Month: March 2019

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018,…

Late last night Boston Dynamics dropped a new video of its robot dog, SpotMini, in action. It walks up some stairs (no big deal—it’s done that before) and then through some corridors, periodically extending its camera-equipped arm to survey bits of a construction site. Then it walks backwards down some stairs and through a doorway…

Sometimes a search for one thing presents the chance to look for something else. If you're like me, that something else is usually something small: Rummaging in the couch cushions for the TV remote might prompt you to dig for spare change. Two birds, one stone, etc. But if you're astronomer Scott Sheppard, the second…

It wasn’t a whodunnit. Last year’s unprecedented rainfall and flooding in Houston were the proximate result of Hurricane Harvey, a massive storm born northeast of Venezuela and reborn in the Gulf of Mexico, where it rapidly intensified, made landfall over Houston, and then stayed—parked, as it were, for five days. LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide…

Tadashi Tokieda lives in a world in which ordinary objects do extraordinary things. Jars of rice refuse to roll down ramps. Strips of paper slip past solid obstacles. Balls swirling inside a bowl switch direction when more balls join them. Quanta Magazine About Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication…

If you think about the history of humans (disclaimer, I'm a human) you could make the argument that history is about the quest for energy. Not just any old energy, we want it cheap or maybe even free. If you have nearly limitless energy, you can do pretty much anything. You can extract the materials…

Evolution is a trip. On the one hand, it’s a seemingly simple mechanism—those best fitted to their environment have more babies, while less fit individuals don’t reproduce as much, and their genes filter out of the system. But on the other hand (or paw or claw or talon), it has given rise to an astounding…

Across the Midwest today, hundreds of schools and businesses are closed, dozens of flights and trains have been canceled, and the governors of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan have declared states of emergency as a bone-chilling, breath-taking Polar Vortex bears down on the region. While I slept in Minneapolis, overnight wind chills in the city topped…

For decades Mars has teased scientists with whispers of water's presence. Valleys and basins and rivers long dry point to the planet's hydrous past. The accumulation of condensation on surface landers and the detection of vast subterranean ice deposits suggest the stuff still lingers in gaseous and solid states. But liquid water has proved more…

Like a lot of people, you probably spend a fair bit of time worrying about how much time you spend on your phone. Who doesn't these days? But what really concerns you is the youth. What is all that swiping and snapping and gramming doing to their still-developing brains? Surely somebody's studied this—the effect of…