My family, like many others who enjoy traveling, went from taking road trips and flying cross-country to doing almost nothing in 2020. I had anticipated that our newfound seclusion would be just temporary and easily reversed. Even though coronavirus cases in our area were declining and scientists advising that wearing a mask and going outside…
Expended rockets are falling to Earth as more frequent rocket launches make space more accessible. In May, a 23-ton Chinese rocket landed in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, ending days of speculation over where it would land. In March, the four-ton top stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket broke apart above the Pacific…
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is working on an interdisciplinary project to recreate the scents of plant species that have been lost due to human colonial destruction of their habitat. Whereas others might try to reconstruct a woolly mammoth from centuries-old sequences, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is working on recreating the scents of plant species that have been…
Both cigarettes and opioids have a high potential for addiction and death. Profiteering companies sell both substances based on science that has been skewed by spin or outright lies. Both have been challenged for multibillion-dollar sums of money. Opioids, on the other hand, are not like cigarettes. And, as the opioid settlements near the conclusion,…
A gigantic crustacean with a peculiar look slid across the muddy seafloor of present-day British Columbia more than 500 million years ago. It was half a meter (1.6 feet) long and had a massive head with a helmet-like carapace, or shell, stalked eyes, and a pair of claws with hard tiny structures that looked like…
Terrorists had to pass through airport security in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia before hijacking the four planes used in the 9/11 attacks. Even though several of them were tagged for screening by the CAPPS security system or were hand-wanded after triggering metal detectors at Dulles airport, they were able to board the Boeing…
WhatsApp is now allowing users to encrypt message backups to cloud servers, filling a long-recognized privacy vulnerability in the Facebook-owned software. In a post on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg revealed the upgrade, praising the engineering effort that went into bringing the new feature to life. “WhatsApp is the first global messaging service of this magnitude to…
It can be difficult to coordinate locations with friends and relatives. When there are many corners, dozens of trees, and 1,908 miles of Interstate 95, phrases like “I’m by a big tree,” “I’m standing on the corner,” and “My car broke down but there are no signs so just drive down I-95 for a bit”…
When terrorists hijacked two planes and brought down the World Trade Center buildings, John Feal, now 54, was a supervisor for a demolition business. 20 years ago, two additional planes slammed into the Pentagon and a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, respectively. Feal, who is from Long Island, New York, arrived the day after the great…
Since 2002, biologist Jeff Sikich has been employed at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. He’s dealt with a variety of strange situations, including a call to bring his dart gun to tranquilize what turned out to be a three-foot-tall statue of a mountain lion rather than a real mountain lion on one memorable…