Science, Spoken

The internet is full of videos of thoughtful people setting things on fire. Here’s a perennial favorite: Cleave a grape in half, leaving a little skin connecting the two hemispheres. Blitz it in the microwave for five seconds. For one glorious moment, the grape halves will produce a fireball unfit for domestic life. Physicist Stephen Bosi tried the experiment back in 2011 for the YouTube channel Veritasium, in the physics department’s break room at the University of Sydney. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last night, NASA reached out one final time to the Opportunity rover on Mars, hoping the golf-cart-sized machine would phone home with good news. Since June, the robot has been unresponsive, likely because a planet-wide sandstorm coated its solar panels in dust. NASA has pinged it over 1,000 times in those gloomy eight months, to no avail. Last night’s attempt was no exception: NASA has announced that Opportunity is officially dead. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Say this much for the “reproducibility crisis” in science: It’s poorly timed. At the same instant that a significant chunk of elected and appointed policymakers seem to disbelieve the science behind global warming, and a significant chunk of parents seem to disbelieve the science behind vaccines … a bunch of actual scientists come along and point out that vast swaths of the social sciences don’t stand up to scrutiny. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The first alert came on January 27. Two small satellites, whirling through Earth's low orbits, had “the potential for a conjunction.” Those are the words Major Cody Chiles, spokesperson for the Joint Force Space Component Command, uses to mean "the chance of a collision." The satellites, one from a company called Capella Space and the other from Spire Global, could smack into each other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In case you’ve been envying the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis lately, don’t. Skittering around the Sahara Desert, the insect endures temperatures so brutal, it can sometimes only manage foraging runs of 15 minutes before it burns to death. Making matters worse, the heat obliterates the pheromone chemical trails that ants typically lay for each other to navigate. Get lost out here, and you’re literally cooked. Accordingly, desert ants have evolved superpowers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Monolithic black rectangle on stage with luminous, bouncing blue dots at eye level was not Project Debater, IBM’s argumentative artificial intelligence. It was just something for an audience to look at while a voice—is it redundant to call an AI’s synthesized voice “disembodied”?—projected over the sound system of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the third floor of a back building on Verily’s South San Francisco campus, ten white machines emit a low-pitched hum. Atop each one sits a plastic container so jammed with tubes and sensors it looks like a protein shake on life support. Inside, beige-colored broth bubbles away while tiny high-res cameras capture the frothy footage and stream it to the cloud. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There might be no better monument to the limits of American environmentalism in the climate change era than a parking garage in Berkeley, California. It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture and water treatment features”—not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you want to watch sunrise from the national park at the top of Mount Haleakala, the volcano that makes up around 75 percent of the island of Maui, you have to make a reservation. Being at 10,023 feet, the summit provides a spectacular—and very popular, ticket-controlled—view. Just about a mile down the road from the visitors’ center sits “Science City,” where civilian and military telescopes curl around the road, their domes bubbling up toward the sky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If it’s hard to imagine the sweeping changes proposed in the “Green New Deal” actually happening, don’t blame the Green New Deal. It’s just that it has been so long since any politician suggested something so grand. The wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and sea level rise that climate scientists have long promised are here, but we could get accustomed to that. We could forget that the world of five years ago or a decade ago was any different. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices