Originally published in March 1961 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “If a future experiment should demonstrate that antiparticles have a negative gravitational mass, it will deliver a mortal blow to the entire relativistic theory of gravity by disproving the principle of equivalence. An antiapple might fall up in a true gravitational field, but it could hardly […]
The federal government has encouraged health centers to delay nonessential surgeries while weighing the severity of patients’ conditions and the availability of personal protective equipment, beds and staffing at hospitals. People with cancer are among those at high risk of complications if infected with the new coronavirus. It’s estimated 1.8 million people will be diagnosed […]
If everyone had to rely on flash memory—the data-storage system used in memory cards and thumb drives—the amount of information that the world is estimated to produce by 2040 would exceed the planet’s expected supply of microchip-grade silicon by up to 100 times. To prevent such a crisis, researchers have been exploring a storage material […]
Margaret Burbidge, an astronomer who made vital contributions to our understanding of what happens inside stars and who worked on instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope, has died at 100. The University of California, San Diego, where Burbidge had worked from 1962 to 1988, announced her death on Twitter Monday (April 6), noting that she had died on […]
A viral outbreak has killed more than 6,500 children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and is still spreading through the country. The foe isn’t the feared coronavirus, which has only just reached the DRC. It’s an old, familiar and underestimated adversary: measles. Cases began to spike here in October 2018. Children became […]
Add U.S. coal to the list of industries threatened by the novel coronavirus. Part of its problem is conditions that precede the pandemic. U.S. coal plants are an aging bunch. Weak electricity demand has only intensified competition with gas and renewables. The weather has been a drag on American miners, too; a warm winter helped […]
It is lunchtime on a Sunday in January. At a long table inside a delicatessen in midtown Manhattan, a group of young people sit together over sandwiches and salads. Most of them have their phones out. One boy wears headphones around his neck. But there is less conversation than you might expect from a typical […]
Living through the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all now seeing the consequences of a failure to plan ahead when an event is predictable but the timing is uncertain. The inattention paid by America’s political leadership to the recommendations, or even the existence, of the Pandemic Influenza Plan prepared in 2017 is having tragic consequences as […]
Governor Andrew Cuomo has warned that New York State is running out of time to get enough ventilators to treat the sickest coronavirus patients. Without them, vastly more New Yorkers could die. But the number of ventilators is not the only bottleneck: hospitals around the country are worried that a surge in COVID-19 patients will […]
The prospect of using the popular genome-editing tool CRISPR to treat a host of diseases in people is moving closer to reality. Medical applications of CRISPR–Cas9 had a banner year in 2019. The first results trickled in from trials testing the tool in people, and more trials launched. In the coming years, researchers are looking […]