Wanna See Around Corners? Better Get Yourself a Laser
You can’t see the bunny, but the picosecond laser certainly can. In a lab at Stanford, engineers have set up a weird contraption, hiding a toy bunny behind a T-shaped wall. And their complex system of computation and rapidly firing lasers can see around that corner. So, too, could the self-driving cars of the future.…
Whisper From the First Stars Sets Off Loud Dark Matter Debate
The news about the first stars in the universe always seemed a little off. Last July, Rennan Barkana, a cosmologist at Tel Aviv University, received an email from one of his longtime collaborators, Judd Bowman. Bowman leads a small group of five astronomers who built and deployed a radio telescope in remote western Australia. Its…
How a Uranium Hunter Sniffs Out Nuclear Weapons
When geologist and nuclear security researcher Rodney Ewing left the University of Michigan for Stanford in 2014, he left some of his belongings back in the Midwest. Hundreds of his belongings, actually. All of them radioactive. He wasn't trying to poison anybody: It was a collection of minerals from around the world—some unearthed himself, some…
SpaceX Is About to Launch Its Final Block 4 Falcon
SpaceX is swiftly moving toward achieving its ultimate goal of rapid reusability: flying a single booster twice within a 24-hour time period. It’s a goal that Elon Musk says SpaceX will achieve later this year—but in order to make good on that promise, the company must first say goodbye to its hardest-working rocket yet. That…
The Second Coming of Ultrasound
Before Pierre Curie met the chemist Marie Sklodowska; before they married and she took his name; before he abandoned his physics work and moved into her laboratory on Rue Lhomond where they would discover the radioactive elements polonium and radium, Curie discovered something called piezoelectricity. Some materials, he found—like quartz and certain kinds of salts…
One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech
Ruth Nall is a talented talker. Always has been. When she was a child, her mother taught her to enunciate her words when she spoke, which she did often and at length. So wordy was she that, in grammar school, her friends nicknamed her "Yakky Roo," partly for her ace Yakky Doodle impersonation, but also…
Watch SpaceX Launch the First of Its Global Internet Satellites
Update: On Wednesday, SpaceX delayed its Vandenberg launch due to strong winds; the targeted launch time is now 6:17 AM Pacific on Thursday, February 22. Last week, SpaceX realized a decade-long dream of successfully launching the most powerful rocket in the world. The Falcon Heavy’s achievement, marked resoundingly with thunderous sonic booms following twin booster…
The Physics of a Puzzling Perpetual Motion Machine
Perpetual motion—it's fun to say that. For some people, perpetual motion machines hold the secret to everlasting free energy that will save the world. To them, it's a machine that is just beyond our grasp. If only we could tweak our design just a little bit, it would work. To others (like me), perpetual motion…
Trump's Plan to Redefine Gender Makes No Scientific Sense
What’s supposed to be simple is, you got a sperm and you got an egg—each one carrying roughly half the genes of the person who made it. They fuse. You get an embryo, and it’s destined to be male or female. So, not so simple. Sex (broadly, the biology of reproduction) and gender (broadly, one’s…
Robots Can't Hold Stuff Very Well, But You Can Help
Imagine, for a moment, the simple act of picking up a playing card from a table. You have a couple of options: Maybe you jam your fingernail under it for leverage, or drag it over the edge of the table. Now imagine a robot trying to do the same thing. Tricky: Most robots don’t have…