Science

[embedded content] Perpetual motion—it’s fun to say that. For some people, perpetual motion machines hold the secret to everlasting free energy that will save the world. To them, it’s a machine that is just beyond our grasp. If only we could tweak our design just a little bit, it would ...

This is a cooler physics problem than I initially realized. It goes something like this. A block has a mass of 1 kg and is placed on a vertical wall such that the coefficient of static friction is 0.5. With what magnitude force do you need to push on the ...

Last October, a University of California, Berkeley, team headed down to the Arizona desert, plopped their newest prototype water harvester into the backyard of a tract home and started sucking water out of the air without any power other than sunlight. The successful field test of their larger, next-generation harvester ...

In 1956, the renowned cognitive psychologist George Miller published one of the field’s most widely cited papers, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” In it, he argued that although the brain can store a whole lifetime of knowledge in its trillions of connections, the number of items that ...

Find yourself adrift at sea, surrounded by undrinkable water, and you will parch to death. Find yourself lost in a desert and you will meet the same fate, also surrounded by water, also undrinkable. That’s because, even in the driest of lands, the air is loaded with water molecules—they just ...

For 10 years, Andre Igoudala slept terribly. Back in college, the Golden State Warriors forward would play videogames late into the night. Eventually he’d crash, sometimes as late as 4 am, only to wake up a few hours later for practice. Then came class. When he was lucky, he’d squeeze ...

The extrasolar planet WASP-127b is one of the least dense exoplanets ever found. It has a radius 1.4 times greater than Jupiter, but only 20% of its mass. Such a planet has no analogue in the solar system and is rare even within the exoplanet diversity. It takes just over ...

A journalist, a soup exec, and an imam walk into a room. There’s no joke here. It’s just another day at CrisprCon. On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of scientists, industry folk, and public health officials from all over the world filled the amphitheater at the Boston World Trade Center to ...

On Monday at its annual developer’s conference, Apple unveiled several new features designed to help users understand and manage the time they spend on their iOS devices. There’s new time-and location-based Do Not Disturb modes; a suite of notification-management tools; and a clever lock screen feature that organizes your push ...

More than 11 million Americans may have incorrect prescriptions for aspirin, statins and blood pressure medications, according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Their findings are based on an updated set of calculations — known as pooled cohort equations, or PCEs — that ...