Sending flocks of tiny satellites out past Earth orbit and solving the irrigation efficiency paradox
Small satellites—about the size of a briefcase—have been hitching rides on rockets to lower Earth orbit for decades. Now, because of their low cost and ease of launching, governments and private compa...
23 Aug 201821min
Ancient volcanic eruptions, and peer pressure—from robots
Several thousand years ago the volcano under Santorini in Greece—known as Thera—erupted in a tremendous explosion, dusting the nearby Mediterranean civilizations of Crete and Egypt in a layer of white...
16 Aug 201821min
Doubts about the drought that kicked off our latest geological age, and a faceoff between stink bugs with samurai wasps
We now live in the Meghalayan age—the last age of the Holocene epoch. Did you get the memo? A July decision by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is responsible for naming geological ...
9 Aug 201821min
How our brains may have evolved for language, and clues to what makes us leaders—or followers
Yes, humans are the only species with language, but how did we acquire it? New research suggests our linguistic prowess might arise from the same process that brought domesticated dogs big eyes and bo...
2 Aug 201826min
Liquid water on Mars, athletic performance in transgender women, and the lost colony of Roanoke
Billions of years ago, Mars probably hosted many water features: streams, rivers, gullies, etc. But until recently, water detected on the Red Planet was either locked up in ice or flitting about as a ...
26 Juli 201827min
Why the platypus gave up suckling, and how gravity waves clear clouds
Suckling mothers milk is a pretty basic feature of being a mammal. Humans do it. Possums do it. But monotremes such as the platypus and echidna—although still mammals—gave up suckling long ago. Instea...
19 Juli 201818min
The South Pole’s IceCube detector catches a ghostly particle from deep space, and how rice knows to grow when submerged
A detection of a single neutrino at the 1-square-kilometer IceCube detector in Antarctica may signal the beginning of “neutrino astronomy.” The neutral, almost massless particle left its trail of debr...
12 Juli 201826min
A polio outbreak threatens global eradication plans, and what happened to America’s first dogs
Wild polio has been hunted to near extinction in a decades-old global eradication program. Now, a vaccine-derived outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is threatening to seriously ext...
5 Juli 201819min
