Physicists Condemn Sexism Through ‘Particles for Justice’
This week, of all weeks, should have been triumphant for women in physics. For her work on lasers, Canadian physicist Donna Strickland became the first female Nobel Laureate for the field after 55 years. She finally joined a short list consisting of just two other women, Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer. But Seyda Ipek barely…
The Human Cell Atlas Is Biologists' Latest Grand Project
Aviv Regev speaks with the urgent velocity of someone who has seen the world with an extraordinary new acuity, and can’t wait for you to hurry up and see it too. At a meeting of 460 international scientists gathered last week in San Francisco, the computational biologist bombarded her audience with a torrent of results…
Take a Good Look, America. This Is What the Reckoning Looks Like
By at least one metric, we humans are dumber than frogs. The fable goes that if you toss a frog in a pot of hot water, it’ll leap right out. Put it in cold water, though, and bring it slowly to a boil, and the frog won’t notice before it’s too late. That turns out…
The Serious Security Problem Looming Over Robotics
They call it Herb2. It’s a dapper robot, wearing a bowtie even while it sits at home in its lab at the University of Washington. Its head is a camera, which it cranes up and down, taking in the view of a dimly lit corner where two computer monitors sit. All perfectly normal stuff for…
Life-Saving Deliveries Will Get Drones Flying the Skies
Delivery drones are real and they’re operating on a national level, but they’re not dropping off impulse purchases, and some of the most important applications are not in the United States. Zipline, a Bay Area startup, inked a deal with the government of Rwanda in 2016 and now uses small, autonomous planes to deliver medical…
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,…