Science & Technology

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Nuclear Meltdowns Raised Fears, but Growing Energy Needs May Outweigh Them

Catastrophic accidents at power plants have heightened fears about the safety of nuclear energy, but environmentalists and others are giving it renewed attention as a way to fight global warming.

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Can You Spot Misinformation?

Think you can beat the experts in spotting misinformation? Watch this short video and find out.

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Where's That Photo From? Identify the Source

Online photos can be deceiving. Do you know how to identify the source? This skills-based video can help by teaching you how to use a reverse image search.

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How the Cold War Arms Race Fueled a Sprint to the Moon

After the Soviet Union sent the first human safely into orbit, the U.S. government doubled down on its effort to win the race to the moon.

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Trump and Biden Both Want to Repeal Section 230. Would That Wreck the Internet?

Today’s heated political arguments over censorship and misinformation online are rooted in a 26-word snippet of a law that created the Internet as we know it.

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Health Risks of Vaping: Lessons From the Battle With Big Tobacco

Like cigarette manufacturers decades ago, e-cigarette makers have pitched their products as fun and safe. But nobody knows what the risks are.

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Google Workers Walked Out Over Harassment. A Year Later, What’s Changed?

Sexual harassment. Discrimination. Workplace inequity. Google’s employees demonstrated against unfair practices. But has anything changed?

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Lessons From the Challenger Tragedy

Normalization of deviance, the process of becoming inured to risky actions, is a useful concept that was developed to explain how the Challenger disaster happened.

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Could We Geoengineer Ourselves Out of Climate Change?

Is geo-engineering the climate an answer to global warming? Cold War science has some lessons.

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Are Robots Really Taking Over?

Humans are wary that robots could replace them. So what can we learn from the legendary chess match between a supercomputer and Garry Kasparov?

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Online All the Time? Researchers Predicted It.

Our social media addiction is explained by theories pioneered by B.F. Skinner decades ago.

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Can We Teach Cars to Drive? It's an Uphill Challenge.

Autonomous vehicle technology has gotten better, but how close are we really to a time when a robot chauffeur will be able to safely drive us?

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The Moon’s Lasting Pull

Our moon has winked from the heavens as a symbol and anchor, reminding us not only the cycle of life, but also of danger and death. Scientists have brought the moon into sharper focus, and astronauts have left the first footprints there. But will we ever be able to explain its lasting, mesmerizing power of attraction?

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Space Law: The Next Generation

An international treaty laid out the basics of space law in 1967. But without a lot of case history to go on, lawyers today have looked to maritime law and Arctic exploration as they lay the groundwork for how space will be governed.

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Trump, Measles, and a Study That Fueled Fear

President Donald Trump has long been a critic of childhood vaccines – but then he suddenly changed course, urging parents to vaccinate their children.

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Future of College

Online learning is indeed disrupting college as we know it – but not in the way you might think.

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Future of Water

The increasing scarcity of drinking water is beginning to capture the world’s attention – but surprisingly, an innovative solution might just be found in one of the Earth’s driest places.

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Future of Gaming

As gaming becomes the dominant form of entertainment this century, game developers increasingly track player behavior to tailor experiences that will keep people playing longer and spending more money.

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Genetic Screening: Controlling Heredity

With every new advance in prenatal genetic screening, the ability to prevent suffering has also sparked difficult questions about what should count as “a disease” versus “a difference,” and whether we’re in danger of wiping out certain segments of the population. This story was produced in collaboration with PBS, American Experience.

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Biosphere 2: A Faulty Mars Survival Test Gets a Second Act

NASA isn’t the first organization to experiment with living on Mars – in 1991 eight people sealed themselves inside a giant glass biosphere to practice space living. By the time they emerged two years later, they had “suffocated, starved and went mad.”

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From Y2K to 2038, Lessons Learned from First Computer Crisis

The Y2K bug threatened to wipe out computers and disrupt modern society at the end of the 20th century. We all remember the doomsday hype, but what really happened?

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Where the Debate Over "Designer Babies" Began

Genetic technology is advancing, and critics are warning of a slippery slope. We speak with the scientists working at the forefront of the research, families who have benefited and the first-ever “test-tube” baby to understand the debate.

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Life as the World's First Test Tube Baby

On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown became the first ever so-called “test-tube baby.” Her birth was one of the biggest media stories of the 20th century, and she became famous just by being born.

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Old Attitudes on Addiction Are Changing. So Are Treatments.

Overdose deaths are skyrocketing, forcing researchers to find new ways to think about and treat addiction.

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Selling the Code: Can Genetic Testing Services Really Predict Your Future?

Today, companies market genetic tests for everything from cancer to diet and exercise. But how much can tests like 23andme really predict?

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Fixing the Code: Genetically Engineering Your DNA to Cure Disease

For the past 20 years, scientists have been trying to cure disease by altering DNA. We examine how with CRISPR Cas-9 gene editing and the revival of gene therapy, they’re closer than ever.

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Finding the Code: The Race to Sequence the Human Genome and What It Means

One of biology’s most spectacular achievements – the race to sequence the human genome – was billed as a way to end disease. Here’s where it led.

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Crumbling Bridges: US Infrastructure 10 Years After Minneapolis

A tragic bridge collapse in Miami echoes a similar event in Minnesota over a decade ago, one of the first signs of America’s growing infrastructure problem.

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Raising Doubts About Evolution… in Science Class

A skepticism of science has seeped into the classroom, and it’s revived attacks on one of the most established principles of biology – evolution.

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Future of Work

A remote Oregon mountainside offers a window into the workplace of the future.

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Future of Money

Future of Money, the first in a 5-part series, looks at what ancient stones on a tiny Pacific island can teach us about Bitcoin, blockchains and the future of money.

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Future of Home

Guatemalan homesteaders and a Michigan contractor are riding a wave that could change how our lives are wired.

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Future of Fact

Online manipulation and immersive media have begun to eradicate our shared notion of authenticity and trust. How will society change when we can no longer believe what we see, hear, or think?

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Future of Food

A small South Dakota farm holds lessons for feeding a crowded and less predictable world.

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Freeman Dyson

We’ve teamed with PBS’ American Experience to take a look back at Freeman Dyson, who explored whether interplanetary space travel could be made possible by harnessing the power of a nuclear bomb.

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Nikola Tesla Was a Hundred Years Ahead of His Time

Wireless power seems cutting edge, but it was actually pioneered more than 100 years ago by Nikola Tesla. We’ve teamed up with the American Experience to explore how Tesla’s technology is being used today.

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LSD and Cats

The early science of hallucinogens in the 1950s and ’60s was “kind of a Wild West free-for-all.” For more info on the science of spiders and drugs, visit www.drpeterwitt.com.

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Teaching Robots to do Easy Stuff is Still Hard

The robotics team from M.I.T recovers from disaster at the robot Olympics.

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Machine trains self to beat humans at world's hardest game

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Runaway Plane

For decades the United States has been on a quest to perfect stealth technology, but development of the F-35 fighter jet shows just how complicated dreams can become.

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When Dreams Fly

More than 40 years ago, Pierre Sprey set out to build the ultimate fighter jet.

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What Is a Healthy Diet? The Answers Are Unsatisfying

Thirty-five years after the first dietary guidelines, how much do we really know about the science behind a healthy diet?

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Is the Key to Obesity All in Your Gut?

Is there a hidden cause of obesity? A professor at Stanford thinks the answer might lie with the 100 trillion microbes living in our bodies.

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The Unexpected Science of Exercise

Does exercise really make you lose weight? One scientist went to Africa and found an unexpected answer.

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Fire Safety and Chemicals in our Clothes

There are over 80,000 chemicals in use today. The story of TRIS, removed from children’s pajamas in the 1970s, illustrates just how hard it is to regulate chemicals, or to even know if they’re safe.

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Power Line Fears

News media coverage in the 1980s and early 1990s fueled fears of a national cancer epidemic caused by power lines and generated a debate that still lingers today.

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The Surprising Technological Revolution Launched by the Air Bag

How did cars become “computers on wheels,” so automated that some are about to start driving themselves? The story begins forty-five years ago with a quest to make cars safer and the battle over the air bag.

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Flawed Evidence: The Limits of Science in the Crime Lab

Before DNA testing, prosecutors relied on less sophisticated forensic techniques, including microscopic hair analysis, to put criminals behind bars. But how reliable was hair analysis?

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Blackout: Understanding the US Power Grid's Vulnerability from the 2003 Failure

In 2003, a blackout crippled areas of the U.S. and Canada, leaving some 50 million people in the dark. Years later, we are still grappling with concerns over the vulnerability of our power grid.

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How Cloning a Sheep Set Off a Sci Fi Panic

In 1997, Scottish scientists announced they had cloned a sheep and named her Dolly, and sent waves of future shock around the world that continue to shape frontiers of science today.

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GMO Food Fears and the First Test Tube Tomato

In the 1990s, a bunch of gene jockeys brought the first genetically engineered food to market. The business crashed but biotech science has flourished far beyond the produce aisle.