Tag: SCIENCE

When you think of automation, you probably think of the assembly line, a dramatic dance of robot arms with nary a human laborer in sight. But that’s child’s play. The grandest, most disruptive automation revolution has played out in agriculture. First with horses and plows, and eventually with burly combines—technologies that have made farming exponentially…

Twenty years ago, WIRED made a bold prediction: Cable modems are on the way out. "Things are looking bad for the cable industry: Careful study has shown that nearly the entire cable network would need to be replaced to make it suitable for two-way data traffic, and satellite services have been stealing away cable's television…

Last week, when a British reporter broke the news that American scientists had used Crispr to edit the first human embryos on US soil, he wasted no time in cutting to the big, juicy, highly controversial chase. “One Giant Step For Designer Babies” ran the headline on Steve Connor’s world exclusive in the i, a…

Sometimes a cat will fall out of a window or balcony—a byproduct, no doubt, of a cat doing cat things. If you have a house cat, your feline's propensity for aerial shenanigans probably doesn't worry you that much: Cats falling from low windows can use their righting reflex to land on their feet like nothing…

The Navier-Stokes equations capture in a few succinct terms one of the most ubiquitous features of the physical world: the flow of fluids. The equations, which date to the 1820s, are today used to model everything from ocean currents to turbulence in the wake of an airplane to the flow of blood in the heart.…

The three best male marathon runners of their generation, racing on the fastest, flattest course in the world, in a faceoff between Nike and Adidas, with the distinct possibility of a huge new world record: the men’s elite race at tomorrow’s Berlin Marathon has much to recommend it. The likelihood, however, is that most American…

At the Seeing Eye guide dog facility in Morristown, New Jersey, puppies spend the first three weeks of their life in plastic kiddie pools—the blue kind, speckled with colorful undersea cartoons. Lined with fleece and towels, the wading pools are perfectly sized for a litter of soft, tiny puppies and their mama to lounge and…

When US troops return home from a tour of duty, each person finds their own way to resume their daily lives. But they also, every one, complete a written survey called the Post-Deployment Health Assessment. It’s designed to evaluate service members’ psychiatric health and ferret out symptoms of conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress, so…

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It’s a sunny October day on the outskirts of the west German town of Bottrop. A quiet, two-lane road leads me through farm pasture to a cluster of anonymous, low-lying buildings set among the trees. The highway hums in the distance. Looming above everything else…

A quarter century ago, Steven Spielberg created velociraptors that were viscerally compelling enough to toe-claw tap dance straight into our nightmares. Last year, the VFX team behind Rogue One gave us a posthumously CGI-reanimated Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, and that inspired a different and unintended kind of unease. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s famous…