Author: Crop Protection
In order to replicate lightning, Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, set up a flask in 1953, filled it with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water—the approximate chemical composition that scientists thought existed on the early Earth—and passed an electric current through it. A week later, amino acids were produced by the mixture. From nothing recognizable as life, the components of life had come together. Miller had created something in a laboratory that, in theory, seemed to be at the very limit of what science was meant to accomplish. The experiment gained notoriety. Then, for the better…
The majority of investors dismissed Western Digital’s announcement in February of last year that it was dividing into two distinct businesses as corporate housekeeping, which produces a brief flurry of analyst notes before being forgotten. In a world that seemed to be moving away from hard drives, Western Digital was a hard drive manufacturer. The flash memory company being spun off, SanDisk, was a storage brand that most people were familiar with from the tiny cards found in their digital cameras. There didn’t seem to be any clear momentum in either half of the split. SanDisk had increased by almost…
Weight-loss medications don’t have a proud past. Beginning in the 1940s, “rainbow diet pills” containing amphetamines and diuretics were marketed to American women with the air of a breakfast cereal. Let’s fast-forward to the 1990s and the emergence of fen-phen, a combination medication that caused significant weight loss as well as severe lung and heart damage in enough patients to lead to widespread legal action and an FDA withdrawal. Over the course of several decades, the pattern remained largely consistent: a medication shows promise, becomes widely prescribed, and then reveals a side effect profile that can range from problematic to…
It all began with an error. While pursuing her doctorate at the University of Guelph in Ontario in 2022, Sabrina Rondeau conducted research on the effects of pesticides on bumblebees in the winter. Her setup was simple: to replicate the cold, dark conditions of a natural burrow, queens were placed in refrigerated tubes filled with soil. Four of those tubes eventually had water seeping into them. The queens were completely immersed. When Rondeau came upon what must have appeared to be a botched experiment, she discovered something completely unexpected. The bees were still alive. sitting there, seemingly unfazed, underwater. One…
Imagine an 1864 Confederate POW camp. Because of the extreme overcrowding, each prisoner took up about the same amount of space as a grave, according to historians. Union soldiers subsisted on meager corn rations, and many of them perished from scurvy and dysentery as their bodies deteriorated in environments that were, by definition, meant to break people. The men who survived had obvious consequences, including reduced prospects, shortened life expectancies, and poor health. That is not shocking. Surprisingly, the damage didn’t end with the survivors, as researchers piecing together historical mortality records eventually found. Compared to the general population, their…
There is a moment that is consistently described in various ways by various people, but it always involves the same fundamental surprise. When a software engineer answers the phone or opens their email, they may find a billionaire on the other end. They may be mid-career, just past their PhD, or even still enrolled in graduate school. not a hiring manager. not in charge of HR. The CEO. For myself. making a job offer to them. Speaking to Business Insider, a tech employee recalled how peculiar it was to get a direct call from Sam Altman while conducting an interview…
Somewhere in the hours before the first strikes on Iranian targets in early March 2026, a large language model was processing battlefield data, synthesizing intelligence feeds, and running scenarios that would have taken a room full of analysts the better part of a day. The model wasn’t a classified government system built over decades in some secure facility in Virginia. It was Claude — made by Anthropic, a San Francisco AI company — running inside military networks, helping commanders decide where to hit and when. The fact that President Trump had, around the same time, ordered federal agencies to begin…
A biologist by the name of Stephen Austad placed a wager back in 2000. He bet that the first person to live to be 150 years old was already on the planet, having been born, breathing, and aging through whatever stage of childhood or middle age they were in at the time. Based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Austad researches the biology of aging. According to most accounts, he is not the kind of person who makes snap judgments. The wager, which was made with a coworker, was designed to pay out in 2150. He might be correct.…
On the outside, a building in East Setauck, New York, doesn’t seem like much. No glass towers, no ticker crawl visible from the street, no buzz of activity on the trading floor. Renaissance Technologies has always operated away from the Wall Street theater, using models, data, and mathematics to accomplish tasks that most professional investors spend their careers attempting to replicate but never quite managing. There has never been any shouting or televised predictions. Therefore, it’s important to pay attention when Renaissance files a 13F and the figures indicate a $520 million wager on a single memory chip company. Silently.…
A faint signal, a thin line buried in radio data, emerged late at night in a quiet office. It didn’t appear dramatic. Alarms don’t flash. No reveal in the movie. However, it seemed strangely unsettling to Jane Greaves as she stared at the spectrum on her screen. It appeared to be a phosphine signature. That was not supposed to be there. Venus, the planet beyond Earth, shines with a kind of false beauty. Hanging low and steady, it is the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon when viewed from the ground. However, all of the probes that…