How Antivax PACs Helped Shape Midterm Ballots
Click:filling outdoor barbecue fire gun In early 2015, Sen. Ervin Yen, an anaesthesiologist who became Oklahoma’s first Asian American state legislator, introduced a bill to require all schoolchildren to be vaccinated, unless they had a medical reason not to. California had recently debuted similar legislation after an outbreak of measles in Disneyland sickened 147 people…
Thin, Flexible New Solar Cells Could Soon Line Your Shirt
Click:SWISS Cosmetic Device The general rule when developing a new kind of solar technology is to expect progress to be slow. Take silicon solar cells, the most ubiquitous and recognizable form of photovoltaic generations today. When silicon panels were first built in the early 1950s, they could only turn about 6 percent of the light…
Polio Is Nearly Wiped Out—Unless Some Lab Tech Screws Up
In 1979, a photographer named Janet Parker got a disease that wasn't supposed to exist anymore. At first she thought she had the flu, but then she kept getting sicker, got a rash, and went to the hospital, where doctors—in disbelief—diagnosed her with smallpox. Just a year earlier, the World Health Organization had declared that…
Kilogram Redefined. The Metric System Overhaul Is Complete
On the morning of Friday, November 16, scientists and diplomats crammed into an auditorium in Versailles, a stone’s throw from the Sun King’s gilded chateau. Patrick Abbott, an American physicist, had flown into France for the long weekend. Forehead gleaming and blue suit jacket draped across his lap, Abbott watched from a packed balcony as…
Trump's Immigration Speech Won't Change Minds, Science Says
When President Trump first announced he would deliver a primetime address about the border wall, people objected. They argued that the networks shouldn’t run it, given Trump’s record of lying about immigration issues and the precedent of not airing presidential speeches deemed purely political. Misinformation experts warned that if news organizations do air the speech,…
China’s Moon Lander Wakes Up From Its Long, Ultra-Cold Night
We already know it’s chilly on the moon. A lunar night lasts 14 Earth days, and its temperatures can dip into a cold so punishing it makes the polar vortex look like a hot tub. But yesterday, China’s space agency announced that the frigidity of the lunar night is even more intense than we’d thought:…
You Can Drink Champagne in Space—Yes, Really
Space travel used to be something that only people with the right stuff could experience. But advances in commercial space tourism is changing all of that. Virgin Galactic is registering passengers online. SpaceX announced it would send two lucky passengers around the moon in the next year or two. But space travel is still likely…
Dark Matter Hunters Are Looking Inside Rocks for New Clues
In nearly two dozen underground laboratories scattered all over the earth, using vats of liquid or blocks of metal and semiconductors, scientists are looking for evidence of dark matter. Their experiments are getting more complicated, and the search is getting more precise, yet aside from a much-contested signal coming from a lab in Italy, nobody…
For Pi Day, Calculate Pi Yourself Using Two Colliding Balls
This is at least my ninth year of writing about Pi Day—here is my post from 2010. Of course it's called Pi Day because the date, 3/14, is similar to the first three digits of pi (3.1415 …). At this point I've built up a whole library of fun things in honor of Pi Day.…
Tonight: Watch SpaceX Announce Its First Passenger to the Moon
Update: Read our coverage of the event—and the reveal of Yusaku Maezawa as SpaceX's mystery passenger. Tonight will be a big night for space tourism. SpaceX, the private spaceflight company spearheaded by Elon Musk, will reveal the identity of the mystery passenger who booked a trip around the moon on the company's massive BFR rocket.…