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Just how fast is the X-Men character Quicksilver, also known as Peter Maximoff (and son of Magneto)? This would be a popular topic of debate at the comic book bar—if a comic book bar existed. It such a bar does exist, I have to go. We can take a crack at answering this question, starting […]

Jake Misch’s family has been growing corn in the sandy soils of northwestern Indiana for four generations. Like other farmers in the area, the Misches spray their fields with a nitrogen-rich fertilizer once in the spring when the seeds are planted, and once later in the year, when the corn is going through its growth […]

WIRED ICON Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft NOMINATES Stephen Quake, professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Stanford University and copresident of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Few things trouble me as much as the fact that many cutting-edge medical advances aren’t available to everyone who needs them. Many lifesaving procedures require specialized equipment and trained […]

Three hundred and sixty four days ago, Jiwoo Lee’s friends helped her celebrate her 18th birthday by baking her a Rice Crispr cake. They bedecked the gooey, cereal-based treat with blue and red frosted double helixes in honor of her favorite high school hobby—gene editing. Lee, who won top awards at the 2016 Intel International […]

The government’s new weather forecast model has a slight problem: It predicts that outside temperatures will be a few degrees colder than what nature delivers. This “cold bias” means that local meteorologists are abandoning the National Weather Service in favor of forecasts produced by British and European weather agencies. For the past few weeks, the […]

In 2015, the 12-person organizing committee of the first International Summit on Human Gene Editing—which included Crispr co-inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier—issued a statement on how the world should responsibly push forward the science of permanently altering the DNA of Homo sapiens. Combined with other changes that had sprung biology free from the ivory […]

This story originally appeared on Reveal and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. William Whitt suffered violent diarrhea for days. But once he began vomiting blood, he knew it was time to rush to the hospital. His body swelled up so much that his wife thought he looked like the Michelin Man, and on […]

If you are a Spider-Man fan (like me), surely you've seen Spider-Man: Homecoming. It's great. OK, you know what comes next. Here is the part where I look at a particular scene and talk about the physics. It's just what I do, I can't help myself. But even if there is a physics problem, I […]

As a fan of science fiction and science, I have to say that The Expanse has a bunch of great science. It's not just the science in the show. The characters also seem to demonstrate an understanding of physics. One scene from the first season stands out in particular as a classic physics example. I […]

In the spring of 2017, Urmila Mahadev found herself in what most graduate students would consider a pretty sweet position. She had just solved a major problem in quantum computation, the study of computers that derive their power from the strange laws of quantum physics. Combined with her earlier papers, Mahadev’s new result, on what […]