Enlarge (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt) The Department of Justice late Tuesday announced that it disagrees with a Florida judge’s ruling that abruptly nixed the federal travel mask mandate. However, the department said it would not immediately seek an appeal or a stay that would keep the mandate in place while litigation continued. Instead, the […]
Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link) After spending three episodes looking to the heavens—first at dark matter, then Mars, then black holes—our intrepid host Paul Sutter now turns his gaze to a more terrestrial topic: Why are we here? And I don’t mean in a Nietzschean sense (and if […]
Enlarge / Two views of hardware from the world’s largest electron microscope, which loomed over the event. (credit: Dhananjay Khadilkar) C64H22CuF6N4: it is both a chemical formula and the technical specification of a car that won the 24-hour race held recently in France. No, not the one in Le Mans. This particular event, Nanocar Race II—dubbed […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Earth Day is April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their […]
Enlarge / A bowl of General Mills Lucky Charms cereal. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan) The end of the rainbow may not have a pot of gold—but a pot of something entirely different. Thousands of people have reported stomach pains, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea after eating Lucky Charms, the “magically delicious” sugar-coated cereal fronted by […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty) According to the FDA, the average American eats 3,400 mg of sodium a day, despite the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommending less than 2,300 mg per day and WHO recommending under 5,000 mg per day. Moving down to roughly a teaspoon of table salt a day can make your tastebuds weep from […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA/CXO/University College London/W. Dunn et al; Optical: W. M. Keck Observatory ) Late in 2021, the astronomy community released its decadal survey , a roadmap of scientific priorities for the next 10 years, which describes the hardware we’d need to build in order to achieve them. That survey was focused on distant objects […]
If you have to test the mechanics of an Oreo, what better fixture is there than an oreometer? Everyone has their preferred method for snacking on tasty Oreo cookies: twisting the two halves apart to eat the creme filling first, perhaps, before dunking the chocolate wafers in a glass of milk. But you may have […]
Enlarge / Vice President Kamala Harris receives an unclassified briefing in the Command Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Space Force Base on April 18, 2022. (credit: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) The United States will no longer conduct anti-satellite tests, Vice President Kamala Harris announced Monday. With this declaration, the country […]
(credit: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.12.021007 ) Science is often viewed as utilitarian. We explore the natural world so that we can plunder its secrets for our own benefit. Indeed, this is often precisely the sort of science that funding agencies seek. But, for most scientists, the utilitarian comes second to other motivating factors: The observation of beauty and […]