What happens when your teenage son is obsessed with nuclear research and wants to experiment in the backyard? How 17-year-old Taylor Wilson found support from his family and a group of scientist mentors: Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg Businessweek, Reuters, Popular Science, City Pages Minneapolis, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Jason Boog.
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For years, doctors attempted to create artificial hearts that mimicked the real heart—using methods that recreate blood pumping. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier instead developed a continuous-flow device that has worked on calves and some humans, including patient Rahel Elmer Reger: The little quilted backpack held two lithium-ion batteries and the HeartMate II’s computerized controller, […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, GQ, The New York Times, Forbes, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Sujatha Santhanakrishnan.
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Life on the job with a team of nuclear divers. As nuclear power plants age, they require more upkeep—and much of that work can happen underwater: Last March, a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to a disastrous series of reactor meltdowns. The consequences were immediate. Germany vowed to phase out nuclear […]
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Excerpt from the new book Spillover, on understanding the threat of RNA viruses like Marburg, Ebola, West Nile and SARS—and how humans can help contain them: During the early 20th century, disease scientists from the Rockefeller Foundation and other institutions conceived the ambitious goal of eradicating some infectious diseases entirely. They tried hard with yellow […]
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An Italian inventor may have created a machine that can generate so much cheap energy, it would put oil companies out of business. Or it all may be a spectacular scam: On the last day of the conference, Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at Langley Research Center, summed up the state of LENR research. Guys like […]
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The Woman Who Counted Fish
Conservation, domestication and the future of the animal kingdom.
