The Astounding Engineering Behind the World's Largest Optical Telescope
It's easy to miss the mirror forge at the University of Arizona. While sizable, the Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory sits in the shadow of the university's much larger 56,000-seat football stadium. Even its most distinctive feature—an octagonal concrete prominence emblazoned with the school's logo—looks like an architectural feature for the arena next door. But…
The Best of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comic Books
To try and summarize the comic book career of Stan Lee is almost impossible. He was the primary—at times, sole—writer for Marvel in the 1960s when the company was becoming Marvel Comics. He was involved in the co-creation of almost all of the company’s most well-known characters, from Spider-Man to the X-Men, with Iron Man,…
Can Nike's New Marathon Shoes Make You Faster? A Nike-Funded Study Says Yes
Eliud Kipchoge, the world's best marathon runner, runs in Nike shoes. But do his shoes help him run faster? You'll be shocked—shocked!—to learn that Nike claims they do. Kipchoge wears a special version of the Vaporfly 4%, which got its name from a study out of CU Boulder. Funded by Nike, and conducted in collaboration…
How #HimToo Became the Anti #MeToo of the Kavanaugh Hearings
Since its inception, the #MeToo movement has received copious backlash: Survivors brave enough to speak up face harassment and doxing, while the media speculates about how being outed as an abuser will impact men’s careers. But until a few days ago, #MeToo hadn’t inspired a full-on hashtag-slinging countermovement. Now there’s #HimToo. The hashtag and its…
How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight
Despite how easy it looks in James Bond movies and heist flicks, good disguises are hard to pull off. A good wig and some makeup don't make you a new person—full transformation requires a full attitude adjustment. Just ask any contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race. And when you're a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency,…
What if Sex Is Just a Garbage Dump for Genetic Mutations?
For a species whose numbers show no signs of collapsing, humans have a shockingly high mutation rate. Each of us is born with about 70 new genetic errors that our parents did not have. That’s much more than a slime mold, say, or a bacterium. Mutations are likely to decrease an organism’s fitness, and an…
Ephemerality Is a Lie
On the internet, as with most of life, you can’t count on things lasting forever. Websites close down, servers get turned off, the wrong button gets hit and years of work is erased. But just as you can’t depend on anything persisting, you can’t count on everything disappearing, either. Those photos of you looking ridiculous…
You Aren't Ready for the Weirdness of Working With Robots
Humanity is entering a confusing time: the Age of the Bizarrely Intelligent Robots. No longer confined to cages on factory floors, the machines are more and more walking, rolling, and hopping among us. But the question is, are we ready for their invasion? After all, interacting with other humans is hard enough for most of…
Nike's New Self-Lacing Basketball Shoe Is Actually Smart
"I'm gonna offer you a fist bump," Tinker Hatfield says, holding out his gloved right hand. He took a tumble off a motorized longboard days before, and while a collegiate pole-vaulting career and a lifetime of skiing taught the 66-year-old how to fall, the remote control in his paw stopped him from tucking his thumb…
The Quest to Perfect the Universal Language of Science
For millennia, humans have turned to the sky to tell time. Our planet rotates once on its axis, and we’ve lived another day. We divide that day into smaller fractions: the hour, minute, and second. But Earth is an imperfect clock. Its orbit and rotation vary slightly from year to year—the kind of wiggle room…