After eight years of experimenting with flames in space, NASA lit a fire inside a cargo spacecraft for the last time and sent its Saffire experiment toward a burning reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Former NASA Astronaut Leland Melvin on the “Overview Effect” NASA’s Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiments, also known as Saffire, came to a fitting … Read more
A coin flip is the quintessence of fifty-fifty chance, but a large group of researchers recently overturned its equitable reputation. Recording a painstaking 350,000+ coin flips by hand, they found that almost 51% of tosses land with the same side facing upward as before the flip (i.e. if the coin shows heads at the start … Read more
Halfway into a simulated Mars expedition, two men and two women living together in isolation have lost a crucial piece of equipment. “I may have accidentally murdered one of our robots,” said Dr. Nathan Jones, the medical officer for the crew, who described the incident as a “traumatic death.” Anca Selariu, the science officer, joked … Read more
Plasma could be wrangled to collide photons and yield matter, according to physicists who ran simulations to explore the practical applications of a world-famous equation. Gizmodo’s Top Five Gadgets of 2023 The equation at work here is Einstein’s E = mc^2, which establishes a relationship between energy and mass; specifically, the equation holds that energy … Read more
BREDA, Netherlands — A paradox at the heart of the Netherlands’ permissive pot policy went up in smoke Friday in two Dutch cities as “coffeeshops” began selling the country’s first legally cultivated cannabis as part of an experiment to regulate the trade. The experiment could mark the beginning of the end for a long-standing legal … Read more
Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that way it’s like limestone, which farmers often use to improve … Read more
SKELLEFTEA, Sweden — It is right to say that the construction of one of the tallest timber buildings in the world — the Sara Cultural Center here — began when a pine seedling was planted in a nearby commercial forest almost a century ago. Green Spaces Blueprints for a more resilient planet People had no … Read more
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When you think about it, adding two extra buttons to a keyboard, a peripheral that already has dozens of keys built in, is kind of ridiculous. Why add more buttons when so many modern keyboards already let you customize their existing keys to do exactly what you want? Are you really so attached to your … Read more
New research might complicate our understanding of ketamine as a potential treatment for depression. The study found that people with depression who were either given saline or ketamine before undergoing anesthesia for a surgery experienced a similar improvement in their symptoms afterward. The findings suggest that at least some of the therapeutic benefits seen with … Read more
With little fanfare, the European Union has launched a huge climate experiment. On October 1, the EU kicked off the initial phase of a Europe-wide tax on carbon in imported goods. This marks the first time a carbon border tax has been tried at this scale anywhere in the world. Europe’s experiment could have ripple … Read more