Category: Story

Seated before a table covered in a knit blue cloth, a researcher hands a young girl a peculiar device. Attached to one end is a small cardboard tube; to the other, a large clear bag. The child grasps the rig with her left hand, places her lips around the cardboard, and lets out a long,…

There's something sort of cool in the next version of Apple's iOS. It's called ARKit—basically, it's a part of Apple's developer package to help programmers create awesome augmented reality apps. Like, maybe a program that adds dancing hotdogs to your screen so that they look like they are there in real life. Or better yet,…

Saturn's rings sure are pretty, and Matt Damon’s been to Mars, but our eight-planet solar system may not be that special after all. Today, scientists using data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft announced they’d discovered an eighth planet orbiting a star 2,500 light years away. They’ve named the planet Kepler-90i after the star it orbits, Kepler-90,…

When new species evolve, where do their viruses come from? As little more than free-ranging bundles of genetic material, viruses desperately need to hijack their hosts’ cellular machinery and resources to replicate, over and over again. Without its host, a virus is nothing. Because of that dependence, some viruses have stuck with their hosts throughout…

In August 2015, scientists from the University of Notre Dame went west, the disassembled pieces of a particle accelerator secured in the back of their U-haul. Over 1,000 miles later and nearly a mile down, they started installing the machine in a new home: deep within an old mine in the town of Lead, South…

Abigail Allwood is a translator. But instead of reading ancient texts, she reads ancient rocks, and for the past decade, the Australian astrobiologist has been exploring the most remote wilderness on earth in search of microscopic fingerprints of life. She uses a tool called the PIXL, which she invented as a postdoc: It fires a…

Susumu Tonegawa’s presence announces itself as soon as you walk through the door of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. A three-foot-high framed photograph of Tonegawa stands front and center in the high-ceilinged lobby, flanked by a screen playing a looping rainbow-hued clip of recent research highlights. Quanta Magazine About…

Day by day, human beings grow more and more inadequate. Robots steal our jobs. They can burn us in a foot race. And they can even read our damn minds. Now a little robot from the University of California Berkeley is putting on a jumping clinic. Meet Salto, the bot that not only leaps four…

There's a new video game in development for all you science nerds, and it has an advisor you might recognize. No, not me—just another one of your favorite physicists-turned-science educators, Neil deGrasse Tyson. The game is Space Odyssey, a space exploration caper that takes you on a journey to explore and settle new planets. Currently,…

At 2:39 am Thursday morning, millions of Bay Area residents from Sacramento to San Jose were shaken awake by the rolling tremble of a 4.4 magnitude earthquake. The eight-mile deep tremor struck along the Hayward fault, two miles southeast of Berkeley. From my apartment just 20 blocks from the epicenter, I woke with the rest…