Catching Up With Dawn, the Massive Spacecraft Exploring the Asteroid Belt
It’d be hard to invent a more Star Wars-esque spacecraft than Dawn. It’s 65 feet from tip to tip. It’s exploring the asteroid belt. And it’s got an ion drive, for Pete’s sake. But Dawn also has a serious job to do. Launched in 2007, it’s been investigating Ceres and Vesta, two mysterious protoplanets in…
Einstein’s Little-Known Passion Project? A Refrigerator
Many people know that work on nuclear weapons enabled the development of the first electronic computers. But it’s no less true that the humble refrigerator, in a roundabout way, enabled the development of the first atom bomb. While reading the newspaper one morning in 1926, Albert Einstein nearly choked on his eggs. An entire family…
The Archaeologists Saving Miami's History From the Sea
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Hurricane Irma sprinted toward Miami-Dade County, Jeff Ransom couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t just worried about gusts shattering windows, or sheets of rain drowning the highway—that’s far from unusual near his home in Broward County, where extreme weather verges on routine, and patches of U.S.…
The Education of Brett the Robot
The Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks—aka Brett, of course—holds one of those puzzle cubes for kids in one hand and with the other tries to jam a rectangular peg into a hole. It is unhappily, hilariously toddler-like in its struggles. The peg strikes the cube with a clunk, and Brett pulls back,…
Physicists Capture the Elusive Neutrino Smacking Into an Atom's Core
Every second of every day, trillions of tiny particles called neutrinos are raining down on your head. But unlike raindrops, hailstones, or bird poop, these elementary particles go right through your body—and through Earth’s crust, mantle, and core—at nearly the speed of light. After they sail through the entire planet, they fly silently back into…
How Climate Change Denial Threatens National Security
In a cramped meeting room Wednesday on Capitol Hill, House Democrats hosted a roundtable to discuss climate change with several national security experts. In attendance were two former admirals, a retired general, a once-ambassador to Nigeria, and the former undersecretary to the Secretary of Defense. Over several hours of questioning, they described how climate change…
US Farms Could Suffer as the Arctic Heats Up
Planet Earth is getting hotter. One of the more confusing aspects of this global trend is the persistent, undeniable discomfort of winter. Even more confusing is when that chilly weather continues into April, May, or godforbidpleasenot June. This might clear the confusion (but probably not the frustration): Those colder temperatures in the first half of…
Puerto Rico’s Slow-Motion Medical Disaster
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases. Roads are blocked, supplies are stuck at the ports, and only 49 of…
Just How Much Food Do Cities Squander?
This story originally appeared on Citylab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last winter, teams of researchers in three US cities donned goggles, gloves, and respirators, tore into bags of other people’s household garbage, and then pawed though the contents. Separating slimy banana peels from clumps of coffee grounds was dirty work, but it had a laudable…
It's Past Time for You To Ditch That Fancy Scientific Calculator
Bruce Sherwood, the co-author of Matter and Interactions, had a question for me when I saw him at the American Association of Physics Teachers conference not long ago: "What calculator do you use?" If this seems odd, well, it was a conference of physics teachers. I responded with something along the lines of "I don't…