Modern robots are not unlike toddlers: It’s hilarious to watch them fall over, but deep down we know that if we laugh too hard, they might develop a complex and grow up to start World War III. None of humanity’s creations inspires such a confusing mix of awe, admiration, and […]
Africa’s Huge Locust Swarms Are Growing at the Worst Time
As the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the world earlier this year, another even more conspicuous plague was tearing through East Africa: locusts. The voracious little beasts are particularly fond of carbohydrates like grains, a staple of subsistence farmers across the continent. Back in January, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization […]
State Alliances Are Leading the US Fight Against Covid-19
A couple of weeks ago, states from coast to coast were racing to find personal protective equipment and ventilators so their hospitals would be ready for Covid-19. “It was at the height of what seemed like the Hunger Games, everybody out there fighting for their life, people buying orders out […]
How a Pudgy Porpoise May Save Other Animals From Extinction
The ensuing gold rush was catastrophic for fish and porpoise alike. At first, the totoabas were so plentiful that they could be harpooned from the beach, butchered for their maws–which, when dried, resemble colossal potato chips with unappetizing tendrils–and left to rot. But as the population dwindled, fisherman turned to […]
Hospitals Quickly Reshape to Treat Covid-19 Patients
Until mid-March, the emergency room entrance at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, looked much like the entrance to other ERs: an illuminated red “EMERGENCY” sign mounted on a brick facade, above an open space where cars and ambulances could unload patients. By the end of the month, part of […]
What Does Covid-19 Do to Your Brain?
During the third week of March, as the pandemic coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was beginning to grip the city of Detroit, an ambulance sped through its streets to Henry Ford Hospital. Inside, a 58-year-old airline worker struggled to understand what was happening to her. Like hundreds of other Covid-19 patients […]
Fast Nanoscale ‘Movies’ Shed Light on a Solar Cell Mystery
Stranks and his colleagues arrived at this conclusion by shining ultraviolet light on perovskite cells and observing them with a high-powered microscope capable of seeing down to just 10 nanometers–roughly the combined diameter of four strands of DNA. The UV light liberated electrons in the solar cell. By measuring the […]
What if Covid-19 Returns Every Year, Like the Common Cold?
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is often compared to its close genetic cousin SARS-CoV-1. And for good reason: The virus responsible for the early 2000s SARS outbreak is, in many ways, the closest parallel to what we’re dealing with now. Researchers look to it when studying how long the new virus […]
The Apple-Google Contact Tracing Plan Won’t Stop Covid Alone
Apple and Google are offering a bold plan using signals from more than 3 billion smartphones to help stem the spread of the deadly coronavirus while protecting users’ privacy. But epidemiologists caution that–privacy concerns aside–the scheme will be of limited use in combating Covid-19 because of the technology’s constraints, inadequate […]
Stephen Wolfram Invites You to Solve Physics
Holy matrix! In other words, he’s suggesting that what happens in these models, which exist only as computations, is as valid as phenomena in what we call the real world–even though these model universes are spectacularly less complex than the actual universe. (Even building his simulations with a 100-core network […]