The IUD That Gives Women Options
In a taupe-walled exam room at the Women’s Community Clinic in San Francisco, lead clinician Lisa Mihaly plucks a small laminated card from a cabinet. Tethered to the card are three T-shaped IUDs, or intrauterine devices—forms of birth control that are, as the name implies, inserted into a woman’s uterus to prevent pregnancy for up…
23andMe Is Digging Through Your Data for a Parkinson's Cure
In 2006, when personal genomics company 23andMe launched from its offices in California, it charged $1,000 for a home spit kit, and its top competitors were DeCodeMe and Navigenics. If you’ve never heard of those last two, that’s because they never made it out of the aughts. And for a while there, no one thought…
You’d Have to Click a Mouse 10 Million Times to Burn One Calorie
My daughter has spent the past week telling me, "Did you know that every time you click a mouse, you burn one calorie?" OK, this sounds pretty cool, but I'm a bit skeptical. One calorie seems like quite a bit for one mouse click. Rather than dismiss it out of hand, I will attack this…
Giant Antarctic Icebergs and Crushing Existential Dread
I went to Antarctica 20 years ago, and I didn’t care about ice shelves. I noticed one at last when the blinding white of the ice, struck up against an abidingly black ocean, made me understand at last why the penguins all around me and the orcas occasionally surfacing a few dozen feet away had…
METI's First Message Is a Music Lesson for Aliens
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,…
SpaceX Lifts Off as Kennedy Space Center Braces for Hurricane Irma
On the eve of Hurricane Irma's landfall, a scene out of a dystopian sci-fi novel unfolded around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. There, in the path of the unprecedented storm, SpaceX managed to launch a secret uncrewed spacecraft for the Air Force and bring its Falcon 9 back home for a ground landing. Meanwhile, just a…
Scientists Are Rewriting the History of Photosynthesis
Researchers have caught their best glimpse yet into the origins of photosynthesis, one of nature’s most momentous innovations. By taking near-atomic, high-resolution X-ray images of proteins from primitive bacteria, investigators at Arizona State University and Pennsylvania State University have extrapolated what the earliest version of photosynthesis might have looked like nearly 3.5 billion years ago.…
What Ligers, Grolar Bears, and Mules Show Scientists About Evolution
In 2006, a hunter shot what he thought was a polar bear in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Closer examination, however, revealed brown patches on its white fur, uncharacteristically long claws and a slightly hunched back. The creature was in fact a hybrid, its mother a polar bear, its father a grizzly. Although this cross…
Bored With Your Fitbit? These Cancer Researchers Aren't
If you’re trying to get in shape and you want a tiny, wrist-bound computer to help you do it, you have more options than ever before. Fitness trackers come in all shapes, colors, and price tags, with newfangled sensors and features to stand out to customers. But for doctors and scientists studying how exercise can…
Container Ships Use Super-Dirty Fuel. That Needs to Change
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The platform overlooking the Panama Canal’s Pacific exit is buzzing with energy on a muggy October afternoon. Tourists cram together, jostling for the best views of the blue container ship gliding by in the gray-green water below. The ship’s crewmembers wave from aboard the 690-foot-long…