Science, Spoken

After the storm comes the flood. Hurricane Florence poured 8 trillion gallons of rain onto North Carolina, and now the landscape between the Cape Fear River and the barrier islands of the Carolinas is a waterworld. Because ecological disasters happen in irony loops, that means long-recognized hazards have now become add-on catastrophes. First the floodwaters found thousands of literal cesspools containing the waste of 6 million hogs, and on Friday the waters reached a pool of toxic coal ash.

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The transmission electron microscope was designed to break records. Using its beam of electrons, scientists have glimpsed many types of viruses for the first time. They’ve used it to study parts of biological cells like ribosomes and mitochondria. You can see individual atoms with it. But experts have recently unlocked new potential for the machine. “It’s been a very dramatic and sudden shift,” says physicist David Muller of Cornell University.

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Last weekend, the Delta II rocket—for 30 years a regular fixture on launchpads in the United States—lifted off for the final time. The vehicle, built by the United Launch Alliance, had long carried the title of the most reliable rocket in service. With a record 153 successful launches out of 155 flights, the 125-foot-tall monolith, with its sporty teal-and-white paint scheme, is now officially a figure of the past.

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Helicopters got to Wilmington, North Carolina after a day of isolation; Hurricane Florence made landfall there, and the city, with one foot in the Atlantic and the other in the Cape Fear River, soon became an island. Its main roads underwater, Wilmington went without help until boats and choppers reached it with medical supplies, water, and food. But it only took a day. According to the federal government, that’s actually pretty fast. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept.

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The octopus is unique among animals in that it can essentially turn itself into liquid, Terminator style. Get yourself a 600-pound octopus and leave it unsupervised and the thing will squeeze itself into a quarter-sized tube and melt its way to freedom. And its manipulation superpowers are legendary—cram it into a jar and it’ll unscrew its way out. So it goes when you’ve got no bones. And loosey-goosey octopuses can teach us a thing or two about robots.

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Dodos. Western black rhinoceros. Tasmanian tigers. Bennett's seaweed. The list of extinct animal and plant species goes on and on. It's a tragedy that's only getting worse, we're told, but honestly, I never cared that much. Recently, though, I've found myself sympathizing with those fighting against species extinction. The reason? I'm a computer scientist interested in algorithms.

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WIRED ICON Jill Tarter, cofounder of the SETI Institute NOMINATES Margaret Turnbull, astronomer investigating alien biology October 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.Plunkett + Kuhr DesignersWhen she met Jill Tarter more than two decades ago, one of Margaret Turnbull’s first questions was, “How can somebody work with you?” Tarter was leading the Center for SETI Research at the time; Turnbull was an astronomy student. The next summer, Tarter took Turnbull on as an intern.

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WIRED ICON Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, orbital enthusiast GOES LONG The 10,000-year clock1 Inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis spent the 1980s and early ’90s designing machines worthy of the new millennium. But by 1995 he realized that he had never given much thought to what lay on the other side of the year 2000.

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“I choose to go to the moon.” Those were among the first words uttered on stage Monday night by Yusaku Maezawa, the mysterious passenger whose existence SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had teased on Twitter last week. Maezawa, a Japanese retail entrepreneur and art collector, stood before a small crowd at SpaceX headquarters and announced that he had also secured tickets for several companions on this week-long journey into space: a half-dozen artists that he will later select and invite along.

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Astronomers have finally found the last of the missing universe. It’s been hiding since the mid-1990s, when researchers decided to inventory all the “ordinary” matter in the cosmos—stars and planets and gas, anything made out of atomic parts. (This isn’t “dark matter,” which remains a wholly separate enigma.) They had a pretty good idea of how much should be out there, based on theoretical studies of how matter was created during the Big Bang.

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