Science, Spoken

In February, leaked software code predicted the demise of the back button on the latest version of Google's Android smartphone. Apple did away with the iPhone's home button in 2017. LG’s latest handset allows users to control their devices without touching them at all. Now, we scroll, swipe, and tap. Soon, we may never again need to hit a button on our phones.

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The Cancer Moonshot initiative, launched under the Obama administration, was audacious by design: Supercharge cancer research to encourage innovation, with the mission “to end to cancer as we know it.” Cancer researchers avoid using the word “cure.” From studying cancer at the molecular level, they know that tumors are complex—even personalized. There’s no simple cancer and no single cure. So, no single destination for a “moonshot.

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On Wednesday morning, a rather unusual plane could be seen flying high over Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. Unlike the military aircraft endemic to the area, this was a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet, its bright red tail emblazoned with a single word: VIRGIN. A 70-foot rocket was strapped beneath its left wing and about 30 minutes after takeoff, jet pilot Kelly Latimer released the rocket and sent it careening to the desert floor 35,000 feet below.

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On July 20, I will celebrate the 50thanniversary of NASA’s moon landing with my mother, an astronomer at Princeton University and the former chief scientist of NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute. Our family’s ties to NASA run deep. My father, also an astronomer, helped start the Hubble Space Telescope program and protected it over the years from Congressional budget-cutters.

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On May 31, 2017, 58-year-old Tamela Wilson checked into Barnes-Jewish Hospital, in St. Louis, with a fever, fatigue, and a strange red rash. She’d been undergoing chemotherapy to treat a relapsing lymphoma, but this exhaustion wasn’t just the cancer or the drugs. She told the doctors she worked at nearby Meramec State Park, tending to its miles of trails through forested river bluffs. And that while there, a week before her symptoms started, she found two ticks burrowed into her body.

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Maybe you figure that 60-inch 4K TV you just bought gives you a good excuse to never leave the house. All the entertainment you could ever need gets caught in its internet-enabled gravity well, orbits your streaming services a few times, and then, thwoomp! Into your eyeballs comes the sweet dopamine hit of fun. But you are being deceived. Color televisions show color, sure—but not real, accurate, bold-as-life, wonderful-world-of color.

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Credit where credit is due: Evolution has invented a galaxy of clever adaptations, from fish that swim up sea cucumber butts and eat their gonads, to parasites that mind-control their hosts in wildly complex ways. But it’s never dreamed up ion propulsion, a fantastical new way to power robots by accelerating ions instead of burning fuel or spinning rotors. The technology is in very early development, but it could lead to machines that fly like nothing that’s come before them.

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The heat wave that scorched Europe last week felt like a red alert of climate change. Death Valley was cooler than southern France, where temperatures reached a record-breaking 114.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But as the heat broke and returned to relatively temperate 80s, another forewarning emerged. Civilizations need to adapt and protect themselves from extreme heat. More than anyone, the French are aware of just how deadly extreme heat can be.

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Shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone, but Jay Inslee is going to get a presidential debate focused on climate change. Inslee, the governor of Washington state and one of two dozen candidates vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, has been agitating for such a single-topic debate for months. Other candidates have signed onto the idea, and activists within the party have amplified the message. But Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said nuh-uh.

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This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Some 30 miles north of San Diego, along the Pacific Coast, sits the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest effort to turn salt water into fresh water in North America. Each day 100 million gallons of seawater are pushed through semi-permeable membranes to create 50 million gallons of water that is piped to municipal users.

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