Last week NASA announced four finalists for its budget-friendly series of Discovery class missions. The first is called VERITAS (stand for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy), which would orbit Venus and map the surface of this hot world. Another possible Venus mission called DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmospheric Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry,…
Category: Science and Nature
Recycled Nuclear Waste Will Power a New Reactor
Idaho National Laboratory sprawls across nearly 900 square miles in the southeastern corner of its namesake state. Home to America’s first nuclear power plant, INL has served as the proving grounds for the future of nuclear energy technology for decades. Along the way, the lab has generated hundreds of tons of uranium waste that is…
To Combat Sexual Assault, Women Are Resorting to Electric Shock Underwear
Ekaterina Romanovskaya froze. It was a warm and sunny day in late May 2000, and the 25-year-old interpreter had just dropped her 3-year-old daughter off at kindergarten in their hometown of Volograd, a city in southwestern Russia, when a man she had never seen before appeared behind her. “We need to talk about the little…
What Is a Quarantine?
As the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues its relentless spread across the globe—the World Health Organization officially declared it a pandemic Wednesday—governments have been struggling mightily to get the crisis under control. Their ultimate goal isn’t to stop the virus in its tracks, as cases have already spread too widely for that, but to “flatten the…
Is It Time for an Elbow Bump Emoji?
Before all the classes got canceled, Stephen Paul Wright, an art director in New York City, went to an OrangeTheory studio for a workout. The instructors have a habit of high-fiving everyone as they walk in, but this time, it was all elbow bumps. No one wanted to touch each other, even if they wanted…
Wash Your Hands—but Beware the Electric Hand Dryer
The spread of Covid-19 has turned us into a nation of hand-washing obsessives, citizens who vigorously interlace our fingers and circle-scrub our thumbs with an exacting, anxiety-fueled intensity. But it’s not over when you flip off the faucet: Drying your hands matters too, because damp skin provides a hospitable environment for microorganisms and, as a…
How Wikipedia Prevents the Spread of Coronavirus Misinformation
“This edit was VERY poor,” wrote James Heilman, an emergency room doctor in British Columbia, to a Wikipedia contributor who had made a couple of changes toward the end of the article on the new coronavirus outbreak. Those edits recommended a special type of mask for blocking the transmission of the virus from those who…
WIRED’s Video Guide to Extreme Indoor Activities
Though it’s necessary to stay home and minimize person-to-person contact during a pandemic, the inescapable reality of “sheltering in place” is: It’s boring. The trick is to defeat the dullness. At WIRED, we’ve always loved a good indoor activity, and we’ve made lots of videos over the years of master-class practitioners doing everything from building…
The Problem With Trump’s Triage Testing
Triage entered the lexicon of the coronavirus era last Friday, when President Donald Trump claimed that Google is working on a tool to determine who’s eligible for testing. In this case, only people who display serious symptoms will be able to get a test for the novel coronavirus. But triage—or targeted—testing is the wrong approach…
In Human Nature, Crispr’s Origin Story Comes to Life
Midday light streams through the windows of the Stanford Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California. In a bed too big for his child-sized body, David Sanchez sleeps among a tangle of tubes plugged into a port in his chest. A machine nearby draws blood out of his veins, exchanging his deformed red blood cells for…