Physicists Get Close to Knowing the Mass of the Neutrino

Of all the known particles in the universe, only photons outnumber neutrinos. Despite their abundance, however, neutrinos are hard to catch and inspect, as they interact with matter only very weakly. About 1,000 trillion of the ghostly particles pass through your body every second—with nary a flinch from even a single atom.Original story reprinted with…

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Stochastic disaster

As I write this, massive fires are erupting all over California, and massive protests are erupting all over the world. Is the former a facet of the climate crisis? Is…

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Scientists Take Baby Steps Toward Extraterrestrial Babies

In February, the Spanish pilot Daniel González climbed into a small aerobatic plane at the Sabadell Airport outside Barcelona and fired up its single prop engine. Once he was in the air, González began a steep climb for about six seconds before entering a nosedive. The plane’s rapid descent created a microgravity environment in the…

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How to Change the Default Apps on All Your Devices

Your computer, your phone and your tablet all have default apps, the preloaded software that springs into action whenever a specific task needs doing. Click an image you've just received over email, for example, and it opens in your default image viewer. Follow a web link someone sends you, and your default web browser opens…

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Meet Utah’s next unicorn

Weave, a developer of patient communications software focused on the dental and optometry market, was the first Utah-headquartered company to graduate from Y Combinator in 2014. Now, it’s poised to…

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Ocean Cleanup’s New Plastic-Catcher … Kinda Already Exists?

Whereas Mr. Trash Wheel was purpose-built for Baltimore, The Ocean Cleanup designed its barge to be mass-producible. And it’s significantly higher tech: Baltimore’s barge uses a water wheel to power its conveyor belt, with solar power as backup, while The Interceptor is fully solar powered. Trash flows up its belt (Boyan Slat, founder and CEO…

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Space Photos of the Week: Moon Walks for Moon Rocks

The International Astronautical Congress met in Washington, DC, last week, and the conference was attended by NASA, the European Space Agency, and several private spaceflight companies, and the takeaway was clear: Humans are going back to the moon—that’s the plan, at least.NASA recently announced a human exploration program called Artemis, which is aiming for a…

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Algorithms Are Not What You Smartypants Think They Are

The next time someone mentions an "algorithm" in workaday chitchat—so, in T minus 17 seconds—ask if they have any idea what in the godforsaken digitized hell they're talking about. “Um, you know, something something Netflix,” most will manage to mumble. Others (hipsters, mostly) will say the real question is what to do about the doomier…

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