Why Do You Feel Lighter at the Top of a Ferris Wheel?
Here is what I like to do (for fun). Take a classic physics problem and go over the solution. After that, I take it just one step further to see what happens. Today, let's start with this problem (you can find a version of this in just about every physics textbook). Of course the first…
A Major Victory for the Impossible Burger, the Veggie ‘Meat’ That Bleeds
The Impossible Burger seems too good to be true—an entirely plant-based “meat” that looks and smells and tastes like beef (at least, according to some folks). Hell, it even bleeds like meat. That’s thanks to a yeast modified to carry genes for the soy leghemoglobin protein, which you’d normally find in the roots of soy…
Why Scientists Turned This Taxidermy Bird Into a Robot
This would be a whole lot harder if biologist Gail Patricelli didn’t have an excellent sense of humor. Because I’m expected to sit here like a professional and not guffaw at her invention: A real-life fembot, which is probably not what you’re imagining but instead a taxidermied bird stuck on wheels. It tears around a…
The Physics—and Physicality—of Extreme Juggling
Among the (many, many) things you probably do not know about juggling is the fact that it is, at times, a physically grueling act. It's something I certainly failed to appreciate before meeting Alex Barron. We recently met at a squash court in Burbank, California so I could watch him practice his craft. There, the…
An Anti-Aging Pundit Solves a Decades-Old Math Problem
In 1950 Edward Nelson, then a student at the University of Chicago, asked the kind of deceptively simple question that can give mathematicians fits for decades. Imagine, he said, a graph—a collection of points connected by lines. Ensure that all of the lines are exactly the same length, and that everything lies on the plane.…
What Is Meat, Anyway? Lab-Grown Food Sets Off a Debate
You don’t typically find philosophical bickering at an FDA public meeting. But then again, this was no ordinary public meeting. On Thursday, the agency convened a scrum on so-called cultured meat—animal tissue grown in a lab, derived from just a handful of cells taken from a cow or chicken or fish. Experts, lab-meat companies, and…
Lab-Grown Meat Is Coming, Whether You Like It or Not
Standing in a kitchen in San Francisco, in a state where foie gras is illegal, Josh Tetrick cuts into the pale gray pate anyway and smears it on a thin piece of bread. “You prettied it up a little bit,” he says to a bearded chef, pointing his butter knife at the plate, “what’s going…
The Struggles of a $40 Million Nutrition Science Crusade
Editor’s note: Since this story's publication WIRED has made several clarifications and corrections, which are described at the bottom of this piece. On Monday night Gary Taubes will begin his second transatlantic trip in a week—from Zurich to Aspen—then eventually head back to Oakland, which he calls home. The crusading science journalist best known for…
Star-Swallowing Black Holes Reveal Secrets in Exotic Light Shows
Black holes, befitting their name and general vibe, are hard to find and harder to study. You can eavesdrop on small ones from the gravitational waves that echo through space when they collide—but that technique is new, and still rare. You can produce laborious maps of stars flitting around the black hole at the center…
Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform
In some ways, Synthego looks like any other Silicon Valley startup. Inside its beige business park facilities, a five-minute drive from Facebook HQ, rows of nondescript black server racks whir and blink and vent. But inside the metal shelving, the company isn’t pushing around ones and zeros to keep the internet running. It’s making molecules…