Browsing: Rose Eveleth

How Does Flying Feel on the Other Side of the Cockpit Door?

Psychology

Turbulence in the wing vortex produced by an airplaneNASA Langley Research Center (NASA-LaRC) via Wikipedia In many of the times we encounter turbulence in our lives, it is preceded by a calmly worded warning from above. “Uh, folks, we may hit a few bumps,” a pilot announces over the plane’s PA system—or something to that […]

How Graphic Design Can Make Flying Just a Little Bit Safer

Arts & Culture

The cause of aviation safety has had a terrible week. An Air Algérie flight crashed yesterday in Mali, reportedly killing all 116 on board. The day before, a TransAsia plane went down on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, leading to the deaths of at least 48 people. And, most notoriously, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was […]

Sparkly Mints May Help Explain Puzzling “Earthquake Lights”

Agriculture inspector Jim Conacher photographed these earthquake lights over Tagish Lake, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, in 1972Jim Conacher For centuries, people have been reporting mysterious lights along the ground and in the sky soon before an earthquake hits. But it wasn’t until 1966 that there was some solid evidence of the lights, when one man […]

Your Genetic Privacy Is Probably a Lost Cause

Criminal

Any cup you sip from could provide a sample bearing your DNA. dohtoor via Shutterstock Almost everywhere you go, you leave a bit of yourself behind—a hair, a fingernail clipping, a bit of skin, a few skin cells from your lips on a drinking cup. For a long time, that trace of you was little […]

What Would You Put in a Science Time Capsule?

History

It’s 2014: Sixty-one years since the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Four hundred seventy one years since Copernicus published the heliocentric model of the universe. And one year since the Higgs Boson was discovered. In 100 years, how will we look back on today’s science? We’re building a scientific time capsule—a collection of […]