Clyde Tombaugh spent much of his life peering at telescope data. He discovered Pluto in 1930, and he spent years poking around the outer solar system. But as the scientific community began to dream about launching a vehicle into the great beyond, he focused his gaze much closer to home. At the time, the smaller…
The twinkling of a starry night sky is romantic, sure. But for astronomer Dominika Wylezalek, “it’s a nightmare.” That’s because Wylezalek studies galaxies billions of light-years away, and all that finicky glimmering—she’d call it “turbulence”—gets in the way. So she and her colleagues at the European Southern Observatory fire up this Star Wars–worthy laser cannon…
1. When turkeys strut, their leg muscles work as shock absorbers to boost energy efficiency. That gam action inspired a prosthetic exoskeleton for humans: The lightweight contraption is outfitted with a spring and clutch that take the impact off the user’s calf muscle. In experiments, a person wearing the braces while walking expended 10 percent…
Q: What is the "dark side" of the moon? A: The short answer? It's a misnomer. A cool-sounding misnomer! But a misnomer. Assuming they aren't talking about the Pink Floyd album or the French mockumentary, people who say "the dark side of the moon" are almost always referring to the moon's far side—which, despite pointing…
Early last spring, as flu season hit its peak, a woman checked into a Houston hospital with all the familiar symptoms: fever, headache, a grating cough. A chest x-ray revealed an infection engulfing her lungs. Doctors hooked her up to an antibiotic drip, collected blood to be processed and cultured in the hospital’s lab, and…
A long time ago, a star we now call the sun ignited. It did not consume all the material available in its gestational cloud; the leftover gas and dust swirled around it like a ballroom dancer’s skirt. The dusty leftovers started to coalesce in some spots, forming larger rocky objects. After millions of years, the…
The new microscope in Philipp Keller's laboratory looks nothing like a microscope. At least, not to the untrained eye. Tangled cords connect the components mounted to its metal base to a bank of ports on an overhead shelf. An important-looking cube built from tinted panes of acrylic sits at its center. And flexible silver ducting—the…
It’s easy to watch a baby finally learn to walk after hours upon hours of trial and error and think, OK, good work, but do you want a medal or something? Well, maybe only a childless person like me would think that, so credit where credit is due: It’s supremely difficult for animals like ourselves…
Robots are the most powerful blank slate humans have ever created. Want a helpful robot? No problem. Want a mean one? Sure, if that’s what you’re into. A robot is a mirror held up not just to its creator, but to our whole species: What we make of the machine reflects what we are. That…
This is not a story about how the polar vortex is bad—bad for the human body, bad for public transportation, bad for virtually everything in its path. This is a story about how one being among us is actually taking advantage of the historic cold snap: Cassie the bipedal robot. While humans suffer through the…