I, Robot: Our Changing Relationship With Technology

"When we have a question about something embarrassing or deeply personal, many of us don't turn to a parent or a friend, but to our computers: We ask Google our questions."

"As millions of us look for answers to questions, or things to buy, or places to meet friends, our searches produce a map of our collective hopes, fears, and desires."

"Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, analyzes the information we leave behind on search engines, social media, and even pornography sites. He's the author of the book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are."

"'I think there's something very comforting about that little white box that people feel very comfortable telling things that they may not tell anybody else about: Their sexual interests, their health problems, their insecurities. And using this anonymous aggregate data, we can learn a lot more about people than we've really ever known,' he said."

"By mining data from the internet, Stephens-Davidowitz has found surprising correlations that tell a far different story than those presented by surveys. Online data allow him, for example, to estimate the percentage of American men who are gay; to predict the unemployment rate weeks before the federal government releases official statistics; and to uncover parents' unconscious biases against girls."

Just A Handful Of Nuts May Help Keep Us From Packing On The Pounds As We Age

"Eating a handful of almonds, walnuts, peanuts or any type of nut on a regular basis may help prevent excessive weight gain and even lower the risk of obesity, new research suggests."

"It may be that substituting healthy nuts for unhealthy snacks is a simple strategy to ward off the gradual weight gain that often accompanies aging, according to the researchers. Nuts also help us feel full longer, which might offset cravings for junk food."

"Researchers looked at the diet and weight of more than 280,000 adults taking part in three long-term research studies. Over more than 20 years of monitoring, participants were asked every four years about their weight and, among other things, how often, over the preceding year, they had eaten a serving (about one ounce) of nuts."

"On average, U.S. adults put on one pound of weight every year, according to researcher and epidemiologist Deirdre Tobias, a co-author of the new study, which appears in the online journal BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health. "We wanted to know whether nuts were associated with long-term weight gain," says Tobias, who's with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Tobias and her colleagues hypothesized that nuts might be beneficial, given the association of nuts with a lower risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes."

No Need To Cut Back On Red Meat? Controversial New 'Guidelines' Lead To Outrage

"A new set of analyses published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine challenges the widespread recommendations to cut back on red and processed meats."

"The prominent medical journal has also published a new recommendation from a panel of scientists, many of whom are not nutrition experts: "The panel suggests adults continue current processed meat consumption," according to the guideline paper. In other words: no need to cut back."

"Scores of nutrition experts say this conclusion contradicts a large body of evidence, from decades of observational studies, that has found that people who consume less red and processed meats, over time, have lower rates of heart disease and death from certain cancers, including colorectal cancer."

"Recommendations from the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society, as well as the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, all call for limiting red meats and processed meats."

"'I am outraged and bewildered,' says nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford University."

"'This is perplexing, given the ... clear evidence for harm associated with high red meat intake,' says Frank Hu, the chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health."

Elon Musk Unveils SpaceX's New Starship, Designed To Fly To The Moon, Mars And Beyond

"Speaking into gusts of wind at the SpaceX launch facility in Cameron County, Texas, on Saturday night, CEO Elon Musk talked up the space travel giant's newest innovation, the SpaceX vehicle Starship."

"Musk spoke in front of a 50-meter, 200-ton Starship prototype, calling it 'the most inspiring thing that I've ever seen.'"

"He described unique design features of the vehicle and outlined plans to fast-track production of a Starship fleet. His hope, Musk said, is 'to reach orbit in less than six months.'"

"Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has been working toward the goal of making space travel cheaper and accessible to would-be space travelers."

"The Starship is the company's next foray: a large vehicle that could theoretically carry people into space, land safely back on Earth and be fit to turn around and fly again. Being able to return to space multiple times with 'a rapidly reusable orbital rocket,' Musk explained, is key to the company's plans."

"'The critical breakthrough that's needed for us to become a space-faring civilization is to make space travel like air travel. With air travel, when you fly a plane, you fly it many times,' he said."

Why Botswana Is Lifting Its Ban On Elephant Trophy Hunting

"Lebalang Ramatokwane surveys a jagged hole in the cement wall surrounding his half-built guesthouse on the outskirts of Kasane, a small tourist town in the far north of Botswana. A few days earlier, an elephant had knocked down part of the wall in two places, and now he's wondering if he should beef up security before paying customers start to arrive."

"'They are not only damaging what you see here,' Ramatokwane, a 37-year-old medical scientist, says. The thousands of elephants that roam freely around Kasane regularly destroy farmers' crops and pose a real threat to people, he says. 'These are wild, wild, wild animals. They are not conditioned.'"

"Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants, more than any country in the world. For years, trophy hunters from the U.S. and Europe came to Botswana to hunt large male elephants, paying tens of thousands of dollars to head out into the bush with a professional hunter and send a tusked trophy home to mount on their wall."

"But in 2014, Botswana's government, then led by former president Ian Khama, temporarily banned trophy hunting, citing declining wildlife numbers. The move was widely applauded by international animal welfare groups, but in places like Kasane, which lies on the edge of Chobe National Park, the move wasn't universally popular."

A Peculiar Solar System Has Scientists Rethinking Theories Of How Planets Form

"An oddball solar system discovered not too far from our own is forcing astronomers to reexamine their ideas about how planets get created."

"In the journal Science, researchers report they detected a small, dim red dwarf star, about 30 light-years from Earth, being tugged by the gravity of what must be a huge, Jupiter-like planet."

"'It's a very large planet, for such a small star,' says Juan Carlos Morales, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia in Barcelona who was part of the research team."

"It's so big, he says, that its existence can't be explained by the conventional wisdom about how solar systems develop."

'This is the surprising thing,' Morales says. 'We need another, an alternative formation scenario, to explain this system.'"

"Newly born stars are temporarily surrounded by a swirling disk of leftover gas and dust. Scientists have long thought that planets begin to grow when bits of solid material in this disk start to collide and sort of glom together."

Too Much Training Can Tax Athletes' Brains

"Too much physical exertion appears to make the brain tired."

"That's the conclusion of a study of triathletes published Thursday in the journal Current Biology."

"Researchers found that after several weeks of overtraining, athletes became more likely to choose immediate gratification over long-term rewards. At the same time, brain scans showed the athletes had decreased activity in an area of the brain involved in decision-making."

"The finding could explain why some elite athletes see their performance decline when they work out too much – a phenomenon known as overtraining syndrome."

"The distance runner Alberto Salazar, for example, experienced a mysterious decline after winning the New York Marathon three times and the Boston Marathon once in the early 1980s. Salazar's times fell off even though he was still in his mid 20s and training more than ever."

"Probably [it was] something linked to his brain and his cognitive capacities," says Bastien Blain, an author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at University College London. (Salazar didn't respond to an interview request for this story.)

Earth's Oceans Are Getting Hotter And Higher, And It's Accelerating

"As the world's climate changes, ocean warming is accelerating and sea levels are rising more quickly, warns a new report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

"The report is a synthesis of the most up-to-date climate science on oceans and ice, and it lays out a stark reality: Ocean surface temperatures have been warming steadily since 1970, and for the past 25 years or so, they've been warming twice as fast."

"Sea levels are also rising increasingly quickly 'due to increasing rates of ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,' the report states."

"'For me, it's the complete picture that's kind of surprising and, frankly, concerning,' says Ko Barrett, vice-chair of the U.N. panel and the deputy assistant administrator for research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. 'This is, in some ways, a report about water. Water is the lifeblood of the planet.'"

"The report also discusses a relatively new phenomenon in the oceans: marine heat waves."

"'It's sort of remarkable that prior to 2012 [or] 2013, nobody had thought about heat waves in the ocean,' says Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, Maine. 'And then, in 2012 we had a huge event here in the Northwest Atlantic, and the Gulf of Maine was right at the center of it. It was a real surprise.'"

How One Man Used Miles To Fulfill His Dream To Visit Every Country Before Turning 40

"Stefan Krasowski had a dream to visit every country on Earth before he turned 40. That took him to wondrous places, from the crystal blue crater lakes of Djibouti and the ancient Roman ruins of Tunisia to the foothills of the Himalayas in Bhutan."

"And thanks to his considerable stockpile of credit cards, he was able to complete that dream and visit the one that eluded him — Syria. The moment his tourist visa was granted, after a two-year wait, he reached for his credit card."

"'On one day's notice, I was able to be on a plane to Beirut and in Damascus by nightfall,' he said."

"Krasowski is part of a growing subculture of people for whom earning points has become a kind of sport."

"And that's why Krasowski founded a group called Reach For The Miles in New York, a meetup of travel hackers and deal optimizers who trade tips for gaming the points system."

A Rising Generation Asserts Itself On Climate Change

"Spurred by what they see as a sluggish, ineffectual response to the existential threat of global warming, student activists from around the world are skipping school Friday, for what organizers call a Global Climate Strike."

"The young activists are protesting as the U.N. prepares to hold its Climate Action Summit on Monday in New York City."

"The strike's figurehead is 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who traveled from Sweden to New York on an emissions-free sailboat. A little over a year ago, Thunberg began her school strike for the climate by herself, outside the Swedish Parliament."

"Support for a school climate strike has since spread across the globe. In the past year, Thunberg has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian lawmakers. She's also met with Pope Francis and lawmakers in several countries."

"'We are currently on track for a world that could displace billions of people from their homes,' Thunberg warned this week as she accepted Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience Award. She ended her acceptance speech with a call to action: 'See you on the streets!'"

To Better Understand The Arctic, This Ship Will Spend A Year Frozen Into The Ice

"The mission is known as the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, or MOSAiC. Its overarching goal is to collect a vast trove of data that can help improve how the Arctic is represented in climate models."

"To do that, a group of scientists will try to freeze an icebreaker into the ice — for an entire year."

"On a recent day in Tromso, Norway, around 200 people are cycling through the German icebreaker Polarstern as it sits docked in Breivika harbor. They're moving massive amounts of equipment on board, unpacking instruments and starting to install and test them."

"A row of snowmobiles sits on the concrete down below, ready for loading. A massive orange crane is lifting shipping containers, some of which will even be used as lab space, and placing them on the boat."

"One of the people involved in these preparations is Matthew Shupe, an atmospheric scientist with the University of Colorado and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

Vineyards Facing An Insect Invasion May Turn To Aliens For Help

"Walking around a park near Allentown, Pa., I didn't even notice the bugs at first. Then Heather Leach arrived. She's an insect expert from Penn State University."

"She pointed me toward the trees, and suddenly I realized they were everywhere: spotted lanternflies. An army of gray bugs, each one about an inch long, black spots on their wings, was climbing the trees' trunks. They marched slowly along branches. They were sucking the trees' sap, excreting some of it as sugary water that rained down on us in a gentle shower."

"This is the latest great insect invasion to hit the United States."

"'They are kind of ugly, especially when there's thousands of them,' Leach says. 'Poke at them and you'll see how strong of a hopper they are; they just take off.' She demonstrates. The lanternflies jump so fast and so far, they're just a blur in the air. It makes me laugh."

"'Yeah, they can be entertaining,' Leach says. 'You see a lot of kids playing with them, trying to stomp on them.'"

Meet The Nuclear-Powered Self-Driving Drone NASA Is Sending To A Moon Of Saturn

"On the face of it, NASA's newest probe sounds incredible. Known as Dragonfly, it is a dual-rotor quadcopter (technically an octocopter, even more technically an X8 octocopter); it's roughly the size of a compact car; it's completely autonomous; it's nuclear powered; and it will hover above the surface of Saturn's moon Titan."

"But Elizabeth Turtle, the mission's principle investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, insists that this is actually a pretty tame space probe, as these things go."

"'There's not a lot of new technology,' she says."

"Quadcopters (even X8 octocopters) are for sale on Amazon these days. Self-driving technology is coming along quickly. Nuclear power is harder to come by, but the team plans to use the same kind of system that runs NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. Everything that's going into Dragonfly is already being used somewhere else."

Which is not to say that the idea of a nuclear-powered drone flying around a moon of Saturn doesn't sound kind of crazy.

PHOTOS: Vanilla Boom Is Making People Crazy Rich — And Jittery — In Madagascar

"80% of the world's vanilla is grown by small holding farmers in the hilly forests of Madagascar. For a generation the price languished below $50 a kilo (about 2.2 pounds) but in 2015 it began to rise at an extraordinary rate and for the past four years has hovered at ten times that amount, between $400 and $600 a kilo."

"The rise is partly due to increased global demand, partly due to decreased supply, as storms have destroyed many vines, and a lot to do with speculation. Local middle men have rushed into the market, leveraging deals between village growers and the international flavor companies that distill the cured beans into extract and sell it to the big multinationals like Mars, Archer Daniels Midland and Unilever."

"In the meantime farmers are getting rich, richer than their wildest dreams. Felicité Raminisoa's family has gone from subsistence farming — a little rice, bananas and coffee "but these crops didn't improve our lives," said her father — to earning over $20,000 over the past four years. That's enough to buy a new house in town (where they're sending her four children to school), a new electricity generator, better mattresses, a cow and a rice threshing machine they hope to rent out for extra income."

The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'

"During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies."

"MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the 'most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control.'"

"Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research."

"'Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process,' Kinzer says. 'First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one.'"

Scientists Create A Device That Can Mass-Produce Human Embryoids

"Scientists have invented a device that can quickly produce large numbers of living entities that resemble very primitive human embryos."

"Researchers welcomed the development, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, as an important advance for studying the earliest days of human embryonic development. But it also raises questions about where to draw the line in manufacturing 'synthetic' human life."

"Other scientists have previously created synthetic embryos, which are also known as embryoids. These entities are made by coaxing human stem cells to form structures found in very early human embryos. The research has raised questions about how similar to complete embryos they could and should be allowed to become."

"The new work takes such research further by creating a method that can rapidly generate relatively large numbers of embryoids."

"'This new system allows us to achieve a superior efficiency to generate these human embryo-like structures,' says Jianping Fu, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the research."

EPA Chief Pledges To Severely Cut Back On Animal Testing Of Chemicals

"The Environmental Protection Agency says it will aggressively reduce the use of animals in toxicity testing, with a goal of eliminating all routine safety tests on mammals by 2035."

"Chemicals such as pesticides typically get tested for safety on animals like mice and rats. Researchers have long been trying to instead increase the use of alternative safety tests that rely on lab-grown cells or computer modeling. The EPA's administer, Andrew Wheeler, has now set some specific deadlines to try to speed up that transition."

"In a signed memo made public Tuesday, he's directed the agency to reduce all requests for, and funding of, studies with live mammals by 30 percent by 2025. He says he wants the agency to essentially eliminate all mammal study requests and funding by 2035, with the use of live mammals only allowed after that with special permission."

"'I really do think that with the lead time that we have in this — 16 years before we completely eliminate animal testing — that we have enough time to come up with alternatives,' says Wheeler."

"He notes that he wrote an op-ed for his college newspaper on the need to reduce animal testing back in 1987."

"'I didn't think we were that far away from banning animal testing then,' Wheeler says. 'Part of why I'm doing this today is because it's been 30 years and we haven't made enough progress.'"

Not All 'Lost' Jazz Albums Are Created Equal

"Historians and critics have pored over the recordings of these jazz greats like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Stan Getz so exhaustively, it might feel like they've left no stone unturned. And yet, fans are seeing a slew of exciting new discoveries lately from these and other artists — so-called "lost" albums by some of the biggest names in jazz."

"'For jazz historians and record producers, the work never finishes,' Nate Chinen of Jazz Night in America and NPR member station WGBO says. 'There's always another lead to be pursued, another corner to be explored and when we think we know everything about an artist ... There's often something else that we hadn't considered.'"

"In addition to that air of exploration, Chinen says that the jazz industry has 'commercial motivation' to pump out such albums and cites the 2018 album Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, released via Impulse! Records, which sourced material from John Coltrane's 1963 sessions and reference tapes as a shining example. 'It sold over a quarter of a million copies.'"

Saving California's Kelp Forest May Depend On Eating Purple Sea Urchins

"A favorite dish for purple sea urchins living off the coast of California is kelp. Problem is, those kelp forests are shrinking dramatically and that's hurting the marine ecosystem. So a group of scientists ran an experiment to see if these sea urchins can become a top menu item themselves."

"Just off the Monterey Peninsula, a boat sways in the ocean. Three divers get ready to jump in. They're students from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, a graduate school for marine scientists. The assignment, count purple sea urchins."

"'Catch you on the flip side,' says Shelby Penn."

"Their professor, Luke Gardner, waits on deck. He expects they'll find plenty of urchins. And that's not a good thing."

"What they do is they just eat everything in sight," Gardner says.

These spiny creatures are mowing down California's kelp forests. Kelp is a vital part of the ecosystem. It provides food and shelter for numerous animals, including abalone, rockfish and sea otters.

Chip-And-Ship Forest Clearing May Help Prevent Wildfire Disasters

"A huge mechanical claw scoops up several ponderosa pine logs and feeds them into an industrial chipper. Thousands of wood chunks are then blasted into a large shipping container."

'It goes anywhere from one to four to three up to seven small ones can just kind of throw in that little jaws there,' explains Jeff Halbrook, a research associate with Northern Arizona University's Ecological Restoration Institute. Today he's overseeing what's fondly known as the chip-and-ship pilot project about 20 minutes west of Flagstaff."

"These trees being fed into the chipper were recently cut from the nearby Coconino National Forest. A crew of six has been working for days to pack the shipping containers as tightly as possible, stuffing each one with about 40,000 pounds of chipped wood. Then another machine hoists the container onto a nearby railcar. In about two weeks, nearly 60 containers will arrive at a port in South Korea."

"'They primarily use these wood chips for production of energy. Moving away from the fossil-based energy operation in South Korea,' says Northern Arizona University forestry professor Han-Sup Han."