Science, Spoken

At the beginning of 2018, Elon Musk predicted that SpaceX would pull off 30 launches. The goal seemed far-fetched; among other reasons, some of those flights were planned for the Falcon Heavy, which at the time had yet to fly. Indeed, the company didn’t hit that figure. But the 21 launches it did pull off in 2018 still amount to a staggering achievement for the 16-year-old company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Way, way out at the cold, dark edges of the solar system—past the rocky inner planets, beyond the gas giants, a billion miles more remote than Pluto—drifts a tiny frozen world so mysterious, scientists still aren't entirely sure if it's one world or two. Astronomers call it Ultima Thule, an old cartography term meaning "beyond the known world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In a chilly warehouse just outside of Boston, the brute toils away. It’s 600 pounds of orange and black metal and whirring motors, a massive robotic arm that picks up car parts and places them on a table. Like its ancestors have done for decades, this industrial robot does the heavy lifting that no human worker could manage, and it does so with extreme speed and precision. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In April, a citizen scientist named Barbara Rae-Venter used a little-known genealogy website called GEDMatch to help investigators find a man they’d been looking for for nearly 40 years: The Golden State Killer. In the months since, law enforcement agencies across the country have flocked to the technique, arresting a flurry of more than 20 people tied to some of the most notorious cold cases of the last five decades. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Quantum computers are still a dream, but the era of quantum communication is here. A new experiment out of Paris has demonstrated, for the first time, that quantum communication is superior to classical ways of transmitting information. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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After the historic announcement in February 2016 hailing the discovery of gravitational waves, it didn’t take long for skeptics to emerge. The detection of these feeble undulations in the fabric of space and time by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was said to have opened a new ear on the cosmos. But the following year, a group of physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen published a paper casting doubt on LIGO’s analysis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1995, New York City psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg logged onto PsyCom.net, then a popular message board for shrinks, to describe a new disease he called "internet addiction disorder," symptoms of which, he wrote, included giving up important social activities because of internet use and "voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers." It was supposed to be a joke. But to his surprise, many of his colleagues took him seriously. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A bug’s life doesn’t seem half bad, if you can overlook the super-short lifespan or the threat of getting eaten by lizards or swatted at by humans. Flying is nice, as is being able to walk on ceilings. The versatility is enviable, which is why roboticists are on a quest to imbue machines with the power of the bug. But to harness the powers of nature, roboticists are resorting to very un-biological means. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Physicists are remarkably frank: they don’t know what dark matter is made of. “We’re all scratching our heads,” says physicist Reina Maruyama of Yale University. “The gut feeling is that 80 percent of it is one thing, and 20 percent of it is something else,” says physicist Gray Rybka of the University of Washington. Why does he think this? It’s not because of science. “It’s a folk wisdom,” he says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices