Science Friday

A report issued last week by the Department of Homeland Security said that throughout 2016 and 2017, Russian hackers had worked to gain access to control systems at unidentified power plants and were in a position to shut them down. Their actions have finally given Washington the political will to address vulnerabilities in the U.S. power grid. A new bill sponsored by Senator Angus King of Maine will establish a two year pilot program to develop techniques and technologies to better secure the grid

Scientists have been trying for a long time to piece together a question: When did traits of modern humans—like complex thinking and behaviors—first develop? Anthropologists have uncovered tools in Kenya that date to 280,000 years ago that contained non-local materials, indicating that early humans developed social networks and advanced technology tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. What would daily life be like on the Red Planet? We called a couple experts from NASA, MIT,

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking died this week at the age of 76. Hawking challenged and inspired a generation of physicists, and we remember his life and legacy. Plus, blockchain is the technology that makes possible every transaction made with Bitcoin—or any digital currency, for that matter. And when Bitcoin skyrocketed on the stock market last year, it turned average Joes into millionaires. Why just Joes? Most surveys show that 95 percent of blockchain enthusiasts and

In the history of male-dominated computer science, there are a few women who have gotten attention and credit for their contributions. Famously, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm designed for a computer, and foresaw that such machines could do much more than math alone. Grace Hopper, after programming Harvard’s Mark 1 computer during World War II, went on to develop the first program compiler and helped make software programming accessible to more people. But as Claire Evans writes in her new

Overuse of antibiotics has lead to bacteria becoming resistant to the drugs. In the United States, at least two million people become infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. While some researchers are looking for new sources of antibiotics, other scientists are looking for new strategies to treat bacterial infections. One strategy is the use of bacteriophages—viruses that infect and kill bacteria. In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration

Currently, the International Space Station is the only destination for astronauts traveling into lower-earth orbit. It’s also the only way for scientists to conduct experiments in microgravity. After two decades, it’s still proving to be incredibly useful to researchers. But time is running out. President Trump has indicated he wants to defund the station as scheduled by 2025, it’s nearing the end of its expected lifetime, and private companies have indicated that they, too, want to invest in the

If you like to read about the psychology around food and eating, you’ve probably come across stories based on research from Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, directed by Brian Wansink. In an article published this week by Buzzfeed News, science reporter Stephanie Lee reports on a history of shoddy research practices in the lab, and a chain of emails that indicates a practice of “p-hacking”—a statistical wrangling of data aimed at making a borderline result appear to be statistically significant. Lee