Science, Spoken

This past Valentine’s Day, Shawn Richard stood before the San Francisco Planning Commission and made the case for why the board should let him open the first cannabis dispensary in the city’s legendary Upper Haight neighborhood. Given the Haight’s legacy as the epicenter of the weed-fueled counterculture movement, his shop would be historically significant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month, a journal published an n-of-one experiment of unusual origin. It was the study comparing astronaut Scott Kelly’s physiology to that of his Earthbound identical twin brother, Mark. During his time on the International Space Station, Scott gathered reams of data on his own health and took hundreds of samples of his own stool, urine, and blood, for comparison later to those of Mark. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The roof of Notre Dame Cathedral wasn’t just a roof. Sure, it kept the rain out. But what burned away in Paris last April was a technical marvel, the height—literally—of 12th- and 13th-century engineering. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In early April, 1999, a time capsule was delivered to the famed architect Frank Gehry with instructions to incorporate it into his designs for the building that would eventually host MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, or CSAIL. The time capsule was essentially a museum of early computer history, containing 50 items contributed by the likes of Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Millennials are increasingly making time in their busy schedules to put their eggs on ice. More effective flash-freezing technologies, micro-optimized ad targeting, and a growing willingness among companies to follow Silicon Valley’s lead of including fertility treatments in benefit packages, have made the practice more attractive to would-be parents. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The world’s most precise clock sits on a table in Jun Ye’s lab in Boulder, Colorado. A tangle of electronics, fiber optic cables, and laser beams, the clock is still a prototype, so no one actually uses it to tell time. Ye, who is a physicist at the research institute JILA, and his team have demonstrated that the clock can produce a second with precision in the parts per quintillion—that’s 10-19, some hundred billion times more precise than a quartz wristwatch. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the past few years, speculation has risen around whether North Korea or any other nation could detonate a nuclear weapon over the United States that would create an electromagnetic pulse, and knock out all electricity for weeks or months. This doomsday hypothesis has been promoted by a former CIA director , a commission set up by Congress, and a book by newsman Ted Koppel. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today brings sad news in the world of consumer robotics. Anki, maker of Vector, a toy-like autonomous countertop robot, is shutting down, and hundreds of people are losing their jobs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ken Haller is 64, but he vividly remembers having measles when he was 7. And mumps when he was 10. And chickenpox when he was 11, which required him to keep socks on his hands so he wouldn’t gouge his skin from scratching. He still has a faint scar on his nose from one pustule he scratched too intensely. Haller is also a pediatrician who has treated babies who developed meningitis from Haemophilus influenzae (now vaccine-preventable) and became blind—or died. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hardly anyone actually has measles in Los Angeles (so far; thank goodness). Just five people who passed through the airports, and five residents of the county. Four of those residents are “linked cases,” meaning three got it from one. The problem is, one of those people infected with measles spent some time on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. Another one spent an afternoon in a library at Cal State LA. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices