The Allied soldiers who weren’t killed limped back from the defeat. It was clear now, they needed to be able to creep up to the beaches days before a raid to get up-to-date information. They needed to know where the Nazis had tunneled into the land, placed explosives, or built machine gun nests. None of […]
Read MoreOn April 12, 2019, Boston University finally fired David Marchant for sexually harassing Willenbring. (The university said it could not corroborate her claims of physical and psychological abuse.) Marchant released a statement, which the journal Science quoted as vowing that he had “never” sexually harassed anyone, “not in 1998 or 1999 in Antarctica or at […]
Read MoreRepresenting Xenovia, the Leiden team took full responsibility for the explosion but said their client repossessed Candidia’s satellite in full accordance with the Outer Space Treaty. Having given notice to the Candidian company that it was late on payments, they argued, the Xenovian creditor had satisfied the treaty’s requirement for “appropriate international consultations.” Katsande felt […]
Read MoreRepresenting Xenovia, the Leiden team took full responsibility for the explosion but said their client repossessed Candidia’s satellite in full accordance with the Outer Space Treaty. Having given notice to the Candidian company that it was late on payments, they argued, the Xenovian creditor had satisfied the treaty’s requirement for “appropriate international consultations.” Katsande felt […]
Read MoreYou learn a lot about people by hanging out with robots. QT made it plain to me how much human interaction depends on tiny movements and subtle changes in timing. Even when armed with the latest artificial intelligence language models, QT can’t play the social game. Its face expresses emotion, it understands words and spits […]
Read MoreYou booked this doctor’s appointment weeks in advance. You took off work, endured the trip here, filled out paperwork while a cooking show blared from a TV on the wall, and now you’re finally in the inner sanctum, awkwardly perched on an exam table and staring at a jar of tongue depressors. Your doctor comes […]
Read MoreIn the center of Siena, Italy, a cathedral has stood for nearly 800 years. A black-and-white layer cake of heavy stone, fine-cut statuary, and rich mosaics, the imposing structure—now visited by more than a million tourists each year—would seem to be a permanent fixture of the city’s past, present, and future. Most people call it, […]
Read MoreOK, you’ve lost me. What do you mean by “bring in a molecule”? It literally just means allowing a molecule into a cell. And if that molecule is a gene editor, then it can edit genes. So we’re really at the early days of trying to figure out, for all the microbes in the human […]
Read MoreDoing surgery on the back of the eye is a little like laying new carpet: You must begin by moving the furniture. Separate the muscles that hold the eyeball inside its socket; make a delicate cut in the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane that covers the eye. Only then can the surgeon spin the eyeball around […]
Read MoreDoing surgery on the back of the eye is a little like laying new carpet: You must begin by moving the furniture. Separate the muscles that hold the eyeball inside its socket; make a delicate cut in the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane that covers the eye. Only then can the surgeon spin the eyeball around […]
Read MoreThat first year, Fireside trained more than 100 volunteers and conducted some 2,550 conversations with callers—including Greenberg. Within months of reaching Jasmine, he had walked away from his job (and psychedelically high salary) to focus on work “that adds value to the universe.” Eventually he got on the phone with Fireside again—this time not to […]
Read MoreLet’s say you want to go on a walking tour of San Francisco at its warmest and most energetic. You want to see the port town after the rush for gold swelled the foggy backwater into the largest city west of the Mississippi—back when it was home to the West Coast’s tallest buildings and beautiful […]
Read MoreAbout a month into the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist, noticed that she had come untethered from reality. “Everything felt sort of swooshy,” she says, as if she was in an “altered, mystical state.” She wasn’t constantly obsessing over her lab at Johns Hopkins University. She chilled out. And for the first time […]
Read MoreA few weeks after the investigators in Carson published their report, the FDA reinstated its pre-pandemic regulations on hand sanitizer. Now that supply had caught up to demand, the agency said, the relaxed rules were no longer appropriate. Manufacturers were not allowed to sell or donate any sanitizer produced under the rules starting in March […]
Read MoreSeagrass is the “ugly duckling of conservation,” Carlos Duarte says. He calculated that the plant may put away carbon at 10 times the rate of a mature rainforest. Duarte sees the project in the Bahamas as a blueprint (pun intended, he says) for a much grander idea that has animated his work for the past […]
Read Morebecause of the promising conditions in Starr and Hidalgo Counties, Jamie had been helping a handful of people there. The Sage team, of course. The public utility manager for the city of McAllen, who desperately wants to build a geothermal plant for his city. She’d been talking to Dario Guerra, a local water engineer who […]
Read Moreat the midnight Sun Golf Course in Fairbanks, Alaska, they say you never get the same shot twice. That’s because the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet, and as the underground permafrost thaws, it deforms the course’s fairways. This express defrost unlocks ancient organic matter—a lot of it. (The world’s […]
Read MoreThe nodules have been growing, in utter blackness and near-total silence, for millions of years. Each one started as a fragment of something else—a tiny fossil, a scrap of basalt, a shark’s tooth—that drifted down to the plain at the very bottom of the ocean. In the lugubrious unfolding of geologic time, specks of waterborne […]
Read MoreWhat about human safety? Gordon McEwan, whose home is near the proposed launch site, is anxious about falling rockets. In a meeting with Orbex and other crofters, he shared his concern that the launch exclusion zone was too small. When the rocket lifts off, the zone will have a radius of less than 2 kilometers. […]
Read MoreWhen we were teenagers, my brother and I received kidney transplants six days apart. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He, two years older, was scheduled to receive my dad’s kidney in April of 1998. Twenty-four hours before the surgery, the transplant team performed its final blood panel and discovered a tissue incompatibility that […]
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