[THUNDER SOUND] The chance that a human being like you will be struck by lightning is miniscule. But what if you’re a tall tree in the tropics? “Lightning happens in milliseconds. We can’t predict where it’s going to be and we generally can’t find it after it’s happened, so what a hard thing to study.” […]
Last week Elon Musk’s brain tech start-up Neuralink unveiled the latest version of its neural implant technology. In characteristic Musk style, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla announced the news during a widely hyped livestreamed event in which he showed off the implant’s functionality in several pigs. The device is about the size of […]
The alert caught Zsuzsanna Márka’s attention immediately. Whenever the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European counterpart Virgo detect a potential gravitational wave event, an automatic notice is quickly dispatched to members of the collaboration. Soon after receiving the notification for such an event on May 21, 2019, Márka, an astrophysicist at Columbia […]
Every year, more than 4,000 foreign graduates of international medical schools come to the United States for a residency program. They rarely return home to serve the countries that raised and educated them. Meanwhile, more than 2,000 graduates from U.S. medical schools each year are blocked from becoming doctors because there are not enough residency […]
The endeavor known as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has long relied on radio telescopes to listen for broadcasts from potential alien callers. Yet in an expansive galaxy such as ours, how can we ever be sure that we have tuned in to the right station? A new model simulating contact across the Milky […]
In early August, there was a lot of hubbub around a study that purportedly showed that wearing a neck gaiter, the sleeve-like face covering popular especially among runners, might be worse at stemming the spread of COVID-19 than not wearing a mask at all. Headlines popped up spreading the news, sparking conversations far and wide […]
An orientation to our special issue Advertisement A few years after the first issue of this magazine was published, a New Jersey carpenter found traces of gold in California’s American River, setting in motion a Gold Rush in which some 100,000 prospectors flooded the Sierra Nevada seeking their fortune. Rufus Porter, inventor, muralist and founder […]
In 1835 French philosopher Auguste Comte asserted that nobody would ever know what the stars were made of. “We understand the possibility of determining their shapes, their distances, their sizes and their movements,” he wrote, “whereas we would never know how to study by any means their chemical composition, or their mineralogical structure, and, even […]
Fully functional quantum computers and a new quantum industry may appear much sooner than many have anticipated—thanks to five new National Quantum Information Science Research centers just announced by the U.S. Department of Energy. This latest development in the recently launched National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December 2018, comes with $625 million […]
On a warm, mid-June afternoon a concerned mother brought her 11-year-old daughter, who had a high fever and a severe bellyache, to the emergency room at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, R.I. After doctors ruled out the usual suspects for the symptoms, such as bacterial infections and appendicitis, they started to seriously consider a diagnosis […]