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Tech NewsThe Top 100 Songs of All Time as Graphs and Diagrams
Billboard’s top 100 list of all time—well, of all time since the Hot 100 list began in 1958 anyway—is a nostalgia trip through American music of the past half century. Even if you’re a cold-hearted music snob, Nathan Yau’s charts and diagrams are a fun, clever spin on these familiar old songs. A few months … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Natural Moss on This Wooden Bookcase Is Preserved Forever in Resin
Your usual piece of wooden furniture—cut, sanded, painted— bears little resemblance to the tree it came from. So to create the Undergrowth bookcase, Italian design duo Alcaroldeliberately took the opposite tack, preserving the unhewn edges of their lumber—moss and lichen and all. The oak wood itself comes from logs found in the undergrowth of the … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceHealth
Induced Stem Cells Will Be Tested on Humans for the First Time
Back in 2006, when controversy over embryonic stem cell funding was still raging, a piece of research came along that would make the debate essentially obsolete: normal adult cells can actually be reprogrammed into stem cells. No embryos necessary. The technique went on to win its inventor the Nobel Prize. And now, after many years … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Here Is a 3D-Printed Earthquake
When Doug McCune was shaken awake by the Napa earthquake last month, he did what any reasonable person would do in the middle of the night: He downloaded a whole bunch of earthquake data. A few more days of tinkering, and he had created this 3D-printed visualization of the quake. If you’ve ever looked at … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Underground Mapping Near Stonehenge Reveals a New “Super Henge”
The mysteries of Stonehenge are revealed sometimes by unusual methods—forgetting to water its grass or whacking its stones with quartz. In this case, it just took four years of staring at the ground. A new underground survey reveals a vast complex of unknown Neolithic monuments near Stonehenge, including a huge stone “super henge.” The Stonehenge … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsA Loop Musician Made This Perfect Loop Music Video
The fun in live looping is all about hearing how a song is made—how a series of bloops and beats and basses get layered into actual music. It’s just one person and some foot pedals. And in her video for “Anthem,” Kawehi invites us to watch how a song is put together. Kawehi, who first … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
EartherClimate Change
Ship Lost in the Arctic 160 Years Ago Found Thanks to Climate Change
In 1845, the explorer John Franklin set off to sail the fabled Northwest Passage, an Arctic sea route that would hypothetically connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. He never returned. His ship was lost to the ice. But now, thanks to the obsession of Canada’s prime minister, an expedition has located one of Franklin’s two … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Tech From Stealth Warplanes Make Wind Turbines Invisible to Radar
From afar, wind turbines look like small toys spinning lazily in the wind. But get up close, and you realize what huge structures they really are: hundreds of feet tall, blade tips slicing through the air at over 100 mph. And these wind turbines can really scramble airport and weather radars. To solve the problem, … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Clever Plan to Mine Lithium From Geothermal Power Plants’ Wastewater
Regardless what you think about the future of phones or wearables or cars, there is one thing nearly everyone can agree on: We will need more batteries. And for that, we’ll need more lithium. One startup has its eyes on a new source of lithium: the wastewater from geothermal power plants. The curious and clever … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
This Chocolate Teapot Can Hold Boiling Water Without Totally Melting
There is exactly one reason you would ever want to brew hot tea in a barely stable chocolate teapot: To prove that you could. And indeed, tea-loving Brits have enlisted a master chocolatier to do just that. Behold the power of (chocolate) science. In case you aren’t up on your British insults, a “chocolate teapot” … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
How precise is one degree of longitude or latitude?
For those of us with no real navigation experience, encountering longitude and latitude coordinates is usually the result of some hiccup using Google Maps. 40.722272, -73.994194? What? Where the heck is that? Why are there so many digits after the decimal? We’re here to help. And because one degree of longitude and latitude can actually … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Plan to Make the Moon an Enormous Detector of Cosmic Rays
About once a century on any given square kilometer of Earth, a cosmic rayhits with mind-boggling intensity. The teeny tiny subatomic particle from space comes careening in with more than 10 million times the energy of particles shot out by the LHC. Where do these ultrahigh energy cosmic rays come from? Astronomers havea plan to … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsNASA Scans Through Vast Amounts of Data By Converting It to Sound
NASA has a lot of satellites, and these satellites have collected months, if not years, of data that can take pretty much forever to sift through. But one clever idea is to turn the measurements of space into sound and speed it up; a month of data might be scanned audibly in all of 10 … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsThis High-Tech Silicate Film Cracks in the Weirdest and Prettiest Ways
When glass cracks, the result usually 1) very bad and 2) haphazardly damaged across the surface. But scientist in Paris are studying thin films that crack in predictable patterns, at once beautiful and weird, that could be repurposed to make microscopic devices. The study recently published inPhysical Review Letters looks at delicate silicate films, which … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceBiology
How Polar Bears Will Keep the Elephants Warm at the Oregon Zoo
Zoos are weird places. You have fake safari next to fake tundra next to fake rainforest—all separated by a glass and concrete and a few feet of space. At the Oregon Zoo, a new energy plan manages to both subvert and perfectly embody the zoo’s artificial ecology: The excess heat from the polar beat habitat … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
This Lamp Is a Line of Light That You Can Twist to Your Heart’s Content
In the coming LED revolution, lightbulbs will no longer have to be lightbulbs. LEDs, which are just little points of light, can be arranged into any shape you want, and the Swiss design firm Shibui has decided place them in a simple, straight line. Meet Linelight. Despite its stark, minimalist design, Linelight gets a nice … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Funny Backpack Google Uses To Map the Insides of Buildings
In its ongoing quest to map the entire planet, Google has turned its all-seeing eyes on the next logical place: the indoors. Today, Google is showing off six new indoor maps and the Cartographer, a backpack full of high-tech sensors that makes floor plans in real time. You have likely already seen Trekker—the Street View … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
How Scientists Made This Ordinary Phone a Touchless Interface
When touchscreens came to the first iPhone, they felt like a marvelous new way to interact with the devices in our hands. Dirty or wet or gloved fingers reveal the limitations of the touchscreen, though, and touchless interfaces may be closer than you think—a lightly modified ordinary phone can detect hand gestures through interference of … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
This Waste Incineration Power Plant Glows Like It’s On Fire
Power plants that burn garbage for energy are not places where you expect to find beauty. Usually utilitarian in design, they’re often relegated to the middle of some industrial wasteland. But Denmark, a leader in incinerating waste for energy, has taken the opposite tack, commissioning big, beautiful power plants designed by hotshot architects. Back in … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Switzerland Could Be Vulnerable to an Alpine Lake Tsunami
A danger is lurking in the bucolic mountains of Switzerland: the alpine lake tsunami. Yes, it’s a real thing, and yes, it has happened before—many times, according to unsettling new geological research. Like a tsunami in the ocean, a lake tsunami is the result of an earthquake under the water. Rocks and sediments might shift, … Continued
By Sarah Zhang
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