Tag: SCIENCE

The first time I used a multimeter was in my younger years. I was really into remote-controlled cars—but you couldn't just buy one and start driving. You had to buy a kit and a controller separately and put the whole thing together. My car was powered by a battery and an electric motor instead of…

You don't see this very often—a 350-foot artificial waterfall pouring out of a skyscraper. It looks cool, but it also looks expensive. Gushing water isn't free: You not only have to get the H2O, but you need energy to bring it to the top of the building. This is why the building only runs this…

When we design a skyscraper we expect it will perform to specification: that the tower will support so much weight and be able to withstand an earthquake of a certain strength. But with one of the most important technologies of the modern world, we’re effectively building blind. We play with different designs, tinker with different…

The Monolithic black rectangle on stage with luminous, bouncing blue dots at eye level was not Project Debater, IBM’s argumentative artificial intelligence. It was just something for an audience to look at while a voice—is it redundant to call an AI’s synthesized voice “disembodied”?—projected over the sound system of the Yerba Buena Center for the…

On Friday, Earth will engulf the moon in its shadow and create the longest total lunar eclipse in this century: a full 103 minutes. The next one that comes close won’t happen until 2029. And this eclipse’s running time won’t be matched until 2123. In a nice little cosmic reminder that nobody is the center…

Michael introduced itself to North America with 155-mile-per-hour gusts of wind and a barometric pressure of 919 millibars, the third-strongest hurricane to ever make continental US landfall. It was a monster, and it stayed a monster as it rolled through Georgia and then on toward the Carolinas. And monsters are made, not born. “The most…

You know what happens when I get a new toy? Physics happens. I can't stop myself, it's just the way I am. In this case, the toy is a DJI Spark drone (it was a birthday present). I've always wanted a drone that could do some cool stuff. The one I had before was basically…

Last month, the US Department of Agriculture and FDA convened to debate meat: what it is and isn't, and if plant-based or lab-grown products like those made by Impossible Burger and Memphis Meats should be called meat. Lab-grown meat is still months from market, but vegetarian meats already have the poultry and cattle industries in…

Rejoice! The machines won’t be taking over the world anytime soon, because doing the most basic of tasks still confounds them. I mean, have you thought lately about how hard it is to pick a ripe bell pepper? Fine, me neither. But researchers in Israel and Europe certainly have. They're developing a robot called Sweeper…

In California three major fires—the Camp Fire in the north and Hill Fire and Woolsey Fire in the south—have raged on a scale the state has never seen before. The Camp Fire in particular was the most destructive and deadly wildfire in California history by far: It has virtually obliterated the 27,000-person town of Paradise,…