wiredscience

Since I relaunched Beyond Apollo as a WIRED Science Blog in March 2012, I have sought to post at least weekly. There are, after all, so many aspects of space history to write about, so many tales to tell, that I could write something new every day for a decade and only just get started. […]

THAILAND – In the Garden of the Dragon from Justin Heaney on Vimeo. Dark alleyways; a night-time traffic jam; beggars crawling on the street. These aren’t exactly the sorts of things that draw most tourists to Thailand, but digital content producer Justin Heaney dove into the country’s gritty underbelly and came back with a tense, […]

Could a spinning human slow down the Earth? Theoretically, yes. But in practice, the amount of spin you'd have to give would be so monstrous that it is nearly impossible.

In a way, a game like basketball is a physics geek’s delight. It’s a playground where you can apply physics principles to try and get some added insight to the game. Here are 5 things you didn't know about the physics of basketball.

Jumping spiders are the corgis of the spider world. With their tiny size and spiky hairdos, almost everyone finds them at least a little bit cute. A new video lets you see inside a spider's head and understand why they tilt their faces to see better.

Whether it is volcanologists or the public, giant volcanic eruptions are captivating events. These massive events can have a global impact and the idea of a massive ash plume towering 30 kilometers or more over the landscape is an awe-inspiring notion. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that whenever a large volcanic deposit is examine, people […]

Barcelona is one of Europe's most vibrant cities. Tourists flock here for the superb restaurants, lively nightlife, and a chance to check out the stunningly creative architecture of Antoni Gaudí. But the city's historical and cultural roots run deep, and a new interactive map aims to make it easier for visitors and locals alike to explore the city's landmarks.

Bonobos have earned a reputation as a "sexy" ape. Sexual activity — in many creative forms — plays a large role in bonobo society. Sexual contacts occur often, in virtually all partner combinations and in a slew of different positions. One of the main functions of this behavior, besides fun, is to alleviate conflicts that arise within the group.

Osmia bicolor is one of the first bees of spring, emerging as early as February in their native range of South England and Wales. As solitary bees, there are no queens and workers; females build their nests alone. Males emerge, mate, and then die. What makes these little bees so captivating is where they make their nests. They repurpose empty snail shells, belonging to a small group of bees known as "helicophiles" (snail-lovers). As a single mom, letting a snail do all the construction work for a home seems much more sensible than building your own from scratch.

Glen McLaughlin wandered into a London map shop in 1971 and discovered something strange. On a map from 1663 he noticed something he'd never seen before: California was floating like a big green carrot, untethered to the west coast of North America. He bought the map and hung it in his entryway, where it quickly became a conversation piece. It soon grew into an obsession. McLaughlin began to collect other maps showing California as an island.

Imagine a fleet of 60 six-mile-long satellites beaming 300 gigawatts of electricity to Earth. It sounds like sci-fi, but NASA and the Department of Energy looked into just such a system in the heady post-Apollo, pre-Shuttle days of the 1970s.

A new report from the CDC and Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network shows that incidents of food-related bacterial illness are increasing in the U.S. Even worse, it's getting harder to identify exactly which strain is causing more and more of these infections.

A chorus of frog chirps erupts from a pond after winter. After checking what the sound was with followers on Twitter, our blogger Aatish Bhatia learned that this frog species spends a week frozen alive before emerging and producing perfectly timed, perfectly pitched croaks to woo females.

Neuroscientists devised an experiment specifically meant to induce frustration in participants, in order to scan their brains and understand frustration. But the final conclusions of the study are very frustrating themselves. In other words: HULK FRUSTRATED BY FRUSTRATING BRAIN SCAN STUDY.

Galapagos Islands' Giant Tortoises are iconic species that have been decimated by pests introduced by people. Here, we take a look inside the breeding effort to revive these vulnerable creatures.

Captain America's shield is made of a strange substance called vibranium, which has the ability to absorb energy into its molecular bonds. As physicist Rhett Allain explains, this essentially turns the shield into a gigantic star-spangled supercapacitor.

Maggots can generate their own heat. Scientists tested the amount of heat that a mass of maggots makes in order to better understand forensic investigations. The results could help police identify precisely when a body died as well as allow us to calculate the amount of maggots needed to turn into a flaming ball of insect larvae.

Hard to believe that April is half over. For me, it is equally hard to believe that we got ~1 inch of snow overnight here in central Ohio when it was 77F on Sunday. Updates on some volcanic activity (and one eruption that isn’t happening): Perú Explosive activity continues at Perú’s Ubinas as well. A state of emergency […]

UPDATE: I was totally wrong.  Instead of changing my error, I left it along with an update at the bottom.  The Car Talk puzzler is NOT BOGUS.  Instead, I am BOGUS. Don’t get me wrong. I love Car Talk. Who doesn’t love this show? I think this is the only podcast I listen to in […]

In the heart of downtown Los Angeles, hiding in plain sight, some of the city’s most unique architectural treasures are gathering dust. The Roxie, the Tower, the Million Dollar, the Palace: these and dozens of other historic theaters have fallen far since their 1920s and ‘30s heydays, as money and glamor fled to the city’s […]

Tonight is Passover. And the most well-known food of the holiday is matzah, the cracker-like flatbread. Within this food we can find some complexity science goodness. At one part of the Seder meal, we break one piece of matzah into half. Now, for anyone who has actually tried this, one recognizes the great difficulty in […]

Sure, the textbooks all say that the Earth orbits the Sun. But how do we know that? More importantly, how can YOU tell? Here are a few things you can do to convince yourself.

As some of you might be aware, the WIRED website underwent some cleanup and upgrades a couple of weeks ago. Those fixes started to take effect and all us bloggers began to feel our way around a new blogging interface; then, out of nowhere, we got slammed with a malware attack. I’m a simple historian, […]

Chameleons are famous for their quick color-changing abilities. It's a common misperception that they do this to camouflage themselves against a background. In fact, chameleons mostly change color to regulate their temperatures or to signal their intentions to other chameleons.

Really? REALLY? Next you'll tell me people smoke roaches. Oh, wait....

A new study just published in EuroSurveillance, the peer-reviewed journal of Europe’s equivalent of the CDC, raises the possibility that even if you are doing the right thing, you could pick up some very nasty stuff while you’re abroad — and that what you bring back could endanger not only you, but others around you as well.

I'm not really a product review kind of blogger (maybe you already know that). However, when I got an email asking if I wanted to review a quiet lawn mower I said "yes." Why this product? Well, I thought to myself "they won't really ship me a lawn mower, will they?" They did. That's fine because I like to challenge myself with new things.

Big fierce animals are rare...unless they are GIANT ANTS.

There are only two ways you can see something in the world. The first is to have an object that emits light. The light from this object then enters your eye and your brain interprets it. Examples of this type of object are lights and your computer monitor. For all of these types of objects, […]

After Yellowstone’s sizable earthquake on March 30, there was a lot of craziness. People were throwing around theories that animals were running from the park in fear, that the earthquake would trigger an eruption and that helium emissions were rising in the caldera, meaning an eruption was coming. Now, in my fervor to stifle such […]

News from the Minnesota Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: A Minnesota traveler returning from Africa has been hospitalized with what the CDC confirms to be Lassa fever, a viral hemorrhagic fever that is often lumped together with Ebola hemorrhagic fever, though they are caused by different organisms. Given […]

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST for short) is preparing a major report on the problem of antibiotic resistance. The report won’t be published for a few months, but today PCAST held one of its periodic meetings, and aired what it thinks the most important issues are going to be. For […]

Sometimes, even the best-intentioned TV shows muck up some pretty basic physics.

You are no doubt familiar with π Day, the celebration of this mathematical constant on March 14th. But what about other constant holidays? Mike Vitevitch, a cognitive scientist at the University of Kansas and friend of mine, recommends we start celebrating April 6th as Feigenbaum Constant Day. Unlike π, which nearly everyone is aware of, […]

Let’s wrap up the week with some volcano news: Perú Villages around Ubinas had to be evacuated after explosions rocked the volcano — combined with the elevated seismicity, all signs that the volcano may have larger eruptions in the works. However, it seems like a lack of response from Peruvian authorities have hampered the evacuation. […]

Chile's recent earthquake sent a tsunami surging toward the Galapagos Islands. How well did the local tsunami warning systems perform?

This might be some of strangest news I’ve seen in a while, but apparently the world’s smallest volcano has been discovered in the forests of southern Colombia. A group of scientists from the Universidad de Bolivar in Pasto were studying the habits of some of the ubiquitous leaf cutter ants when they stumbled across a […]

For those who yearn to know more about the worlds of Westeros and Essos, the detailed and often mysterious official maps for the series may hold clues not only for where the show is heading, but what lies in the dark lands at the edge of the known world where not even the books have dared to tread.

Hello, Beyond Apollo fans! WIRED has been doing some updates & maintenance all over its site over the past couple of weeks, so I’ve been staying out of the way until the dust clears. I’ve been at work on several posts; and, as often happens when I work on posts with no immediate likelihood of […]

Over the weekend, the Yellowstone National Park felt its strongest earthquake since 1980 — a M4.7 event located just north of the Norris Geyser Basin at a depth of ~7 km. As you can guess, with such an earthquake, the Yellowstone-fearing throngs got a little nervous. However, this earthquake is nothing out of the ordinary for Yellowstone, even if it is larger than your average seismic event in or near the caldera.