Technology

By Joel Achenbach Carl Sagan died 20 years ago Tuesday, at the far-too-young age of 62. He had many strong beliefs, none greater than his conviction that science was a candle in the dark. There’s a lot of darkness these days — science denialism in its various forms. It’s certainly not a novel development, but …

By Rebecca Searles When Tobias van Schneider slips on a virtual reality headset to play Google’s Tilt Brush, he becomes a god. His fingertips become a fiery paintbrush in the sky. A flick of the wrist rotates the clouds. He can jump effortlessly from one world that he created to another. When the headset comes …

By Megan Garber and Ross Andersen This conversation discusses plot points of Arrival, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact. What if there’s more? What if, somewhere out there, there are others? What if, one day, everything—really, everything—changes? Contact with extraterrestrial life is an ongoing theme in film, and there’s a good reason for …

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus Prologue: You Are What You Have Read Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular …

By Nicholas Wade At the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., scientists are trying to get time to run backward. Biological time, that is. In the first attempt to reverse aging by reprogramming the genome, they have rejuvenated the organs of mice and lengthened their life spans by 30 percent. The technique, which requires genetic …

By Dennis Overbye It’s the beginning of a spectacular, almost circuslike end for NASA’s Cassini mission. For 12 years Cassini has been buzzing about Saturn, its rings and its moons. As a result we know that there are methane lakes on Titan and jets of water shooting from Enceladus, and the rings themselves have warps, …

By Matt Richtel As Chuck Peal lay in a Waterbury, Conn., emergency room one Sunday in early September, doctors furiously tried to make sense of his symptoms. Mr. Peal, 61, appeared to be dying, and they were not sure why. He slipped in and out of consciousness, his blood pressure plummeted, his potassium levels soared …

By Erika Hayasaki The slippery baby in the plastic blue tub cringes when her daddy, holding a drippy orange washcloth, leaks a bit of water in her face. He is bathing her for the first time. “Make sure you get the folds in her neck, where milk hides,” I say, video recording the scene on …

By Jamie Holmes It’s bad enough that expertise is under attack these days from populist political movements that dismiss specialist opinion as just another establishment ruse. But lately expertise is being criticized from another direction, too — from would-be defenders of science. Consider the recent controversy over flossing. In August, a widely read Associated Press …

By Ian Sample In what could be a fresh chapter in the never-ending story of the search for eternal youth, scientists are to tinker with people’s blood in the hope of slowing down the ageing process and preventing age-related diseases. Researchers in California plan to launch a clinical trial of the radical – and highly …

By Sarah Kaplan Imagine if scientists found out that a massive asteroid was on a collision course with Earth and would strike somewhere near Los Angeles by September 2020. What could humanity do? Not much. At least, that was the result of a day-long tabletop exercise coordinated by NASA and FEMA late last month. In …

By John Markoff SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft is putting its considerable financial and engineering muscle into the experimental field of quantum computing as it works to build a machine that could tackle problems beyond the reach of today’s digital computers. There is a growing optimism in the tech world that quantum computers, superpowerful devices that …