Month: March 2019

In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, named Cohl Furey rented a car and drove six hours south to Pennsylvania State University, eager to talk to a physics professor there named Murat Günaydin. Furey had figured out how to build on a finding of Günaydin’s from 40 years earlier—a largely forgotten…

The first fully autonomous ground vehicles hitting the market aren’t cars or delivery trucks—they’re ­robo­-farmhands. The Dot Power Platform is a prime example of an explosion in advanced agricultural technology, which Goldman Sachs predicts will raise crop yields 70 percent by 2050. But Dot isn’t just a tractor that can drive without a human for…

Last December, on a dark evening in Baltimore, Anna Scott left her apartment and dragged her bag three minutes to the train station. She eventually caught her train, the Crescent, claimed a comfortable seat to cuddle up in, and took out her laptop full of files related to her PhD work on urban temperature at…

Last month, cancer researcher Amit Verma found himself in a bit of a bind. His lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York had just received feedback on a new paper about how genes get turned on and off when healthy pancreas cells develop into tumors. The journal’s reviewers asked his team…

In the mid-2000s, diamonds were the hot new thing in physics. It wasn’t because of their size, color, or sparkle, though. These diamonds were ugly: Researchers would cut them into flat squares, millimeters across, until they resembled thin shards of glass. Then they would shoot lasers through them. Probably the most valuable bauble of all…

In the early ’90s, Elizabeth Behrman, a physics professor at Wichita State University, began working to combine quantum physics with artificial intelligence—in particular, the then-maverick technology of neural networks. Most people thought she was mixing oil and water. “I had a heck of a time getting published,” she recalled. “The neural-network journals would say, ‘What…

More than a decade ago, researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge began recruiting young, healthy Louisianans to voluntarily go hungry for two years. In addition to cutting their daily calories by 25 percent, the dozens who enrolled also agreed to a weekly battery of tests; blood draws, bone scans, swallowing a…

If you want to avoid getting sick on a plane, the worst place to sit, according to Charles Gerba, is along the aisle. The issue is exposure—not just to other passengers, but anything they touch. That means obvious hot spots (arm rests, tray tables, in-flight magazines) and less-obvious ones like aisle seats, which people use…

Many breakthroughs in prenatal surgery have only been possible because of ever more sophisticated instruments. Since 2011, Michael Belfort, the chief obstetrician at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, has been enhancing the tools he uses to operate on a developing fetus. His modified instruments have led to fewer preterm deliveries and C-sections for mothers, and…

Update: After an initial delay, the Parker Solar Probe successfully launched at 3:31am EST, Sunday August 12th. Early Saturday morning, the skies above Cape Canaveral will light up with the launch of the Parker Solar Probe. Its mission? To sweep through the sun’s infernal outer atmosphere, studying the gaseous fireball at the center of the…