Science, Spoken

It was 1968. I was 8 years old. The space race was in full swing. For the first time, a space probe had recently landed on another planet (Venus). And I was eagerly studying everything I could to do with space. Then on April 2, 1968 (May 15 in the UK), the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was released—and I was keen to see it. So in the early summer of 1968 there I was, the first time I’d ever been in an actual cinema (yes, it was called that in the UK). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The first human brain balls—aka cortical spheroids, aka neural organoids—agglomerated into existence just a few short years ago. In the beginning, they were almost comically crude: just stem cells, chemically coerced into proto-neurons and then swirled into blobs in a salty-sweet bath. But still, they were useful for studying some of the most dramatic brain disorders, like the microcephaly caused by the Zika virus. Then they started growing up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

George Church towers over most people. He has the long, gray beard of a wizard from Middle-earth, and his life’s work—poking and prodding DNA and delving into the secrets of life—isn’t all that far removed from a world where deep magic is real. The 63-year-old geneticist presides over one of the largest and best-funded academic biology labs in the world, headquartered on the second floor of the massive glass and steel New Research Building at Harvard Medical School. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Physicists don’t know much about dark matter. They can’t agree on what it’s made of, how much a single particle weighs, or the best way to construct a Play-Doh diorama of it. (How would you do it? Dark matter is invisible—light doesn’t interact with it at all.) Nobody has ever caught a dark matter particle on Earth. But after 30-plus years of telescope observations, most researchers do agree on one thing: The universe contains a lot of it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

No one knows exactly when or where China's abandoned Tiangong-1 space station will return to Earth. But the map on Ted Muelhaupt's computer gives him a better idea than most. "I'm looking at it right now, and it's telling me the vehicle's not gonna land in Quito," he says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“I am a bit concerned about your telomeres,” the doctor told me, evenly. Telomeres are the caplike segments at the ends of the strands of DNA that make up your chromosomes—think of the plastic aglets at the ends of a shoelace—and some of mine, he could see, were not as long as he would have liked them to be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Resomator stands monolithic in the corner of a room on the ground floor of a building at UCLA. It’s as sterile as a hospital in here, but every patient is already dead. This is the penultimate stage of their time under the care of Dean Fisher, director of the Donated Body Program at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The eyes are unwell. Their childhood suppleness is lost. The lenses, as we log hours on this earth, thicken, stiffen, even calcify. The eyes are no longer windows on souls. They’re closer to teeth. To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ever wonder how a mirror works? If you want to find the path that light takes when reflecting off a surface, you could use Fermat's Principle. This states something like this: The path that light takes is the path that takes the least time. When going from point A to point B, light will travel along the path that takes less time than any other options. I actually used this idea in a question for my students learning about the variational principle with a question using Fermat's Principle. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Millennials, we’re assured by endless headlines, are the people most addicted to their devices. Addled by social networking, obsessed with taking selfies and hustling for likes, youngsters can’t put their damn phones down. Amirite? Nope. That is wrong. The data suggests that the ones most hooked on their devices are those graying GenXers. Research by Nielsen, for example, found that Americans aged 35 to 49 used social media 40 minutes more each week than those aged 18 to 34. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices