google’s computer vision algorithms had […]
Does living in space make your gut bacteria bug out? Twenty mice headed to the International Space Station are about to find out. Early Friday morning, SpaceX plans to launch its 15th resupply mission from Cape Canaveral, sending its Dragon spacecraft packed with nearly 6,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. Most of that will be […]
The International Space Station is one of the few nonstellar things up there that we can see from down here without instruments. It’s a prefab home the size of a football field, 462 tons and more than $100 billion worth of pressurized roomlike modules and gleaming solar arrays, orbiting 250 miles above the surface of […]
Words you don’t want to hear about a $100 million, 10-year scientific study: “significant concerns.” Also bad: “inadequately powered.” Not good either: “These interactions would undermine the perception of study objectivity and would call into question any potential findings.” And especially: “NIH will take necessary steps to arrange for an orderly closeout of the study.” […]
When physicists strip neutrons from atomic nuclei, put them in a bottle, then count how many remain there after some time, they infer that neutrons radioactively decay in 14 minutes and 39 seconds, on average. But when other physicists generate beams of neutrons and tally the emerging protons—the particles that free neutrons decay into—they peg […]
In the fall of 1987, a young Canadian couple set off from their hometown of Saanich, British Columbia to run a few errands in Seattle. They never made it there; police found their bodies a few days later near Bellingham, Washington. Jay Cook had been beaten and strangled. His girlfriend, Tanya Van Cuylenborg, had been […]
Ah, the phantom traffic jam. You know, that thing where the flow suddenly slows to a halt and you inch forward for a half hour and then things pick up again and you look around for an accident or construction or anything at all for Pete’s sake that might justify the time you just wasted. […]
In 1989, two MIT artificial intelligence researchers made a terrifying prediction. “Within a few years,” wrote Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn, “it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots.” Their paper “Fast, Cheap and out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System,”, argued that small, […]