Month: March 2019

Hopes were running high for cow 401, and cow 401 serenely bore the weight of expectations. She entered the cattle chute obligingly, and as the vet searched her uterus, making full use of the plastic glove that covered his arm up to his shoulder, she uttered nary a moo. A week ago, Cow 401 and…

Scientists in the US may be out in front developing the next generation of Crispr-based genetic tools, but it’s China that’s pushing those techniques toward human therapies the fastest. Chinese researchers were the first to Crispr monkeys, and non-viable embryos, and to stick Crispr’d cells into a real live human. And now, a team of…

For weeks, computer scientist Siwei Lyu had watched his team’s deepfake videos with a gnawing sense of unease. Created by a machine learning algorithm, these falsified films showed celebrities doing things they'd never done. They felt eerie to him, and not just because he knew they’d been ginned up. “They don’t look right,” he recalls…

Six months after the first case of Ebola was confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s conflict-torn border province of North Kivu, the outbreak is still raging, leaving a trail of fractured families and hundreds of orphans in its wake. As of December 20, more than 512 cases have been confirmed and 288 people have…

In 1995, New York City psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg logged onto PsyCom.net, then a popular message board for shrinks, to describe a new disease he called "internet addiction disorder," symptoms of which, he wrote, included giving up important social activities because of internet use and "voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers." It was supposed…

You wake up at 6 am feeling achy and chilled. Unsure if you’re sick or just sleep-deprived, you reach for a thermometer. It beeps at 99°F, so you groan and roll out of bed and get ready for work. Because that’s not a fever. Is it? Yes, it is. Forget everything you know about normal…

This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Corn farmers in Eastern Nebraska have long claimed weather patterns are changing, but in an unexpected way. “It’s something I’ve talked about with my dad and grandad many times,” says fifth-generation corn farmer Brandon Hunnicutt. Along with his father and…

It's a brilliant idea: Put solar panels on a drone so it doesn't need a battery. Without a battery, you could fly a drone as long as the sun keeps shining. It's awesome (assuming your motives are pure). That's exactly what students at the National University of Singapore did. But if you watch the video,…

Andrew Rubin sits with a Surface tablet, watching a white skeletal hand open and close on its screen. Rubin’s right hand was amputated a year ago, but he follows these motions with a special device fitted to his upper arm. Electrodes on his arm connect to a box that records the patterns of nerve signals…

Update: After delays, this launch successfully took place on Monday, Dec. 3. On Sunday, SpaceX plans to hoist into space the largest cosmic carpool to depart from US soil. The California-based aerospace company is flexing its ridesharing muscles in a carefully choreographed orbital ballet as its flagship rocket—the Falcon 9—prepares to launch 64 small satellites…