Science, Spoken

In May 2018, a radar facility in Tromsø, Norway trained its antennas on GJ237b, a potentially habitable exoplanet located 12 light years from Earth. Over the course of three days, the radar broadcast a message toward the planet in the hopes that there might be something, or someone, there to receive it. Each message consisted of a selection of short songs and a primer on how to interpret the contents.

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In what will go down as one of the greatest robotics experiments ever, a few years back researchers in Japan let a robot loose in a mall and watched how kids reacted. Far from the sense of wonder you might expect from children, the mood soured into a sense of concern for the next generation, as the kids proceeded to kick and punch the robot and call it names. Call it unconstructive criticism.

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On the evening of October 23, in the middle of the kind of dry, windy night that has become more frequent and more terrifying in recent California autumns, a fire began outside the small unincorporated Northern California town of Geyserville. Over the next two days, as winds reached hurricane-like strength, they carried the fire south, burning some 75,000 acres and threatening some 90,000 structures as of Wednesday afternoon.

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When President Trump visited Pittsburgh last month, he complained about how the Paris climate treaty was unfair to the United States. “I withdrew the United States from the terrible, one-sided climate accord, it was a total disaster for our country,” Trump told a cheering crowd at a natural gas conference. “They were taking away our wealth. It was almost as though it was meant to hurt the competitiveness—really, competitiveness of the United States.

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It’d be tough to mistake a hippo for a sensitive type. Weighing more than a Honda Accord and packing massive incisors, it’s one of the most dangerous animals on Earth. But in reality it’s far more vulnerable than it lets on: Habitat loss, climate change, and rampant water extraction are all threatening the African rivers the hippo calls home.

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Nose pickers are often said to be digging for gold. But a 48-year-old Australian man needed an entirely different kind of nugget mined from his schnoz. Doctors excavated from the man's right nasal cavity a 19 mm by 11 mm rock-hard mass—the calcified remains of a small amount of marijuana he tried to smuggle into prison a startling 18 years earlier. ARS TECHNICA This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more.

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In the summer of 1907, a German doctor named Clemens von Pirquet noticed something strange with one of his patients. The five-year-old boy had previously tested positive for tuberculosis. The test involved injecting a tiny bit of TB protein just under the skin. His antibodies recognized it, activating immune cells which formed a little bump at the injection site. This happens to anyone who has ever been infected with TB. But when Pirquet performed the same test on the boy a second time, no bump.

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Before astronauts head to the International Space Station, they spend years getting ready: They float in pools to practice for spacewalks, learn how to run different types of science experiments, and even practice how to poop. For future missions to the moon and Mars, scientists first try living and working in space-analog environments on volcanoes, deep inside caves, at the South Pole, and even underwater.

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Laura Lewis and her team of researchers have been putting in late nights in their Boston University lab. Lewis ran tests until around three in the morning, then ended up sleeping in the next day. It was like she had jet lag, she says, without changing time zones. It’s not that Lewis doesn’t appreciate the merits of a good night’s sleep. She does. But when you’re trying to map what’s happening in a slumbering human’s brain, you end up making some sacrifices.

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Interstellar space exploration has long been the stuff of science fiction, a technological challenge that many engineers believe humans just aren’t up to yet. But an ongoing study by a group of NASA-affiliated researchers is challenging this assumption. The researchers have a vision for a mission that could be built with existing technology. Indeed, the group says that if their mission is selected by NASA it could fly as soon as 2030.

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