Tag: SCIENCE

It's been almost two weeks since Hurricane Harvey began its assault on southeastern Texas, and communities throughout the region have set off down the long, hard road to recovery. FEMA administrator Brock Long and Texas governor Greg Abbott both said last week that it will take years to rebuild homes, salvage businesses, shore up infrastructure,…

Robots seem so far away. We’re so many years from Jetsons-esque machines that live among us and wash our dishes and fold our clothes. But the reality is the robots have arrived—you’re just not noticing them. Take a robot called Tug, for instance. No, Tug can't talk philosophy with you, and Tug can't do your…

Genes carry the information that make you you. So it's fitting that, when sequenced and stored in a computer, your genome takes up gobs of memory—up to 150 gigabytes. Multiply that across all the people who have gotten sequenced, and you're looking at some serious storage issues. If that's not enough, mining those genomes for…

Now, the first thing you should know about a bomb cyclone is it’s just a name—and unlike a sharknado, it’s not a literal one. The very real scientific term describes a storm that suddenly intensifies following a rapid drop in atmospheric pressure. Bombing out, or “bombogenesis,” is when a cyclone’s central pressure drops 24 millibars…

Tromsø, Norway is usually a destination for northern lights lovers—tourists and scientists alike. But on October 16, the small city north of the Arctic Circle took on a new cosmic role. A radio telescope in the city, a hotspot for aurora investigators, became the origin point of a transmission aimed at the exoplanet GJ 273b,…

Have you ever witnessed a total solar eclipse? Usually when I give a lecture, only a couple of people in an audience of several hundred people raise their hands when I ask that question. A few others respond tentatively, saying, “I think I saw one.” That’s like a woman saying, “I think I once gave…

Silicon Valley runs on two things: obscene amounts of cash and the tales people tell about who they are. Which is perhaps why the Bay Area has rapidly become ground zero for people pursuing one of the oldest mythologies in human history—the legend of everlasting life. Well, maybe not ever lasting life exactly, but vastly-expanded-and-improved…

In late October 2012, as Hurricane Sandy barreled toward New York and New Jersey, barrels of information from the National Weather Service, NASA, and elsewhere inundated the White House. As the storm picked up, experts at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, started closely monitoring storm track modeling from NOAA, satellite imagery…

When you wander around the internet, sometimes you can find some crazy stuff. Check this out: It's an old account of a weird phenomena created by giant plastic sheets at 3M Corporation. In short, these fast-moving, electrically-charged plastic sheets created some type of effect that prevented humans from passing through an invisible wall. It sounds…

The total solar eclipse on Monday, August 21 is shaping up to be an Earth-shaking event, if the crowds getting into position five days early are any indication. But while carloads of chasers are queuing up to see the totality, some are skipping that step and meeting the eclipse more or less half way—from the…