WEIRD SCIENCE
By Joseph Stiglitz – Critics of the Green New Deal ask if we can afford it. But we can’t afford not to: our civilization is at stake. ‘The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy.’ …
By Loz Blain – Compact and portable, the Jyrowheel is launching on Indiegogo. (Credit: Jyroball). Weighing just 20 lb (9 kg) and folding into a 10-inch-diameter (25-cm) ball for transport, the Jyroball is a super-compact self-balancing urban monowheel that its creators say is …
By Ben Coxworth – Brown tube sponges on a reef in Belize. (Credit: dsabo/Depositphotos). We’ve recently been hearing about how scientists can tell which creatures are present in an aquatic environment, by detecting their cast-off DNA in the water. A new study …
By Maggie O’Neill – Mount Sinai Health System © Provided by TIME Inc. In January 2018, Rachel Palma started noticing her body wasn’t working quite right. Her mind wasn’t functioning properly, and she would suddenly drop items she was holding. “My right hand …
By Michael Irving – Researchers have managed to recreate cell division outside of a cell. (Credit: vjanez/Depositphotos). Cell division is one of the most fundamental biological functions, vital to life – but there’s still so much about it that we don’t understand. …
It just takes three elements to make a fire. By Peter Hess – Complications like infections or perforations can arise in the operating room, but one man had a much closer brush with disaster, as doctors reported at the European Society of Anesthesiology’s …
Observer editorial. This absurd ruling restricts highly targeted plant breeding but allows random changes caused by carcinogenic chemicals. The techniques used to modify this rice in Norfolk in the last century have been overtaken by new methods that do not involve introducing …
By Michael Irving – Fashionable fungi: A colored image shows the particles of gold collected by the fungus species fusarium oxsporium. (Credit: CSIRO). Shiny, pretty and useful in electronics, gold has been prized by humans for millennia, but we’re not the only ones …
By Michael Irving – An illustration of a collision between two huge celestial bodies, similar to that now theorized to have given the Moon its asymmetrical face. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech). While we can only see one “face” on the Moon from our vantage point …
By David Szondy – An exoplanet smaller than Neptune with its own atmosphere has been discovered in a Neptunian Desert. (Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick). An international team of astronomers led by the University of Warwick has found a “forbidden” planet orbiting …
