Tag: SCIENCE

You wake up at 6 am feeling achy and chilled. Unsure if you’re sick or just sleep-deprived, you reach for a thermometer. It beeps at 99°F, so you groan and roll out of bed and get ready for work. Because that’s not a fever. Is it? Yes, it is. Forget everything you know about normal…

This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Corn farmers in Eastern Nebraska have long claimed weather patterns are changing, but in an unexpected way. “It’s something I’ve talked about with my dad and grandad many times,” says fifth-generation corn farmer Brandon Hunnicutt. Along with his father and…

It's a brilliant idea: Put solar panels on a drone so it doesn't need a battery. Without a battery, you could fly a drone as long as the sun keeps shining. It's awesome (assuming your motives are pure). That's exactly what students at the National University of Singapore did. But if you watch the video,…

Andrew Rubin sits with a Surface tablet, watching a white skeletal hand open and close on its screen. Rubin’s right hand was amputated a year ago, but he follows these motions with a special device fitted to his upper arm. Electrodes on his arm connect to a box that records the patterns of nerve signals…

Update: After delays, this launch successfully took place on Monday, Dec. 3. On Sunday, SpaceX plans to hoist into space the largest cosmic carpool to depart from US soil. The California-based aerospace company is flexing its ridesharing muscles in a carefully choreographed orbital ballet as its flagship rocket—the Falcon 9—prepares to launch 64 small satellites…

When you wish upon a star (or an asteroid or a comet) you are wishing on plasma, ice, dust, rock, on an object that exists, for real, so far away and moving so fast that no living human will likely ever have direct contact with it. (Well, generally.) But you’re also wishing on a metaphor.…

You know those sexual enhancement dietary supplements for sale at gas stations and markets across the country? Beware, they might actually be viagra. Or steroids. Or an antidepressant. Many supposed dietary supplements for weight loss, erectile dysfunction, and muscle building may contain actual pharmaceuticals—but you likely have no way of knowing what's in them. Between…

When Geoffrey von Maltzahn was first pitching farmers to try out his startup’s special seeds, he sometimes told them, half-acknowledging his own hyperbole, that “if we’re right, you shouldn’t just see results in the field, you should be able to see them from outer space.” As the co-founder of a company called Indigo Ag, von…

Francesco Ricci stands at a table covered in a tangle of wires and tiny mirrors. “Here is where everything happens,” he says, pointing to a metal cylinder roughly the size of a cookie tin. A graduate student at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Ricci is showing me a device he’s built to survey…

I'm oddly attracted to The Titan Games. I think we can all agree that this is the newest incarnation of the popular '90s show American Gladiators. It's not the theatrics that I enjoy, it's the crazy competitions. As you can imagine, there's a bunch of cool physics to talk about for some of these events.…