EveAim

In May 2015, S. Joshua Swamidass, a computational biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, received a curious email: would he like to try advising a theological seminary? The note was from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit organization that was spinning up a program to send scientists into religious institutions.…

The distant future of designer babies might not seem so distant after all. The last year has been full of news about genetic engineering—much of it driven by the the cut-and-paste technique called Crispr. And at the top of the list: news that Crispr could modify human embryos, correcting a relatively common, often deadly mutation.…

Few people would be foolish enough to go toe-to-toe with Evan Ungar in a jumping contest, but on a recent Tuesday I stood beside a length of measuring tape, hung vertically from the wall of a CrossFit gym in the middle of San Francisco, to do just that. I had no delusions of out-leaping Ungar,…

You're sitting in physics class, working on a traditional problem involving forces and acceleration, when you start to wonder where these terms even came from. Were they just dreamed up to bring anguish to students, or do they have a deeper connection to reality? The study of physics, of course, is a type of science—and…

In 1911 and 1912, an Austrian physicist named Victor Hess took to the sky in a series of risky hot-air balloon trips—for science. Down on land, researchers had been registering signals of mysterious energetic particles on their instruments. They didn’t know what the signals were or where they came from. So in progressively thinning air,…

The red imported fire ant is one of the world’s most invasive species. Its sting delivers a burning poison that kills living tissue. Together groups of ants devour deer fawns, baby birds, reptiles, and almost any other source of protein they can get their mandibles on. They form acres of crisscrossing tunnels with thousands of…

On Friday, US senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced legislation to legalize marijuana at the federal level—a bill called SR 420, of course. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have so far expanded access to weed in some form. But with federal law lagging behind, the states have landed in a tangle of rules that…

SpaceX launched its 20th rocket of the year just two days after lofting a record 64 satellites into orbit. On this flight, a brand-new Falcon 9 hoisted a Dragon spacecraft into orbit, bound for the International Space Station. But unlike Monday’s textbook touchdown, today’s landing didn’t quite go as planned. The Falcon’s first stage, the…

I've seen several quotes that say something like this: "Everything I learned in college can now be found online for free." Is that true or false? Well, it depends, of course, on what you did in college—but I hope it's false. Let's start with some examples that seem to support this idea. I will use…

Gravity is pretty complicated if you think about it. The motion of a ball falling on the surface of the Earth is caused by the same interaction as the moon orbiting the Earth. That's crazy. It's even crazier to realize that humans figured out that these two motions (falling ball and moon) are from the…