Batteries that use aluminum and oxygen normally live fast and die young. But a new design could help these high-energy devices endure. Aluminum-air batteries are promising candidates for a new generation of non-rechargeable batteries, because they’re super lightweight and compact. The batteries, however, aren’t widely used because their internal components quickly degrade each other. In […]
Sometime around 9 p.m., before the second leg of a cross-country flight, my just-turned-4-year-old decided she had had enough. She let out a scream and went full noodle right at the end of a moving walkway in Chicago Midway. I had the baby in a carrier and a death grip on my older daughter’s hand, […]
A Chinese scientist surprised the world in late November by claiming he had created the first gene-edited babies, who at the time of the announcement were a few weeks old. Scientists and ethicists quickly responded with outrage. In an interview with the Associated Press and in a video posted November 25, Jiankui He announced that […]
Recognize these rows and columns? You may remember a detail or two about this mighty table’s organization from a long-ago chemistry class. Elements are ordered according to their number of protons, or atomic number. Metals are mostly to the left and nonmetals to the right. The column at the far right holds the noble gases, […]
The rate of drug abuse or addiction among physicians is from 30 to 100 times that of the general public…. The American Medical Association estimates that some 60,000 of the country’s 316,000 doctors misuse drugs of various kinds. The drug abuser among physicians has a predisposing personality for addiction, and suffers from overwork and fatigue. […]
Israel’s first lunar lander, Beresheet, appears to have crash-landed on the moon. The spacecraft, launched by the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL, was scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface on April 11. But in the final few minutes of its descent, the spacecraft’s engine stalled. Mission control reset Beresheet to bring its engine back online, […]
Black holes capture everything they encounter. From subatomic particles to stars, solids, gases, liquids and even light, everything falls irretrievably in. And even more assuredly, black holes capture the popular imagination. Thinking about space, as humans have since they first gazed at the points of light decorating the nighttime sky, triggers the mind to imagine […]
A new peek at the genetics of beetle genitals reveals the underpinnings of a battle of the sexes. When mating, males of Japan’s flightless Carabus beetles insert a chitin-covered appendage that, once inside a female, pops out a plump sperm-delivery tube as well as a side projection called a copulatory piece. That piece doesn’t deliver […]
Over 100 hours of scanning has yielded a 3-D picture of the whole human brain that’s more detailed than ever before. The new view, enabled by a powerful MRI, has the resolution potentially to spot objects that are smaller than 0.1 millimeters wide. “We haven’t seen an entire brain like this,” says electrical engineer Priti […]
From the beginning, the moon has been humankind’s perpetual nighttime companion. Accompanied by innumerable points of light, the moon’s luminous disk hovered overhead like a dim substitute for the sun, just with a shape not so constant. Rather the moon waxed and waned, diminishing to a barely discernible sliver before disappearing and then gradually restoring […]