Articles

Seven days; lots of science in the news. Here’s our roundup of this week’s most notable and quotable items: Researchers determined that the giant, rabbit-faced ancestors of modern kangaroos probably did not hop, linked fracking to hundreds of earthquakes in Ohio, and found 18 new viruses (along with disease-causing viruses like salmonella) in a sample of New York City rats. The CDC issued stricter (but still voluntary) guidelines for American hospitals dealing with Ebola patients, now recommending protective suits that cover the neck as well as the head. The first Uranus-like exoplanet was discovered in a twin star system 25,000 light-years away from Earth. This September was the warmest seen since records began in 1880. The 20th century’s sea level rise of 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) is unmatched by any period in the last 6,000 years. The Dust Bowl drought in the 1930s was the worst in North America in the past 1,000 years. Tornado patterns have changed over the past few decades; there are today more days with lots of twisters, and more with no tornadoes at all. A massive 3,300-year-old compound raised by the cult followers of an ancient god or goddess was unearthed in Israel. Volcanoes on the moon may have been erupting as recently as 50 million years ago, instead of billions of years …

You are made of stardust—but how do the elements in that stardust become molded into such a specific shape? In his new book, Your Atomic Self: The Invisible Elements That Connect You to Everything Else in the Universe, ecologist Curt Stager traces the fascinating paths of all the different kinds of elements in our bodies as they enter and exit us. We got a chance to talk with Stager recently about, among other things, how we can truly be individuals if we’re just an assortment of ever-shifting combinations of atoms:

Flush a toilet in Brooklyn, Queens, or lower Manhattan, and what goes down the hole generally comes to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. The facility, spreading over several large blocks in the industrial district of the North Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, is the largest of the 14 wastewater treatment plants in the Big Apple, treating 310 million gallons* of wastewater every single day. For the curious, the New York Department of Environmental Protection offers monthly tours to give New Yorkers a glimpse of the fascinating, sometimes fragrant science of sewage processing. So we decided to take the plunge. Here’s what we learned on a recent visit. Every job has its own delicate euphemisms and jargon; for a dirty job like sewage treatment, it seems only natural. But it’s still kind of weird that none of the officials on the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant tour will once utter any of the customary words for human waste (not even “feces”), instead relying on terms like: The principal steps in dealing with sewage are: screening, settling, digesting, and dewatering. First, incoming wastewater flows through screens made of bars placed a couple inches apart to filter out all the non-crap crap that gets …

Christopher Columbus might be the most famous man who’s remembered for utterly bungling his original mission. The Italian-born explorer was obsessed with the idea of finding a direct sea route to Asia to help his Spanish benefactors dominate the spice trade. But instead he landed in “The New World,” kicking off an era of brutal European colonization that leads many to question why we want to have a whole day dedicated to him in the first place.

On October 22, the World Science Festival will be looking at the history of dreamers, nerds, inventors, and businessmen who have shaped our digital age and continue to propel it forward at Science and Story: The History of the Future, with the help of Walter Isaacson, author of the new book The Innovators. In the spirit of the event, we wanted to look a little further into the future, to the next computing revolution waiting in the wings.

Seven days; lots of science in the news. Here’s our roundup of this week’s most notable and quotable items: Nobel Prizes were awarded to the scientists who discovered the brain’s GPS system, invented the blue LED, and found new ways to make microscopes see even tinier objects. Researchers think they’ve spotted the footprint of a Majorana fermion, a particle made of both matter and antimatter. Killer whales were found capable of imitating dolphin noises. Astronomers discovered a pulsar—a rotating dead star—that packs a mass equivalent to our sun in an area the size of San Francisco and emits X-rays with the energy of about 10 million suns; it’s the brightest pulsar ever detected. Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, passed away. Five major U.S. airports introduced increased Ebola screening,despite public health experts’ concerns that the type of screening proposed is historically ineffective, that screening wouldn’t catch patients like Duncan that have not developed symptoms while traveling, and that there are no direct flights from the three countries affected, making tracking a logistical nightmare. The epidemic is still raging in West Africa, with more than 8,000 cases and nearly 4,000 deaths in the region; in Sierra Leone, 121 people died of Ebola in a single day. What might be the oldest example of …