Science, Spoken

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Every year in December, a makeshift hangar at the NASA Ames Research Center pops up for one night, transforming the austere airfield into a glitzy, paparazzi’d, black velvet-roped Nerd Prom. At the Breakthrough Prizes—where on December 3, a total of $22 million was handed out to pioneers in math, physics, and the life sciences—researchers traded lab coats and latex gloves for floor-length gowns and bow-tied tuxedos. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This holiday season, more people than ever before are giving the gift of spit. Well, what’s in your spit, to be precise. Want to know where your ancestors once walked or whether you’re at risk for a genetic disease? There’s a spit tube kit for that. And customers are buying them in record numbers. Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, leading personal genomics company AncestryDNA sold about 1. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Hunter Williams used to be an English teacher. Then, three years into that job, he started reading the book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The 1966 novel by Robert Heinlein takes place in the 2070s, on the moon, which, in this future, hosts a subterranean penal colony. Like all good sci-fi, the plot hinges on a rebellion and a computer that gains self-awareness. But more important to Williams were two basic fictional facts: First, people lived on the moon. Second, they mined the moon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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In 1891, a New York doctor named William B. Coley injected a mixture of beef broth and Streptococcus bacteria into the arm of a 40-year-old Italian man with an inoperable neck tumor. The patient got terribly sick—developing a fever, chills, and vomiting. But a month later, his cancer had shrunk drastically. Coley would go on to repeat the procedure in more than a thousand patients, with wildly varying degrees of success, before the US Food and Drug Administration shut him down. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For the first time, humans have detected an interstellar asteroid—a space rock they're calling 'Oumuamua, which is a Hawaiian word meaning "scout." It's the only object we've ever seen that entered the solar system from beyond our little collection of planets. That's a pretty big deal on its own. But on top of that, this asteroid has a really interesting shape: It's very long and skinny, with a width to length ratio of about 1 to 10. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Behind the Scenes as NASA Tests the Most Powerful Rocket Ever NASA wants to send a human to Mars in the next two decades. And that means making the most powerful rocket ever. In 2019, NASA will send a capsule called Orion on an elaborate 25-day trajectory. First, the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, will blast it into the ether. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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