The Roman Pantheon’s unreinforced concrete dome has stood for nearly 1,900 years and remains the largest of its kind on Earth, partly because its builders mixed in lighter volcanic rock near the top and left a 27-foot hole open at its center.
The Pantheon’s concrete dome has been holding itself up in the middle of Rome since roughly 128 CE, when the emperor Hadrian’s builders closed the last ring of a 142-foot span with a 27-foot hole punched through its crown. Nearly…
Two-Week Brain Tumor Test, Done in Twelve Minutes
The glass slide is nothing special. A sliver of brain tumor, fixed in paraffin, sliced thinner than a hair and washed in the same two dyes pathologists have leaned on for more than a century: hematoxylin to stain the cell…
An Unmanned Rooftop Machine Runs All Day on Sunlight and Air
On a partly cloudy morning in Osaka, on the rooftop of a university building, a squat box of titanium and plastic membranes began quietly turning carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. No one was watching over it. No one needed to….
To Find New Physics, an AI First Has to Forget the Old Physics It Learned
Teach a machine everything we know about the universe, and you might expect it to spot the cracks in that knowledge faster. The opposite can happen. A neural network trained on the standard picture of the cosmos sometimes turns that…
Even Americans Who Love AI Want It Reined In
Find the person you know who is most sold on artificial intelligence. The one who runs everything through a chatbot, who tells you the technology has changed how they work, who rolls their eyes when you fret about it. Now…
Chemists Can Now Rewrite a Drug Molecule in a Single Step Instead of Building It From Scratch
The vial does not look like much. A pinch of paraformaldehyde, a splash of solvent, a known antidepressant tipped in as its hydrochloride salt, and an unremarkable hydrocarbon you could buy by the barrel. Seal it, warm it to 75…
A Brain Implant That Listens for Every Footstep Cuts Falls in Parkinson’s
The swing of a leg lasts less than half a second. In that sliver of time, the foot leaves the ground, travels forward, and lands again, and the brain has to orchestrate the whole thing while keeping the body upright….
World’s Sharpest Climate Models Can Finally See Storms, But Keep Getting Four Things Wrong
For decades, a global climate model saw the planet the way an early digital camera did: about ten thousand pixels stretched across the entire Earth. At that resolution a monster thunderstorm cluster, the kind that drowns cities and snaps power…
Fluffy Fabric Keeps Heat In When It’s Freezing and Lets It Out When It’s Not
Pull a tuft of it apart and it looks like cotton wool, all airy white fibres that spring back when you squeeze them. Roll it into a ball, flatten it into a sheet, bend it round your finger, it doesn’t…
Hiding Electronics Inside a Cockroach Makes It a Better Robot
The gap was eight millimetres. The cockroach was taller than that, and it knew it, in whatever way a cockroach knows things. It lowered its head, swept its antennae across the underside of the shutter blocking the corridor, and shoved….
