Science, Spoken

By the end of June, Kajsa Fernström Nåtby was homesick. The native Swede had just finished a 5-month internship with her country’s diplomatic office near the UN headquarters in Manhattan, darting between debates on migration and ocean plastic. Now, her parents were pleading for her to hop on an 8-hour flight across the Atlantic and rush home. But Fernström Nåtby had a different idea.

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In 1911 and 1912, an Austrian physicist named Victor Hess took to the sky in a series of risky hot air balloon trips—for science. Down on land, researchers had been registering signals of mysterious energetic particles on their instruments. They didn’t know what the signals were or where they came from. So in progressively thinning air, more than three miles off the ground, Hess performed experiments to figure out if the particles came from above or below.

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Inside an 80-foot-tall chamber on Lockheed Martin’s Denver-area campus, backgrounded by red-rock ridges, stands a hulking spacecraft. You have to crane your neck to see the top of the apparatus. At the bottom, wires spew from a porthole to snake up and down and away. The cylindrical structure flows into a duller, funnel-like cone, which tapers into a tower with rocket nozzles. Next to it, the blue scaffolds of an indoor crane resemble a launchpad gantry.

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This much is obvious: What the world needs now is less fake news. In general, sure, but particularly on the planet's leading source of information: Facebook. The thing is, to separate the informational wheat from the disinformational chaffe, what you actually need is a better definition of fake news. And that's… well… less obvious. "What does it mean, exactly? It's not always clear.

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Turbulence, the splintering of smooth streams of fluid into chaotic vortices, doesn’t just make for bumpy plane rides. It also throws a wrench into the very mathematics used to describe atmospheres, oceans and plumbing. Turbulence is the reason why the Navier-Stokes equations—the laws that govern fluid flow—are so famously hard that whoever proves whether or not they always work will win a million dollars from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

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Does it matter if you put a video camera near your magnetic compass that is used for navigation? The theoretical answer is "yes." But the practical answer? "Probably not." Now for a detailed explanation! How does a magnetic compass work? So, the Earth is like a giant magnet, just like that bar magnet that picks up paperclips. For this giant Earth-magnet, the north end is in Antartica and the south end is in the Arctic. Yes, the North Pole of the Earth is the south pole of the Earth's magnet.

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Space: final frontier or ultimate tourist destination? Possibly both—provided you have the cash. Already, you can buy tickets for (as-yet-unscheduled) flights aboard SpaceShipTwo, the crew vehicle developed by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. And at a NewSpace conference in Seattle last month, Blue Origin—helmed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—announced that it has plans to sell tickets to wannabe space tourists as early as next year.

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The robot apocalypse is nigh. Boston Dynamics’ robots are doing backflips and opening doors for their friends. Oh, and these 7-foot-long robot arms can lift 500 pounds each, which means they could theoretically crush, like, six humans at once. The robot apocalypse is also laughable. Watch a robot attempt a task it hasn’t been explicitly trained to do, and it’ll fall flat on its face or just give up and catch on fire.

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This storyoriginally appeared on Gristand is part of theClimate Deskcollaboration. Sometimes the most vicious fights occur over the smallest differences. Brutal battles have pitted Catholics that kneel in prayer against Protestant sects that stood before the same God.

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The best questions are always the ones that don't have a single clear answer. In my physics classes, I like to present students with problems that can promote a lively discussion—and to do that, they have to have multiple answers that could possibly make sense. (And they shouldn't involve lots of math, otherwise my students will just get hung up on the calculations.) Here is a version of one of these great questions; it's truly a classic. A human (person A below) has two baseballs.

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