A Nuclear Plant Braces for Impact With Hurricane Florence
On March 11, 2011, a one-two, earthquake-tsunami punch knocked out the safety systems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, triggering an explosion of hydrogen gas and meltdowns in three of its six reactors—the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Fukushima’s facility was built with 1960s technology, designed at a time when engineers underestimated plant…
A Flying Tesla? Sure! We Calculate the Power Demands
Elon Musk isn't afraid to play around on Twitter. In a recent tweet, Musk suggested that a future Tesla would look like the flying car from Back to the Future. Ha ha. Funny. But could it really work? What would it take to make a flying Tesla that converts from driving to flying mode with…
11 Fantastic Science Books to Binge Over the Holidays
This year brought no shortage of great science-themed books. Spurred by rapid advances in biotech, the writer Carl Zimmer spun a personal tale around the emerging science of heredity. Investigative reporter John Carreyrou exposed the rotten business at the heart of Theranos, the blood-testing startup built on air. Our past also proved bountiful, with books…
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…