Science, Spoken

It might not be apparent unless you're driving through the mid-longitudes of Interstate 70, but around 40 percent of the land in the United States is farmland. Understanding what happens on that acreage is complicated—for individual farmers and agricultural conglomerates. Understanding how to improve what’s going on is even harder. That’s why Granular—a farm software business under the agriculture division of DowDuPont—penned a deal with Planet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This year, nearly 1.7 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer. Most will find out in the usual way; after having tiny blobs of tissue slurped up through a needle, smeared and stained on a slide, and put under the discerning eye of a pathologist. But starting this week, Medicare patients with advanced cancers will have access to a more 21st century diagnostic: Their cells can now be sequenced, matching patients with the drugs most likely to make a difference. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you want to avoid getting sick on a plane, the worst place to sit, according to Charles Gerba, is along the aisle. The issue is exposure—not just to other passengers, but anything they touch. That means obvious hot spots (arm rests, tray tables, in-flight magazines) and less-obvious ones like aisle seats, which people use to steady themselves as they move about the cabin, frequently on their way to and from a lavatory. Oh right, lavatories. Don't get Gerba started on those. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The bionic hand closes slowly. Its slender metal digits whirr as they jitter into a loose fist, as though they are wrapping around an invisible baton. "OK, closed," says the test subject. The test subject is Amanda Kitts. In 2006, a Ford F350 hit her Mercedes sedan head-on. The collision rent the truck's tire from its chassis and shoved the axle into Kitts' car, where it nearly severed her arm. "It wasn't completely off, but it was mincemeat," she says. "There was no saving it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the early 2000s, Greg Wyler, former founder of a semiconductor company, was laying fiber in Africa. He wanted to do something that mattered. Semiconductors didn’t matter, you know? But linking people to each other and to information did, he thought. “The lesser educated version of myself said, ‘Fiber is the answer,'" says Wyler. "'I’ll run it everywhere.’” He didn’t run it everywhere, though he did run it quite a few places in Africa. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It took ten years to build the Maverick, a dorm-fridge-sized box that takes in a cartridge with a little bit of blood—more than a drop but, you know, not a pint, either—and spits out new knowledge. On the cartridge is a silicon chip carved with antibody-lined channels; if any of a range of molecules that signal things like celiac disease are floating around, they stick to the antibodies, changing the way the channel reflects infrared light. The machine goes ping. (Not literally. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s hard to pick which species to save in Brazil right now. Yellow fever is tearing through primate populations, wiping out squirrel and howler monkeys. Poachers are nabbing giant anteaters for meat and blue macaws to sell as exotic pets. But conservation biologist Rogério Zacariotti wants to save a venomous yellow viper—the golden lancehead. But the snake isn't making it easy for him. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For arguably the most famous physicist on Earth, Stephen Hawking—who died Wednesday in Cambridge at 76 years old—was wrong a lot. He thought, for a while, that black holes destroyed information, which physics says is a no-no. He thought Cygnus X-1, an emitter of X-rays over 6,000 light years away, wouldn’t turn out to be a black hole. (It did.) He thought no one would ever find the Higgs boson, the particle indirectly responsible for the existence of mass in the universe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On March 4, an embryologist at Pacific Fertility Center was doing a routine walk-through of the clinic’s collection of waist-high steel tanks, each one filled with thousands of liquid nitrogen-bathed vials of frozen sperm, eggs, and embryos. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It is once again Pi Day (March 14—which is like the first digits of pi: 3 and 14). Before getting into this year's celebration of pi, let me just summarize some of the most important things about this awesome number. Outside the US, Pi Day should probably be July 22 (22/7)—this fraction is a surprisingly good estimate of pi. You can find the value of pi with a mass and a spring. The value of pi is related to the local gravitational field. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices