“Want to come to a quantum computing party?” I wasn’t expecting the question. My brain was hurting: I’d just finished an hour-long interview with Jarrod McClean, a Google quantum computing scientist, and I was mentally planning to write up my notes. His talk had caught my attention the day before: McClean spoke animatedly, bobbing a […]
In a hallway of an engineering building at Stanford University, some devilish researchers have built a sprawling obstacle course. To make it through, competitors have to wind over sand, through a door, up some steps, and finally, through a forest of small pillars. Sounds like the Rube Goldbergian machinations of an grad student with too […]
America doesn't have good data on guns. Blame the Dickey amendment. First introduced in 1996, the legislation didn't ban gun investigations explicitly (it forbade the use of federal dollars in the advocacy or promotion of gun control), but Congress that year also cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the […]
Let's be clear—airplanes are complicated. Sure, it's entirely possible to get a piece of paper and fold it in a particular way so that it flies. But the physics of flight isn't trivial. It's even harder to give an explanation of the forces on a flying aircraft in a short video—which is what I did […]
It’s an interesting time to be making a case for philosophy in science. On the one hand, some scientists working on ideas such as string theory or the multiverse—ideas that reach far beyond our current means to test them—are forced to make a philosophical defense of research that can’t rely on traditional hypothesis testing. On […]
The 144 words of Robert Frost’s seminal poem “The Road Not Taken” fit neatly onto a single printed page. Or in a 1-kilobyte data file. Or, in Hyunjun Park’s hands, in a few drops of water at the bottom of a pink Eppendorf tube. Well, really what’s inside the water: invisible floating strands of DNA. […]
Last week, two American astronauts, Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold, and one Russian cosmonaut, Oleg Artemyev, climbed into a giant explosive stick and fired into space, ascending 250 miles before docking with the International Space Station on Friday. As usual, they flew in the storied Soyuz rocket, launched out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan—the […]
Let’s say we had a way to distribute beacons around our solar system (or beyond) that could survive for billions of years, recording what our civilization has achieved. What should they be like? It’s easy to come up with what I consider to be sophomoric answers. But in reality I think this is a deep—and in […]
Who wouldn’t enjoy a little x-ray vision, really? You could cheat at cards, for one. And that game where someone puts something under one of three cups and you have to guess where it is. Easy. Of course, x-ray vision would come with a downside, in that you’d be spraying all your surveillance targets with […]
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In a coastal city, it’s easy to assume the greatest climate threat comes from the rising ocean. But in Long Beach, California, the biggest danger is not the sea, but the sun. “We have to deal with sea-level rise,” Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said. […]