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ScienceHealthAmericans — Why Is Your Insulin So Expensive?
Insulin has saved countless lives since its discovery in 1921. But nearly a century later, there is somehow still no cheap, generic version of insulin available in the U.S—making the “wonder drug” too expensive for many patients. Why? In the New England Journal of Medicine, Jerome Greene and Kevin Riggs call it the “paradox of … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
“Biodegradeable” Plastic Is Not So Biodegradeable After All
Biodegradeable plastic, now often found in plastic bags and bottles, contains additives that are supposed to get microbes to break down tough plastic faster. But a new study from Michigan State University finds that some of these additives may actually doing, well, jackshit. Aside from generally sounding virtuous (thanks, greenwashing!), “biodegradeable plastic” is a bit … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
The MAVEN Spacecraft Has Spotted a Strange Aurora on Mars
While you were looking for an aurora on Earth last night, NASA scientists were preparing to unveil something far more unusual: an aurora on Mars, unlike any seen on the red planet before. MAVEN, or the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft, has been circling Mars since last September. Last December, it witnessed an unusual … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsPrivacy & Security
Man, It’s Still So Easy to Fool Facial Recognition Software
Passwords suck, so why not replace them with facial recognition? Because facial recognition software still kind of sucks, too, as Dan Moren discovered in Popular Science after a little craft project easily fooled his bank app. Facial recognition software isn’t totally dumb anymore. You can’t just hold up a photo of someone’s face, like you … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Neuroscience of Why Virtual Reality Still Sucks
The faceputer ads say virtual reality is coming and it’s gonna work this time. But here’s some real talk: There are still many ways virtual reality cannot fool the human brain. And it has little to do with the tech itself. Instead, it’s about neuroscience and our brain’s perceptual limits. True, the past year has … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
EartherClimate Change
Here’s What Could Happen If Antarctica’s Ice Is Melting From Below
File this under, “Welp, this is worse than we thought.” A study published in Nature Geoscience finds that warm seawater is likely getting under an East Antarctica glacier and melting it from below. If the glacier’s ice shelf melts, runway melting could cause another 11 feet of sea-level rise—that’s on top of previous estimates. Scientists … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
A 3D View Inside the Earth’s Liquid Core, Based On Earthquakes
Every so often, earthquakes remind us that the solid ground beneath our feet can tremble and shake like rock jello. But there’s an upside to all this shaking: Seismic waves are how we peer deep inside the Earth to map what’s under the crust. The Titan computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
California’s Wine Country Is Getting a Huge Floating Solar Farm
California has long been on the cutting edge of solar power, and now it has what be its most interesting plan yet: a vast solar array floating on top of wastewater ponds. The project will be built in Sonoma County, which you may know better as wine country. Greentech reports that Sonoma Clean Power will … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
A New Kind of Brain Stimulation that Uses Magnets and … Spice
Deep brain stimulation involves threading electrodes deep into the brain — it’s invasive, but it’s also an effective way to treat disorders like Parkinson’s and depression. But now scientists have a new wireless brain stimulation technique, which targets the proteins that sense heat and spice. New Scientist reports on a study inScience, where researchers injected … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
23andMe Wants to Make Drugs—Here’s What That Could Mean in 10 Years
23andMe made a name for itself selling DNA test kits, but today it announced a radical new direction: The company will start mining its huge database of DNA sequences to create new drugs. The science of how they could do that is fascinating—but it raises a lot of futuristic ethical questions too. Image by fotohunter … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Ancient Secrets of a “Bleeding” Glacier Are Finally Being Revealed
Against vast whiteness of Antarctica, Blood Falls bleeds a deep dramatic red. The color comes from iron-rich ancient seawater trapped under the ice for 2 million years. For the first time, scientists have been able to take a sample from deep under the ice. The five-story tall Blood Falls was first discovered in 1911. In … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The $761 Peanut Butter and Other Insanely Expensive Government Products
The most expensive peanut butter in the world is sold by the U.S. government. The $761 jar of peanut butter, created to calibrate machines in food science labs, went viral last month. But “Standard Reference Material 2387,” aka peanut butter, is only the tip of the iceberg of a strange and fascinating world. Even among … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
If You Want Healthy Cows, Feed Them Magnets
Dairy farmers routinely feed their cows a finger-sized magnet, which settles in the digestive tract to help keep the cows healthy. Wait what? This is no bizarre homeopathy, but rather a legitimate treatment for a stomach-churning ailment called “hardware disease.” The problem arises because cows don’t chew before swallowing. Of course, cows do famously spend … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsCould a Jet Engine Survive Sucking Up a Drone?
You can say goodbye to the quadcopter. That much is obvious. But what about airplanes? Passengers on commercial airlines actually have little to worry about, as IEEE Spectrum explains today. IEEE Spectrumput the drone-airliner crash question to George Morse, founder of Failure Analysis Service Technology, a company that specializes in analyzing foreign-object damage to airplanes. … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Wow, People Really Suck at Drawing Apple’s Logo From Memory
Do you know what Apple’s oh-so-ubiquitous logo looks like? Do you really? UCLA psychologists asked 85 undergrads to draw the Apple logo from memory, and only one got it right. The rest of the results are hilarious and incorrectly lopsided. Okay, so not all of us are artists. I do not have much faith in … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The World’s Oldest Mummies Are Suddenly Turning Into Black Goo
Having survived 8,000 years, the Chinchorro mummies found in modern-day Chile and Peru have started decaying more quickly than ever before—in some cases even melting into gelatinous “black ooze.” Scientists at Harvard think they’ve found the reason why. The mummies, the oldest manmade ones in the world, originate with the Chinchorro people, who preserved their … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
io9Books & Comics
The One Ebook You Have to Read If You Love Digital Books
You have not read a truly digital book until you’ve read The New World. The novella is about a woman trying to reclaim her dead husband’s head from a cult-like cryogenics company. But more than that, it is the most ambitious attempt I’ve seen at exploring a future where books lack physical form and are … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsThe “Harvard Sentences” Secretly Shaped the Development of Audio Tech
During World War II, the boiler room under Harvard’s Memorial Hall was turned into a secretive wartime research lab. Here, volunteers were subjected to hours of noise as scientists tested military communications systems. Out of this came the Harvard sentences, a set of standardized phrases still widely used to test everything from cellphones to VoIP. … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
300,000 Chickens Killed By Attacks on Farm Alarm Systems
In the past two weeks, attacks at 16 South Carolina chicken houses have left over 300,000 chickens dead. Farmed chickens rarely live good lives, but these deaths were especially horrible: Someone with inside knowledge of the houses temperature alarm systems, slowly killed the chickens with heat and cold. The criminals, who seemed to have expert … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Time Activists Tried to Destroy GPS With an Axe in the 90s
If you had heard of GPS in 1992, you likely heard about it because of the Gulf War. For the first time, GPS was used to precisely guide missiles to Iraqi targets. With this context in mind, it perhaps makes more sense why two activists would want to hack a GPS satellite to pieces. Over … Continued
By Sarah Zhang
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