Robert Kremens fights fire with fire. No, really – that’s his job. Kremens sets fires in a host of locations across the US. In April he drove 18 hours from his home in Rochester, New York, to Tall Timbers, a research station in Tallahassee, Florida, to set three or four fires. In mid-May he travelled […]
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It’s been 10 years since Tom Liebert received an experimental cancer vaccine to treat his multiple myeloma, and he still wonders: Did it work? The question nags at him, but not always. After all, he’s still alive and singing with a barbershop quartet in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee. And while he knows multiple myeloma is currently
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If you’re interested in the smallest things known to scientists, there’s something you should know. They are extraordinarily ill-behaved. But that’s to be expected. Their home is the quantum world. These subatomic bits of matter don’t follow the same rules as objects that we can see, feel or hold. These entities are ghostly and strange.
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One winter morning in 2015, as he left for work from his home in Silver Spring, Md., Jonathan Margulies pushed the button on his remote to close his garage door. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. The motor was shot. He ended up replacing it with a “smart” opener that not only lifted and lowered
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When he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, teachers and parents told Helaman Ferguson he would have to choose between art and science. The two fields inhabited different realms, and doing one left no room for the other. “If you can do science and have a lick of sense, you’d better,” he recalled
Creating sculpture with math Read More »
Under cover of darkness, thieves dove into the inky waters of Tennessee’s river sanctuaries and scooped up endangered washboard mussels by the thousands. The thick shells of these animals—some as big as Frisbees— were destined to be cut into cubes, polished round, and implanted in saltwater oysters to grow cultured pearls. “Every one of them
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In more than 20 years as a meteorologist, Joshua Wurman had seen – and chased – more than 150 tornadoes. But the one that hit his pickup truck caught him by surprise. On a warm spring evening in 2012, Wurman was driving down a two-lane highway in the small plains town of Russell, Kansas.
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With round lenses set in super-thick frames, these new eyeglasses look like they belong on a cartoon character. But what they lack in style, they make up for in smart design. Their lenses are made of glycerin — a thick, colorless liquid — encased in clear rubber. And without effort, they will focus on whatever
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A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first of which was shown experimentally 22 years ago, isn’t your garden variety state of matter. It formed at a fraction above absolute zero and only in atoms that act like bosons, one of two types of fundamental particles. Bosons don’t follow the Pauli exclusion principle, which prohibits two particles
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In November 2012, when she was 52 years old, Shannon Semple was diagnosed with a disease she didn’t have. She credits getting a second opinion with saving her life. Semple, a physician assistant at a regional hospital in New Bern, North Carolina, had developed a persistent fever and high blood pressure. She spent a few
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