Science, Spoken
WIRED
Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Aug 1, 2019 • 7min
The World Health Organization Says No More Gene-Edited Babies
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Jul 31, 2019 • 6min
7/31 AM The Bizarre, Peaty Science of Arctic Wildfires
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Jul 30, 2019 • 6min
7/30 AM Physicists Made a Blazing Hot Plasma Doughnut to Study Solar Wind
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Jul 29, 2019 • 5min
7/30 PM SpaceX Just Unleashed Its Starship Rocket for the First Time
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Jul 29, 2019 • 7min
7/30 AM Why Big Banks Could Soon Jump on the Quantum Bandwagon
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Jul 26, 2019 • 12min
7/26 PM Here’s How Elon Musk Plans to Stitch a Computer into Your Brain
Elon Musk doesn’t think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. Just a lot of it. Eventually. At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It’s a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot.
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Jul 24, 2019 • 27min
An Alien-Hunting Tech Mogul May Help Solve a Space Mystery
In spring 2007, David Narkevic, a physics student at West Virginia University, was sifting through reams of data churned out by the Parkes telescope—a dish in Australia that had been tracking pulsars, the collapsed, rapidly spinning cores of once massive stars. His professor, astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer, had asked him to search for a recently discovered type of ultra-rapid pulsar dubbed RRAT.
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Jul 24, 2019 • 5min
The Sea Is Consuming Jakarta, and Its People Aren't Insured
Jakarta is sinking at the worst possible time. As sea levels creep higher, the coastal megalopolis continues to pump too much water from its underlying aquifers, and consequently the land is collapsing by almost a foot a year in some places. A modern city, home to 10 million people, is in danger of disappearing: According to one researcher’s models, 95 percent of north Jakarta could be submerged by 2050.
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Jul 22, 2019 • 10min
What Happens When Reproductive Tech Like IVF Goes Awry?
It sounds like the setup to a bad joke: Three couples walk into a fertility clinic. But the punch line—what happened to those families at one Los Angeles medical facility in August 2018—is no laughing matter. The embryos from two couples hoping to conceive were mistakenly implanted into a third patient. That third woman and her husband, both of Korean descent, suspected that something was amiss when their two newborns didn’t look anything like them.
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Jul 19, 2019 • 7min
7/19 Headed to Mars? Pack Some Aerogel—You Know, for Terraforming
Mars attacks. Its wisp of an atmosphere means that if you were standing on the surface, it’d be a race to see if suffocation or the sub-zero temperature killed you first. But that’s all tarring the red planet with too broad a brush, perhaps. It’s not all a rusty, frozen hellscape. At the mid-latitudes, just inches down into the ground, you’d find ice—frozen gases like carbon dioxide, even frozen water.
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