Science, Spoken

This year, 47 million Americans will spend an estimated $8.5 billion betting on the outcome of the NCAA basketball championships, a cultural ritual appropriately known as March Madness. Before the tournament starts, anyone who wants to place a bet must fill out a bracket, which holds their predictions for each of the 63 championship games. The winner of a betting pool is the one whose bracket most closely mirrors the results of the championship.

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The idea behind the guillotine is this: If you’re going to execute someone, you may as well do it efficiently and humanely, at least by 18th-century standards. Decapitating the condemned with an ax or sword may take a few swings—unacceptable for carrying out justice in a "civilized" society. The guillotine, on the other hand, is downright surgical, a perversely methodical way to end a life.

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If a woman (or non-female identifying person with a uterus and visions of starting a family) is struggling to conceive and decides to improve their reproductive odds at an IVF clinic, they’ll likely interact with a doctor, a nurse, and a receptionist. They will probably never meet the army of trained embryologists working behind closed lab doors to collect eggs, fertilize them, and develop the embryos bound for implantation.

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Like most people, Daniel Ibrahim remembers exactly where he was the first time he came across a tiny, bug-eyed, toothless, limp-tongued cat called Lil Bub, the internet-breaking Queen of Cute. It was September 2014, during a mild night in Berlin, when the molecular geneticist found himself watching a Vice documentary on social media-famous felines by the blue light of his computer. But unlike most people, Ibrahim’s next move wasn’t to buy a Lil Bub shirt or join the ranks of her 2.

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nearly a billion people could be newly at risk of tropical diseases like dengue fever and Zika as climate change shifts the range of mosquitoes, according to a new study. Since the life cycle of mosquitoes is temperature sensitive, scientists have long been concerned about how their prevalence might spread as the world continues to warm.

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As a shopper, you can chose from labels touting a product’s chemical-free nature (Certified Organic), genetic makeup (Non-GMO), and effect on tropical ecosystems (Shade Grown). Now you could start to encounter a label that certifies that your daily internet traffic is sustainable as well.

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For nearly 400 million years, amphibians have led a highly successful double life on Earth, foraging on terra and reproducing in water. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and any number of other worldwide catastrophes, but they’ve never seen a catastrophe quite like humanity. Already stressed by habitat degradation and the wildlife trade, amphibians are now reckoning with the chytrid fungi, pathogens that humans have spread the world over.

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Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Humans are ruining everything for amphibians Amphibians may have survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, and all kinds of other catastrophes, but a fungi that humans helped spread is doing damage. Serious damage. More than 500 species of amphibians are experiencing decline because of chytrid fungi, which infects an amphibian’s skin and disrupts its ability to breathe and absorb water.

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When Saralyn Mark heard the news earlier this month that NASA was planning the first all-women spacewalk at the International Space Station on March 29, she started to worry. Mark, an endocrinologist by training, was a senior medical advisor to NASA for 18 years. In that role, she studied the way men and women’s bodies differ, on space and on earth. Within the agency, she advocated for spacesuit and technological design that took these differences to account.

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In December 2017, roughly a year into his tenure as president, Donald Trump directed NASA to develop a plan to return American astronauts to the moon. Since then, the government has released few details about what this mission would look like. But Tuesday, at the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence doled out a big piece of information: When American astronauts go back to the moon, they will land at the lunar south pole.

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