A Chilean scientist believes manipulating extremophile bacteria to eat metal can save the environment from mining waste.
Sitting in her laboratory 1,100 kilometers north of Santiago, Nadac Reales watched bacteria devour a nail in only 3 days. It was an idea she’d had since university. Working closely with her country’s many mining plants to increase the efficiency of copper extraction, she focused on using microorganisms to help…
The extraordinarily dense insides of neutron stars serve up large portions of the strongest known substances: quantum spaghetti, lasagna, bucatini, gnocchi, and waffles for dessert.
Neutron stars are deliciously weird. The post-supernova collapsed core of supermassive stars, they rotate upwards of 43,000 times per minute (24% the speed of light), are 10 times hotter than the Sun, can have magnetic fields 10 15times stronger than Earth’s, and are 10 14times denser than water. In fact…
The lead-crime hypothesis suggests that childhood lead exposure leads to higher crime rates roughly 20 years later.
Through the 1970s and 80s crime rates in New York City skyrocketed. Murders, robberies, and rapes were up 5-fold, 14-fold, and 4-fold respectively since the 1960s, leaving residents feeling like hostages in their own city. …
The US Founding Fathers were certainly religious, but most questioned the Bible, the intervention of God in the affairs of man, and even the divinity of Christ.
After the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Alexander Hamilton was asked why God wasn’t mentioned in the country’s founding document. “We forgot” he responded snarkily. This may come as a surprise to some, as it seems to be common knowledge in some circles that the US Founding Fathers were devout Christians…
Texas Republicans overhauled state election laws, adding unnecessary barriers for marginalized voters and undermining the basic tenets of democracy.
Texas House Democrats fled to Washington DC for 6 weeks to avoid voting on the new bill. After two special sessions, though, Republicans forced a vote and passed the bill to overhaul state election laws in a late-night win, 80–41. Democrats fought so hard against it because they believe it…
Thanks to staggeringly large, high-resolution data sets, biologists can understand genetic diversity patterns across scales never before possible.
Since it’s beginning in the 1920s, the field of population genetics has had a data problem. …
And they’re not good: 241,000 dead, 2.5 million displaced, $2.4 trillion spent (and counting), and a more powerful Taliban than ever before.
After 20 years of war and occupation, President Biden made the difficult decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. Within 10 days, though, Taliban forces seized the country with little opposition from the Afghan army, leaving many to wonder what the point of the war was. …
Vaccine mandates aren’t new, they’re not a violation of your rights, they’ve been upheld by the Supreme Court, and they’re necessary to stop the pandemic. Get over it and get vaccinated.
Vaccine mandates are as old as the United States. The first one came from George Washington, as he wintered the Continental Army in Morristown, New Jersey, only a few months into the Revolutionary War.
Sitting in his make-shift quarters in January 1777, after the important victories in Trenton and Princeton…
Thomas Paine, the intellectual architect of the American Revolution, made a logical and impassioned plea for providing everyone with guaranteed income.
Thomas Paine arrived in the colonies in 1774 in the middle of rising tension between the British crown and the New World colonists. The Boston Tea Party had already happened, and the colonists were suffering from the resulting Intolerable Acts imposed to punish and humiliate them. …
With a 3rd term on the horizon, Washington chose to recede from public life and to issue a dire warning for his fledgling country.
It was 1796, a few months before the election, when famed general and US founding father George Washington turned down his chance for a 3rd term at the helm of the executive branch. Before leaving public life to satisfy his “ardent wishes to pass through the vale of life in…
