We know that humans have gone 25,000 miles per hour going to the moon—the speed itself is not an issue, it was mainly the acceleration to get out of the Earth’s atmosphere that they had to endure. The two programs I was involved with, the Red Bull Stratus and the space dive—the goal was for a human without a vehicle to break the speed of sound, and that was accomplished because they wore a pressure suit. The reason they didn’t have aerodynamic flail issues was that there’s very little atmosphere above a hundred thousand feet
You can attain very high speeds—at least supersonic ones—as long as you’re protected, or (if you’re free falling from space) you’re at an atmospheric density that’s not going to cause that flail to develop.

The bird hospital is one of several built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals. Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. Read: What mirrors tell us about animal minds Singh told me this crow would soon move upstairs, to one of the roof’s exposed cages, where the birds have more space to test their still-fragile wings, in view of an open sky that must surely loom large in a bird’s consciousness.

Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. “Atlantic City in particular,” said Buchanan, “but even New Jersey writ large, are expected to experience more sea level rise than the global mean.”

With its proximity to the legendary growing regions of Northern California, the center can start to quantify this historically secretive industry, measuring its toll on the environment and looking at how existing rules affect the growers themselves. So for the past few years Van Butsic, codirector of the Cannabis Research Center, and his colleagues have been sifting through satellite images to pinpoint those unaccounted-for farms. “I think that the environmental impact of the additional plastics is really something that has not been addressed at any level, yet there are in California mandates about plastic bags and other plastics in the environment,” says Joanna Cedar, industry analyst for CannaCraft, a California cannabis producer.

Writing Fingerprints of God, my 2009 book about the science of spirituality, gave me an excuse to ask a question that I never openly considered before leaving Christian Science, one that was unusually freighted: Is there any scientific evidence, anything beyond the realm of anecdote, that prayer heals? Prayer studies are a “wild goose chase that violate everything we know about the universe,” Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith, told me: “There are no plausible mechanisms that account for how somebody’s thoughts or prayers can influence the health of another person. Like most brain processes, meditation or contemplative prayer involves many areas of the brain, from the brain stem to the prefrontal cortex.

Radio images made from VLBI observations soon revealed that the sources at the centers of radio galaxies are “microscopic” by galaxy standards, even smaller than the distance between the sun and our nearest star. By matching the positions of these stars at the two wavebands, the radio position of Sgr A* can be transferred to infrared images with an accuracy of 0.001 seconds of arc. Finding that the compact radio source Sgr A* is at the precise location of the unseen mass and is motionless provides even more compelling evidence for a supermassive black hole.

In a 2012 study, for example, the negative effects of cycling in 89-degree heat were partly erased when the thermometer in the room was rigged to read 79 degrees. And several recent studies have explored using things like menthol that create a perception of coolness to enhance performance in the heat. The heat pad was turned up to about 104 degrees, just a few degrees above normal body temperature.

Military use of dolphins dates to the early 1970s, when the navy deployed the animals during the Vietnam War. The navy also realized they could train dolphins to detect what the military perceived as threats, and they taught the animals to find underwater mines and spot foreign objects in the water, such as remotely operated spy vehicles and enemy divers. Their ongoing research with the navy includes studying the impacts of anthropogenic noise on the echolocation and hearing of navy dolphins (and sea lions, another military sea mammal), which informs efforts to reduce negative impacts on wild marine mammals.

Last week, a study in the scientific journal Nature Medicine that opened a door to early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease hinted that Cassandra’s regret might soon become an uncomfortably familiar phenomenon. Furthermore, testing of general populations might mean that people who actually end up never contracting a particular disease are identified as high risk. “In medicine, there is a distinction between early testing for diseases where there is treatment or prevention, and those where there is not,” says Julian Savulescu, who researches various issues around medicine, ethics and responsibility at Oxford University.

Image: NOAA NCEI
Earth’s north magnetic pole, a wandering point where magnetic field lines vertically enter and exit our planet, has been acting weird lately. Earth’s magnetic field has been weakening in recent decades, but the north pole’s shift does not seem to be having a significant impact on that trend. Read More: Scientists Can’t Fix Map of Earth’s Magnetic Field Thanks to the Government Shutdown
Given that the WMM team is keeping tabs on the poles, and making sure models are up to date, the pole’s movement is not likely to be a problem in the years to come.