Science, Spoken

In the last 20 years, genealogy websites have attracted more than 15 million customers by promising insights into your past. Maybe you’ll uncover a secret infidelity or be reunited with a long-lost cousin, like when Larry met Bernie on Finding Your Roots. It’s deeply personal, affecting stuff. But when your family tree contains thousands, millions, even tens of millions of people, it’s no longer a personal history. It’s human history. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

By design, the downtown San Francisco storefront offices of Forward feel more like a spa or a ritzy skin care boutique than a doctors’ office. But the latter thing is true. Despite the sun shining through floor-to-ceiling windows onto pastel walls, blond-wood surfaces and no check-in desk in sight (attractive, casually dressed receptionists with iPads offer you a water), Forward is a concierge medical service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You can’t see the bunny, but the picosecond laser certainly can. In a lab at Stanford, engineers have set up a weird contraption, hiding a toy bunny behind a T-shaped wall. And their complex system of computation and rapidly firing lasers can see around that corner. So, too, could the self-driving cars of the future. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Since early Friday morning, calls have been crackling across the Duxbury Fire Department dispatch center in a barrage of static. “Tree down on a house on Mayflower Street.” “Wires down on at Keene Street and Congress.” The seaside Massachusetts town is now firmly in the grips of Winter Storm Riley, the massive Nor’Easter forecasted to explosively develop through the weekend across a 700-mile swath of New England. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Enough. It's time. You've decided to reclaim your morning commute by spending it on something substantive. No more bottomless Instagram feeds and auto-playing YouTube videos for you! So out the door you stride with that week's New Yorker wedged beneath your arm, a new episode of Flash Forward playing in your ear, or the latest Jesmyn Ward novel cued up on your Kindle app. So far so substantive. But it doesn't last. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earth got a warning shot on January 25, 2016. On that day, Air Force engineers were scheduled to kill off a GPS satellite named SVN-23—the oldest in the navigation constellation. SVN-23 should have just gone to rest in peace. But when engineers took it offline, its disappearance triggered, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a software bug that left the timing of some of the remaining GPS satellites—15 of them—off by 13.7 microseconds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The robotic platform heaves, as if breathing. Atop it stretches a piece of white gauze with a blue line painted down the middle. Along this line another robot snips with little surgical scissors, waiting for the platform to come to a brief rest before making a cut. And another snip, and rest. And another, and rest, on down the line. This could be you one day. Not that you’ll turn into a robot—you may go under the knife of a machine working as a surgical assistant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are quite a few fundamental constants. These are things like the speed of light (c) the charge on an electron (e), and the Planck constant (h). These constants are determined with some type of interesting experiment. The first values of these constants were often difficult to find—the speed of light, for example, was calculated by tracking the moons of Jupiter. Of course, now we have much better methods to get a very precise value for the speed of light. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Female scientists were reporting sexual abuse and harassment by professors years before the #MeToo movement exploded in the public eye last fall. From unwanted comments and weird texts to missed promotions and direct assaults, female graduate students and postdocs are often vulnerable while working in male-dominated field camps, laboratories, or remote observatories where there are few places to turn for help. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In October 2013, a moon-orbiting NASA spacecraft aimed a laser beam at Earth, 239,000 miles away. Within seconds, the intended recipient—an observatory in southern California—locked onto the beam of infrared light, invisible to the naked eye. Encoded inside the light was a high-definition video of NASA administrator Charles Bolden delivering a short speech. Bolden had, of course, recorded the video on Earth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices