The Robots Will Be Soft and Cuddly and Heal Their Own Wounds Poke a hole in a human and something remarkable happens. First of all, you go to jail. But meanwhile, the wound heals itself, filling in the missing tissue and protecting itself from infection. Poke […]
Tag: Science
What a Border Collie Taught a Linguist About Language
What a Border Collie Taught a Linguist About Language Tansy was not into sports. The little border collie, a rescue, didn’t care for agility trials or flyball. But her adopted family—with two other border collies already in the house—did them all the time. Border collies are […]
The Best Way to Test Students? Make Them Explain It On Video
The Best Way to Test Students? Make Them Explain It On Video As a physics professor, I have two jobs. The first, obviously, is to help students understand physics. That makes me something of a coach. But I want to talk about my second job: evaluating […]
How Solar Eclipses Illuminate the Marvel of Science
How Solar Eclipses Illuminate the Marvel of Science On Monday, August 21, 2017, the world will go under, or so it might well feel like if you position yourself along a 70-mile-wide swath of the US from South Carolina to Oregon. From here you can witness […]
James Damore’s Google Memo Gets Science All Wrong
James Damore’s Google Memo Gets Science All Wrong In early August, a Google engineer named James Damore posted a document titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” to an internal online discussion group. His memo was a calm attempt to point out all the ways Google has gone […]
Quantum Internet Is 13 Years Away. Wait, What’s Quantum Internet?
Quantum Internet Is 13 Years Away. Wait, What’s Quantum Internet? A year ago this week, Chinese physicists launched the world’s first quantumsatellite. Unlike the dishes that deliver your Howard Stern and cricket tournaments, this 1,400-pound behemoth doesn’t beam radio waves. Instead, the physicists designed it to […]
The Plan to Put a 3-D Printer With Robot Arms Into Orbit
The Plan to Put a 3-D Printer With Robot Arms Into Orbit Space is indifferent to your suffering. It doesn’t care that it’ll freeze you to death unless you’re wearing a fancy suit, or that even before freezing you’ll suffocate in its vacuum. And it certainly […]
How to View the Solar Eclipse Without Glasses
How to View the Solar Eclipse Without Glasses You’ve surely heard by now that the moon will pass between Earth and the sun on August 21, creating a total solar eclipse that will cast a shadow over much of the US. Jimmy Carter was president the […]
Buried in a Gold Mine, a Particle Accelerator Searches for Stellar Secrets
Buried in a Gold Mine, a Particle Accelerator Searches for Stellar Secrets In August 2015, scientists from the University of Notre Dame went west, the disassembled pieces of a particle accelerator secured in the back of their U-haul. Over 1,000 miles later and nearly a mile […]