Month: March 2019

Have you ever witnessed a total solar eclipse? Usually when I give a lecture, only a couple of people in an audience of several hundred people raise their hands when I ask that question. A few others respond tentatively, saying, “I think I saw one.” That’s like a woman saying, “I think I once gave…

Silicon Valley runs on two things: obscene amounts of cash and the tales people tell about who they are. Which is perhaps why the Bay Area has rapidly become ground zero for people pursuing one of the oldest mythologies in human history—the legend of everlasting life. Well, maybe not ever lasting life exactly, but vastly-expanded-and-improved…

In late October 2012, as Hurricane Sandy barreled toward New York and New Jersey, barrels of information from the National Weather Service, NASA, and elsewhere inundated the White House. As the storm picked up, experts at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, started closely monitoring storm track modeling from NOAA, satellite imagery…

When you wander around the internet, sometimes you can find some crazy stuff. Check this out: It's an old account of a weird phenomena created by giant plastic sheets at 3M Corporation. In short, these fast-moving, electrically-charged plastic sheets created some type of effect that prevented humans from passing through an invisible wall. It sounds…

The total solar eclipse on Monday, August 21 is shaping up to be an Earth-shaking event, if the crowds getting into position five days early are any indication. But while carloads of chasers are queuing up to see the totality, some are skipping that step and meeting the eclipse more or less half way—from the…

When you think of automation, you probably think of the assembly line, a dramatic dance of robot arms with nary a human laborer in sight. But that’s child’s play. The grandest, most disruptive automation revolution has played out in agriculture. First with horses and plows, and eventually with burly combines—technologies that have made farming exponentially…

Twenty years ago, WIRED made a bold prediction: Cable modems are on the way out. "Things are looking bad for the cable industry: Careful study has shown that nearly the entire cable network would need to be replaced to make it suitable for two-way data traffic, and satellite services have been stealing away cable's television…

Last week, when a British reporter broke the news that American scientists had used Crispr to edit the first human embryos on US soil, he wasted no time in cutting to the big, juicy, highly controversial chase. “One Giant Step For Designer Babies” ran the headline on Steve Connor’s world exclusive in the i, a…

Sometimes a cat will fall out of a window or balcony—a byproduct, no doubt, of a cat doing cat things. If you have a house cat, your feline's propensity for aerial shenanigans probably doesn't worry you that much: Cats falling from low windows can use their righting reflex to land on their feet like nothing…

The Navier-Stokes equations capture in a few succinct terms one of the most ubiquitous features of the physical world: the flow of fluids. The equations, which date to the 1820s, are today used to model everything from ocean currents to turbulence in the wake of an airplane to the flow of blood in the heart.…