Month: March 2019

In Elon Musk’s fever dreams, we’re already looping around the moon in spaceships. And possibly even vacationing in an elaborate lunar colony like the one Andy Weir imagines in his new novel, Artemis. Being Weir—he of the meticulously researched space-survival thriller The Martian—you know he just had to science the shit out of it. On…

A handprint, Mylar slides, a box of “cosmic crayons” from the early 20th century—these are some of the things tucked in a back room of the South Australia Museum, relics of expeditions into Australia's center. From the late 1920s through the 1970s, the University of Adelaide’s Board for Anthropological Research organized over 40 expeditions to…

A monster was coming to central Oklahoma. Early in the evening of May 30, 2013, Cathy Finley and her partner, Bruce Lee, were driving along a back road near the small town of Guthrie, Oklahoma, 30 miles north of the state’s capital, when they spotted Tim Samaras and two members of his crew leaning against a white…

Half-eaten doughnuts hit the bottom of waste bins around the world this week, as news feeds spread word of a new dietary danger. Yes, headlines declared, a new study shows that sugar is the favorite food of cancer. Cancer. “This link between sugar and cancer has sweeping consequences,” wrote Johan Thevelein, a Belgian biologist and…

This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Superstorm Sandy ripped through New York City in October 2012, it did not discriminate. At the construction site of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, chief operating officer John Stanley recalls “mechanical equipment bobbing like corks” in the floodwaters. And at the Rubin…

Do me a favor and grab and object near you. Anything will do. Even if it’s something you’ve never handled before, odds are your brain automatically worked out how you should grasp the thing and with what force. It’s the kind of clever dexterity that makes you human. (You are human, I hope?) Ask a…

Update: On January 22, 2018, President Trump approved a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels, which will eventually decrease to 15 percent. Suniva was once among the top solar panel manufacturers in America. Then, in April, the Georgia company declared bankruptcy. A few days after, it revealed why: Foreign governments, like China, had subsidized…

Seated before a table covered in a knit blue cloth, a researcher hands a young girl a peculiar device. Attached to one end is a small cardboard tube; to the other, a large clear bag. The child grasps the rig with her left hand, places her lips around the cardboard, and lets out a long,…

There's something sort of cool in the next version of Apple's iOS. It's called ARKit—basically, it's a part of Apple's developer package to help programmers create awesome augmented reality apps. Like, maybe a program that adds dancing hotdogs to your screen so that they look like they are there in real life. Or better yet,…

Saturn's rings sure are pretty, and Matt Damon’s been to Mars, but our eight-planet solar system may not be that special after all. Today, scientists using data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft announced they’d discovered an eighth planet orbiting a star 2,500 light years away. They’ve named the planet Kepler-90i after the star it orbits, Kepler-90,…