At Tesla, Peter Carlsson spent nearly five years at Elon Musk’s side, locating various parts of the Model S as the electric car company's global supply chain manager. "The overarching goal of Tesla is to help reduce carbon emissions, and that means low cost and high volume," Musk said back in 2006. "We will also […]
On Monday, August 21, 2017, the world will go under, or so it might well feel like if you position yourself along a 70-mile-wide swath of the US from South Carolina to Oregon. From here you can witness the moon move in front of the sun in the middle of the day and darken the […]
Jutting out of the Pacific Ocean 375 miles off the coast of Australia is Ball’s Pyramid, the most bizarre island on Earth. It is, as promised, shaped like a skinny pyramid, the remnant of a shield volcano. It is decidedly supervillain-lair-ish. In 2003, scientists scaled its sheer cliffs in search of the only thing more […]
E. coli might best be known for giving street food connoisseurs occasional bouts of gastric regret. But the humble microbial workhorse, with its easy-to-edit genome, has given humankind so much more—insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs, biofuels, synthetic rubber, and now: a place to keep your selfies safe for the next millennium. Scientists have already used plain […]
Digitizing the world's medical records was supposed to make doctors' lives easier and patients' lives longer. But unlike banking and shopping, medicine has had a rough time transitioning to the new digital order. Because health care providers use different systems for their electronic health care records, it’s still difficult for a patient’s data to follow […]
I'll be honest—I don't know as much about DC superheroes as Marvel superheroes. Still, I'm pretty excited about the upcoming DC movie Justice League. As a kid, I dressed up as Aquaman; my mother was pretty good at making stuff and so she made costumes for me and my two brothers. The other two costumes […]
Like many other surgery patients, Hayley Anthony has a daily physical therapy regimen. But unlike other post-ops, the 30-year-old marketing consultant is recovering from a procedure she helped invent. Five months ago, she became one of the first people in the world to have a piece of tissue incised from the cavity of her abdomen […]
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, has failed to find any of the hoped-for particles that would lead physicists beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. But it’s possible that the LHC has been producing such pivotal new particles all along, and that we’re just […]
The human brain is routinely described as the most complex object in the known universe. It might therefore seem unlikely that pea-size blobs of brain cells growing in laboratory dishes could be more than fleetingly useful to neuroscientists. Nevertheless, many investigators are now excitedly cultivating these curious biological systems, formally called cerebral organoids and less […]
MEXICO CITY—"Alerta sísmica! Alerta sísmica!" Few things strike as much fear into the hearts of Mexico City residents as the words “seismic alert” blaring from speakers in schools and parks. It means an earthquake is rumbling up from the Pacific coast, and you have 60 to 90 seconds to get someplace safe. I had just […]