Number of words – 1,041 FEW RULES for the cleanroom where NASA’s new InSight Mars lander waits for launch. One, if you must sneeze, sneeze away from the spacecraft. Two, if you drop anything, let one of NASA’s escorts pick it up for you. Three, do not under any circumstances cross the black-and-yellow-striped tape and … Read more

Number of words – 678 The Earth is round but not a perfect round. It is actually a spherical object with a bulge around its axis which won’t make it flat anyhow. But some people still believe that the Earth is flat. If you are not living under a rock, you might have heard about … Read more

Number of words – 1,298 Back when I studied geology in grad school, the long-term future of energy had a single name: nuclear fusion. It was the 1970s. The physicists I studied with predicted that tapping this clean new source of electric power by forcing two nuclei of hydrogen to combine and release massive amounts … Read more

Number of words – 1,289 Around 4 billion years ago, Earth was an inhospitable place, devoid of oxygen, bursting with volcanic eruptions, and bombarded by asteroids, with no signs of life in even the simplest forms. But somewhere amid this chaotic period, the chemistry of the Earth turned in life’s favor, giving rise, however improbably, … Read more

Number of words – 1,302 “We believe that everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls,” Mark Zuckerberg told the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. “We’ve had a lot of these controls in place for years. The [EU General Data Protection Regulation] requires us to do a few more things, and we’re going … Read more

Number of words – 716 Surgeons pack donated organs on ice while racing them to transplant patients but it may be time for a warmer approach. British researchers said Wednesday that keeping at least some livers at body temperature instead may work better. The livers keep functioning until they’re transplanted thanks to a machine that … Read more

Number of words – 745 When White House press secretary Sean Spicer lied about how many people attended US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the counselor to the president, Kellyanne Conway, defended him, saying the made-up numbers were an “alternative fact”. I am delighted to report that we too now have a Kellyanne in our midst, … Read more

Number of words – 1,400 It’s 4 am in the morning. I’m waking up in a Boston hotel room and can only think of one thing: tooth pain. One of my ceramic inlays fell off the evening before. Five hours later, I’m sitting in a dentist’s chair. But instead of having a repair of my … Read more

Number of words – 2,921 Gardening consists largely in protecting plants from blight and weeds, and the same is true of attending to the growth of children. If a plant fails to grow properly because attacked by a pest, only a poor gardener would look for the cause in that plant alone. The good gardener … Read more

Number of words – 290 At Yellowstone, despite the re-introduction of wolves, the willows are not actually recovering as well as was hoped. One reason, Marris found, may be that wolves don’t actually scare elk away from their preferred feeding areas, as earlier research suggested they might. “When elk are really hungry, they’re going to … Read more