Penguin Poop, Seen From Space, Tells Our Climate Story
Satellites watch many things as they orbit the Earth: hurricanes brewing in the Caribbean, tropical forests burning in the Amazon, even North Korean soldiers building missile launchers. But some researchers have found a new way to use satellites to figure out what penguins eat by capturing images of the animal’s poop deposits across Antarctica. A…
So Much Genetic Testing. So Few People to Explain It to You
When Dan Riconda graduated with a master’s degree in genetic counseling from Sarah Lawrence College in 1988, the Human Genome Project was in its very first year, DNA evidence was just beginning to enter the courts, and genetic health tests weren’t yet on the market. He found one of the few jobs doing fetal diagnostics…
These DNA Startups Want to Put All of You on the Blockchain
Click:Manufacturing and OEM In 2018, people started using the blockchain to battle deepfakes, track sushi-grade tuna from Fiji to Brooklyn, and even cast a (symbolic) vote. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to put all 6 billion bits of your genetic source code on the blockchain too. Starting this…
A 600-Meter-Long Plastic Catcher Heads to Sea, but Scientists Are Skeptical
This weekend, a project of staggering ambition will sail past San Francisco and out to sea through the Golden Gate. The invention of an organization called the Ocean Cleanup, it consists of a 600-meter-long plastic tube with a dangling screen that a ship will tow 240 nautical miles out to sea for testing. If that…
Wildfire Smoke Is Smothering the US—Even Where You Don't Expect It
America is on fire … again. More than a million and a half acres are burning in 15 states, from Arizona to Alaska. More than 3,000 firefighters are working to contain the Mendocino Complex Fire 100 miles north of San Francisco, now the largest in California history, and over the weekend, lightning strikes sparked dozens…
New Satellites Will Use Radio Waves to Spy on Ships and Planes
When a company called HawkEye 360 wanted to test its wares, it gave an employee a strange, deceptive task. While the worker stood in Virginia, he held the kind of transceiver that ships carry to broadcast their GPS locations. Usually such a signal would reveal his true position to a radio receiver, but he’d altered…
A 6-Legged Robot Stares at the Sky to Navigate Like a Desert Ant
In case you’ve been envying the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis lately, don’t. Skittering around the Sahara, the insect endures temperatures so brutal, it can sometimes only manage foraging runs of 15 minutes before it burns to death. Making matters worse, the heat obliterates the pheromone chemical trails that ants typically lay for each other to…
The Risk That Ebola Will Spread to Uganda Is Now ‘Very High’
Ebola is one of those scourges where the mere mention of its name strikes fear: the virus, which kills about half of those it infects and gets passed on through body fluids, is notoriously hard to contain. That means that the best, perhaps only, way to contain an outbreak like the one currently ravaging the…
Get Ready For Gravitational Waves All Day, Every Day
In the sprawling concert venue that is our universe, black holes often collide to produce cosmic cymbal crashes known as gravitational waves. These collisions, along with other astronomical activity that generates these spacetime disturbances, occur frequently enough that a wave should be rippling through some part of the universe at any given moment. But because…
How to Follow New Horizons' Historic Flyby of Ultima Thule
For the past 13 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been bolting away from the sun at speeds in excess of 31,000 miles per hour, charting a course for the fringes of our solar system. In 2015, it made a close pass of Pluto, returning the highest resolution images of the erstwhile planet the world…