As a 16-year-old boy, Albert Einstein imagined chasing after a beam of light in the vacuum of space. He mused on that vision for years, turning it over in his mind, asking questions about the relation between himself and the beam. Those mental investigations eventually led him to his special theory of relativity. Such thought […]
When Allison Vanore stepped onto a plane last week, she was shocked to find scores of empty seats. Vanore, a 37-year-old television producer, had an entire row to herself on the United Airlines flight last Thursday from Newark to Los Angeles. Out of roughly 200 seats, only 20 or 30 were filled. “It felt completely […]
Ventilator shortages are looming, and unemployment in the United States has surged to the highest levels since the Great Depression. As doctors make triage decisions and employers consider whom to lay off next, will people of color find themselves on the losing side of these decisions? It will take time for the full effects of […]
Originally published in March 1951 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “What fabrics best insulate the body against the loss of heat? Tests demonstrate that an open-weave cotton fabric has the smallest insulation value. A dense cotton cloth gives somewhat more protection, and wool still more. But insulation value declines greatly when fabrics are damp; for wet […]
In the beginning, there was matter and antimatter, and then there was only matter. Why? This question is one of the defining mysteries of physics. For decades theorists have come up with potential solutions, most involving the existence of extra particles beyond the known species in the universe. Last week scientists announced tantalizing findings that […]
A new book captures the pioneering, propaganda-infused visions of mid-20th-century Soviet space exploration Outlook, issue 4, 1976, ‘Yuri Gagarin: Let’s Go!’, illustration by S. Alimov. The first track on the magazine’s accompanying flexi-disc record was a recording by Gagarin titled ‘Planet Earth is Beautiful’. Credit: Phaidon and the Moscow Design Museum Advertisement The future isn’t […]
Mark Denison began hunting for a drug to treat COVID-19 almost a decade before the contagion, driven by a novel coronavirus, devastated the world this year. Denison is not a prophet, but he is a virologist and an expert on the often deadly coronavirus family, members of which also caused the SARS outbreak in 2002 […]
The current COVID-19 pandemic underscores how unprepared we humans are in fighting zoonotic diseases: pathogens that originate in wildlife and jump to humans. Human immune systems are equally unprepared for drug-resistant diseases that jump from plants to humans. As we work to control and treat the current pandemic, we must simultaneously be thinking one step […]
On April 30, 2018, the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō crater on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano suddenly collapsed—marking the starting point for its largest eruption in at least 200 years. The lava lake inside another crater drained into the ground. Roughly 60,000 earthquakes struck the region. New fissures ripped open along the volcano’s slopes and poured approximately one billion […]
Black rhinos have terrible eyesight. Even so, these giant African herbivores easily fend off hungry lions and hyenas. “Their basic body plan has proved to be good enough to survive on a savanna full of large predators, being very large, thick skinned, big rapier-like horns.” Victoria University of Melbourne behavioral ecologist Roan Plotz. But those […]