Category: Story

Ebola is one of those scourges where the mere mention of its name strikes fear: the virus, which kills about half of those it infects and gets passed on through body fluids, is notoriously hard to contain. That means that the best, perhaps only, way to contain an outbreak like the one currently ravaging the…

In the sprawling concert venue that is our universe, black holes often collide to produce cosmic cymbal crashes known as gravitational waves. These collisions, along with other astronomical activity that generates these spacetime disturbances, occur frequently enough that a wave should be rippling through some part of the universe at any given moment. But because…

For the past 13 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been bolting away from the sun at speeds in excess of 31,000 miles per hour, charting a course for the fringes of our solar system. In 2015, it made a close pass of Pluto, returning the highest resolution images of the erstwhile planet the world…

A district court judge today halted the execution of Nevada death row prisoner Scott Dozier—a man who has repeatedly expressed his desire to die—hours before he was scheduled to be put to death with an untested injection of three drugs: midazolam, fentanyl, and cisatracurium. The temporary injunction hinges on midazolam, a sedative produced by pharmaceutical…

In the summer of 2017, Michael Parsons found the urban rat haven of his dreams: A Waste Management transfer station—aka a literal trash heap, aka rat paradise—in Brooklyn, New York. For nearly two years, the behavioral ecologist and visiting scholar at Fordham University had been searching for a place to observe the city-dwelling rodents in…

WIRED ICON Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, orbital enthusiast GOES LONG The 10,000-year clock1 Inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis spent the 1980s and early ’90s designing machines worthy of the new millennium. But by 1995 he realized that he had never given much thought to what lay on the other side of…

If you want to find the size of a basketball, you can use a normal meter stick to measure the diameter. You should get a value of around 0.24 meters. Please don't use inches—they are just harder to deal with. Anyway, you probably aren't using Imperial units since there are only three countries that officially…

When Hristos Doucouliagos was a young economist in the mid-1990s, he got interested in all the ways economics was wrong about itself—bias, underpowered research, statistical shenanigans. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d go to seminars and people would say, ‘You’ll never get this published,’” Doucouliagos, now at Deakin University in Australia, says. “They’d say, ‘this…

Macular degeneration is the most common cause of vision loss among the elderly. But for some people with the disease, a shot of stem cells to the peeper was all they needed to see again. For others, treatment left them permanently blind. What gives? Stem cell treatments like the one described above—happening every day in…

Click:Ferraz Shawmut B300519 – PC71UD13C315TF Fuses Editor’s note: This is the first entry in a new video series, HardWIRED: Welcome to the Robotic Future, in which we explore the many fascinating machines that are transforming society. And we can’t do that without first defining what a robot even is. When you hear the word “robot,”…