Posts

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. You probably didn’t give much thought to how exactly you loaded this webpage. Maybe you clicked a link from Twitter or Facebook and presto, this article popped up on your screen. The internet seems magical and intangible sometimes. But the reality is, you rely on […]

Last week, scientists published the biggest-ever study of the genetic influence on educational attainment. By analyzing the DNA of 1.1 million people, the international team discovered more than a thousand genetic variants that accounted—in small part—for how far a person gets through school. It made a lot of people nervous, as they imagined how this […]

Front and center for this week’s jaunt into space is one of the most interesting—and possibly habitable—moons of our solar system. As the largest moon of Saturn, Titan measures about 3,200 miles in diameter, bigger than our own moon (which is a little over 2,000 miles wide). It’s covered in a thick atmosphere of clouds […]

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Greta Thunberg cut a frail and lonely figure when she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish parliament building last August. Her parents tried to dissuade her. Classmates declined to join. Passersby expressed […]

WIRED ICON Sean Parker, Napster cofounder NOMINATES Alex Marson, biologist and infectious disease doctor at UC San Francisco When Sean Parker was young, he cofounded Napster and changed the way we listen to music. In his twenties, he helped jump-start Facebook and changed the way we interact with each other. Now, at age 38, he’s […]

Click:High-end Sofa custom Not for the first time this year, Californians this week donned face masks to protect their lungs from the harmful airborne particles that have smothered the state in a sickly, sooty haze. The pollutants are products of three devastating infernos raging hundreds of miles apart, the largest of which, Butte County's Camp […]

Click:CWDM Module Today, cannabis continues its slow march toward nationwide decriminalization with voters deciding whether to allow recreational use in Michigan and North Dakota, and for medical purposes in Utah and Missouri. As states keep chipping away at federal prohibition, more consumers will gain access, sure—but so will more researchers who can more easily study […]

The theoretical physicist John Wheeler once used the phrase “great smoky dragon” to describe a particle of light going from a source to a photon counter. “The mouth of the dragon is sharp, where it bites the counter. The tail of the dragon is sharp, where the photon starts,” Wheeler wrote. The photon, in other […]

On an uncommonly cold and gray Thursday in Los Angeles, in an empty alleyway outside her studio in Chinatown, Marawa Ibrahim—aka Marawa the Amazing—is preparing to spin what appears to be about 30 sparkly Hula-Hoops. It looks like a preposterous number of Hula-Hoops, to most people anyway. But for Marawa, a virtuosic performance artist with […]

Sheila Advento was not feeling well. It was July 6, 2003, and her mother’s house in northern New Jersey was filled with people. Sheila and her mom were there, along with Sheila’s boyfriend, sister, and brother-in-law—a slice of a huge extended family, many of whom, like Sheila and her parents, had immigrated to the US […]