Science, Spoken

The Breakthrough Prizes are unlike anything else in science. Instead of the hum of lab equipment, there’s Orlando Bloom. Instead of donning lab coats, the scientists find themselves marching down a red carpet in their black-tie best. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Max Krause was thinking of buying some bitcoin, as one does. But Krause is an engineer—mostly he works on modeling greenhouse gas emissions from landfills—so his first step was to run the numbers. He looked at price, of course, but also how fast the world’s bitcoin miners create new bitcoins and the ledger that accounts for them. And he looked at how much electricity that would seem to require. “I thought, man, this is a lot of energy,” Krause says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In early 2015, Sen. Ervin Yen, an anaesthesiologist who became Oklahoma’s first Asian American state legislator, introduced a bill to require all schoolchildren to be vaccinated, unless they had a medical reason not to. California had recently debuted similar legislation after an outbreak of measles in Disneyland sickened 147 people and led to the quarantine of more than 500 others. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2015, the U.S. Naval Academy decided that its graduates needed to return to the past and learn how to navigate using the stars. Nine years prior, it had dropped celestial navigation from its requirements because GPS was so accurate and simple to use. But recent events had shaken the academy’s faith in GPS. Researchers had taken over a yacht’s navigation system as it steered in the Mediterranean. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One year ago, Hewlett Packard Enterprise sent an off-the-shelf supercomputer up to the International Space Station, to see if its mass-produced hardware could survive, basically unmodified, in the harsh environment of space. Now NASA and the computer company are declaring the experiment a success—even though nearly half of its hard disks failed after getting fried by solar radiation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you ever meet a climate scientist, give them a hug. Not only is the work important, it involves an absolute mess of variables—emissions, maybe sequestering those emissions, atmospheric patterns, maybe geoengineering that atmosphere. Data is often sparse or non-existent. So give them a hug. The data problem is particularly acute in the oceans. A key part of figuring out how much the planet has warmed, and how drastically we need to cut emissions, is determining how the sea is changing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last November, Apple Watch owners began receiving recruitment emails from Apple. The company was looking for owners of its smartwatch to participate in the Apple Heart Study—a Stanford-led investigation into the wearable's ability to sense irregular heart rhythms. Joining was simple: Install an app and wear your watch. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It would be extraordinarily difficult—impossibly difficult—for any one of the several thousand asylum-seeking refugees in the so-called migrant caravan now on the border between Guatemala and Mexico to have smallpox. A global vaccination campaign eliminated the disease from the world at large in 1980. Yet that’s what a guest on the Fox Business Network show Lou Dobbs Tonight said earlier this week. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Los Angeles derives much of its charm from its diversity, both of its people and its amenities—rolling hills here, lovely architecture there, a national forest to the north and legendary beaches to the west. But much of it is in trouble: Sea level rise is coming for Los Angeles County and its 74 miles of coast. According to a new report from the New York Academy of Sciences, it’ll take LA as much as $6. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. New York is suing the oil giant ExxonMobil in a lawsuit that claims the company engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to downplay the risks posed to its business by climate change regulations. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices