Tag: SCIENCE

Sarah Jamie Lewis was thinking about an internet-connected cock ring. As a computer scientist, she could understand the nominal use case. It was studded with accelerometers and other sensors. People with penises were supposed to put it on before having penetrative sex and record things like thrust length, speed, overall time of session … the…

To hear Andrew Przybylski tell it, the American 2016 presidential election is what really inflamed the public's anxiety over the seductive power of screens. (A suspicion that big companies with opaque inner workings are influencing your thoughts and actions will do that.) "Psychologists and sociologists have obviously been studying and debating about screens and their…

A decade ago, Pablo Graiver was working as a VP at Kayak, the online airfare aggregator, when he sat down to dinner with an old friend—a heart surgeon from his home country of Argentina. The talk turned to how tech was doing more to save folks a few bucks on a flight to Rome than…

NASA has to start protecting planets better. The international treaty governing space—there is one—and the laws and regulations that follow it date back to the Cold War. That was before scientists knew about the oceans on moons around other planets, before they knew about how tough microorganisms get here on Earth (and so maybe in…

On March 4, an embryologist at Pacific Fertility Center was doing a routine walk-through of the clinic’s collection of waist-high steel tanks, each one filled with thousands of liquid nitrogen-bathed vials of frozen sperm, eggs, and embryos. The San Francisco-based clinic offers cryogenic cold storage and in vitro fertilization services for patients throughout the Bay…

Scientists, environmentalists, and anyone who lives within a hundred miles of the winding Mississippi River will tell you—have told you, repeatedly, for 150 years—that efforts to tame the river have only made it more feral. But scientists would like more than intuition, more than a history of 18th-century river level gauges and discharge stations, more…

So you've decided you need a break from your smartphone. You're not looking to do anything drastic, like revert to one of those old school Nokia bricks, because, let's face it, having a supercomputer in your pocket comes in handy. But you've grown wary of how you use the thing—the way it keeps you up…

I don't know very much about bobsleds—but I know quite a bit about physics. Here is my very brief summary of the bobsled event in the winter Olympics. Some humans get in a sled. The sled goes down an incline that is covered in ice. The humans need to do two things: push really fast…

Attendance at this weekend’s March for Science is expected to be lower than last year's, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across the country to protest the Trump administration and its science policies. Many anti-Trump protesters say their attention is now focused on other forms of action, such as filing lawsuits…

Maybe you have watched Stranger Things but maybe you haven't. I've seen it, and I thought it was great—and not just because there's lots of science in it. Don't worry, I'm not going to talk about multiple universes or quantum tunneling. Instead I am going to talk about salt. Small spoiler alert (but not really…