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Click:religious significance The pistol shrimp, aka the snapping shrimp, is a peculiar contradiction. At just a few inches long, it wields one proportionally sized claw and another massive one that snaps with such force the resulting shockwave knocks its prey out cold. As the two bits of the claw come together, bubbles form and then […]

This weekend, the Perseid meteor shower will light up the moonless sky, the product of dust breaking off from the same Swift-Tuttle comet that sends its greetings to Earth every August. The richest display of meteors will appear between August 11 and 13. But as you settle down to watch those fragments burn up into […]

Like a hit-and-run driver who races from the scene of a crash, the interstellar guest known as ’Oumuamua has bolted out of the solar system, leaving confusion in its wake. Early measurements seemed to indicate that it was an asteroid—a dry rock much like those found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Then by this past […]

This is sort of awesome. It's a concrete gravity battery. What? Yup. The idea is to even out the balance between power generation and power usage; like with any battery, this one allows you to store extra energy for use at a later time when demand is higher. Or maybe you could use solar power […]

This story originally appeared on The New Republic and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the kind of bold, aggressive climate goal scientists said […]

Is there any more tantalizing headline than “Scientists Discover a Cure for Cancer”? Some version of this fantastical claim has been dropped into the news cycle with the regularity of a super blood wolf moon for the better part of a century. In 1998, James Watson told The New York Times that a cancer cure […]

When Melissa Moore was tinkering around with RNA in the early 90s, the young biochemist had to painstakingly construct the genetic molecules by micropipette, just a few building blocks at a time. Inside the MIT lab of Nobel laureate Phil Sharp, it could take days to make just a few drops of RNA, which ferries […]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a crisp winter morning, while my daughters lingered over pancakes with their grandparents, I drove a couple of miles past houses nestled among incense cedars, Ponderosa pines, and Douglas firs. I couldn’t help imagining those trees roaring with flames, because […]

If you had your very own home robot, what would you want it to do, exactly? Pick up after you? Do the dishes? Help you make coffee? Yeah, me too, but that kind of robot is a long, long ways off. That isn’t stopping robotics companies from jumping into the robotic assistant fray. Consider Jibo, […]

This story originally appeared on Grist on Jan. 31 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. This January should be remembered for its unusual warmth, not its cold. Yes, it’s so cold right now that even hardy Minneapolis is shutting down schools, but even with these few days of extreme cold, Minnesota should end […]