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ScienceSpace & SpaceflightLooking for Alien Life on Bizarre “Eyeball Planets”
It’s easy for us Earthlings to imagine life evolving on planets like ours. But there are exoplanets out there that strain the imagination. Take “eyeball planets,” which are half frozen, half broiling with the heat of their suns. Earthlike planet Zarmina, in the Gliese system, is one of these. We shouldn’t rule these bizarre planets … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
How the Search for Life on Mars Could Be Dooming Itself by Accident
When Curiosity goes looking for organic molecules in Mars’s solid surface, it vaporizes a rock sample and sniffs the gas that comes out. The plan could be going awry thanks to a pesky little mineral called jarosite. Jarosite releases an oxygen atom when it is heated up. Oxygen is very reactive, so it goes looking … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceHealth
Are We Doomed to Get Rashes from Our Fitness Trackers?
Constant 24/7 fitness tracking can have itchy, scratchy consequences. Those would be wrist rashes, as Fitbit users have been learning. But rashes aren’t just a Fitbit problem—any wristband can leave you red, thanks to some basic biology. There may be no miracle cure for this malady of the quantified self. Our skin has the thankless … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
Black Hole Emits Ferocious Winds With the Energy of a Trillion Suns
A black hole and its galaxy are locked in a cosmic struggle, evolving in tandem and balancing each other’s growth. In this artist’s recreation, you can see cosmic winds howling out of supermassive black hole PDS 456. These winds are so strong that they prevent the galaxy from forming new stars. NASA’s NuSTAR telescope and … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsThis Video Is the Best Explanation Yet of How Genomes Really Work
There are 20,000 genes in the human genome, but only a small fraction of them are active in any given cell. This video from Nature explains with beautiful clarity the system that activity, turning genes on and off. It’s called the epigenome, and it’s incredibly important. Now you can understand how it works, too. Back … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
That Time Listerine Claimed It Was Good For Cleaning the Vagina
Before Listerine found its true commercial calling as a mouthwash, it was a general purpose antiseptic meant to be used on cuts, sore throats, dandruff, and, most horrifying of all, down there. “It possesses great penetrating power,” touts the ad! I came across this ad in a Duke University archive while researching my article on … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The Origin of Joy Division’s Most Famous Album Cover, Finally Revealed
The cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is famously graced with the radio pulses of a dying star. Its origins, however, have always been unclear. But now, Scientific American’s Jen Christiansen has followed the rabbit hole to the very end—to an obscure 1970 PhD astronomy thesis and the guy who wrote it. Joy Division fans … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
A Map of the World’s Largest Annual Human Migration
In the days and weeks before Chinese New Year, some 700 million people—twice the entire population of the U.S.—cram onto trains, buses, planes and boats to go home. This mass migration is the largest annual movement of humans in the world, and now it can be tracked by smartphone. For the past couple years, Chinese … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
“Natural” Flavorings Are Bullshit
In one of those naked PR moves, Nestlé announced today it would only use natural flavorings and colors in its candy. Which means it’s a good time to remember that is “natural” does not mean better. The natural stuff is just as processed, and comes from places like beaver butts and insects. There’s nothing inherently … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceSpace & SpaceflightThe Most Clever Ideas For Vehicles to Explore Saturn’s Moon Titan
Forget a boring old rover and try nuclear-powered boats or quadcopter space drones. If we want to explore Saturn’s moon Titan—with its liquid methane lakes and dense nitrogen atmosphere—we’ll need exploration schemes that are just as unique as the alien moon itself. To date, space crafts have usually landed on celestial bodies with entirely solid … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
A “Photoshop For Sound” Could Transform Restaurants and Music Halls
Restaurants have to strike a fine balance between eerily quiet and shouting-across-the-table loud. At Oakland’s Oliveto, the high-tech solution is a set of mics, speakers, and sound-absorbing panels that constantly record, modify, and pipe back the ideal background noise—essentially real-time Photoshop for sound. In The New Yorker, the magazine’s music critic, Alex Ross, recounts a … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
São Paulo Is Running So Low on Water People Might Be “Warned to Flee”
São Paulo is Brazil’s largest and wealthiest city, a bustling concrete jungle of 11 million people. Now imagine the city going for days without water for drinking, bathing, or cleaning—it’s a dystopian scenario not far from São Paulo’s reality thanks to a water crisis made worse by drought. As the New York Times reports, taps … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
The U.S. Just Approved Its First GMO Apple, Which Doesn’t Turn Brown
For years, a small Canadian company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits, has been touting its Arctic apple, which doesn’t turn an unsightly brown after being sliced. The U.S. Department of Agriculture finally approved it for planting this week. But before you see any Arctic apples at the grocery store, get ready for a big round of GMO … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
What’s the Best Game for Killing Time With Your Phone?
Once upon a time, humans had to entertain themselves during the few idle minutes of waiting in line. No more! Now we have pocket computers with access to dozens of games at once. Tell us, which are you favorites? On this Valentine’s Day eve, I’d like to write a brief love letter to Monument Valley, … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceHealth
This Contact Lens Is Actually a Tiny Telescope
This little cone of plastic that fits on your eyeball is an extremely thin telescope, and its zoom can be turned on and off with a simple wink of the eye. The contact lens, developed by researchers at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and funded by DARPA, is a scleral lens, a type … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Strange New Land Is Growing Along Louisiana’s Disappearing Coastline
Louisiana’s wetlands are famously disappearing, thanks to a century of dredging and drilling in the Mississippi River. A football field-sized swath of land falls into the ocean every hour. But along on small part of the coastline, the land is actually growing. Welcome to Atchafalaya Bay. A pair of recent satellite images released by the … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsA Gorgeous Ice Castle Time Lapse Makes Winter Bearable Again
For all the cold and ice that winter dumps upon, you have to admit that ice can be beautiful—perhaps no more so than in this ethereal winter castle. Filmmakers Michael Sutton and Julian Tryba shot this time lapse in a hand-built Ice Castle in New Hampshire. We interviewed the icicle farmers who make Ice Castles … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
We’re Dumping Way More Plastic Into the Ocean Than We Thought
Garbage in the ocean is a big problem, but until now we didn’t know how big. A study published today in Science drops a rough but still astounding estimate: 8 million metric tons per year. That’s 20 to 2000 times more than what experts had estimated. Until now, a lot of our information about how … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
ScienceHealth
How “Clean” Was Sold to America with Fake Science
The average American’s daily hygiene ritual would seem unusual—nay, obsessive—to our forebears a hundred years ago. From mouthwash to deodorant, most of our hygiene products were invented in the past century. To sell them, the advertising industry had to create pseudoscientific maladies like “bad breath” and “body odor.” Americans had to be convinced their breath … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech News
Original Copy of the Magna Carta Found in Forgotten Old Scrapbook
An unassuming scrapbook buried inside the archives of Sandwich, England turned out to hold quite a treasure: an original copy of the Magna Carta from 1300, one of just several that have survived all these centuries. The Magna Carta Project announced the discovery this week, after verifying the tattered page found in December was indeed … Continued
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