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Jan 22, 2025 | 
scientificamerican.com | Rachel Feltman |Ben Guarino |Jeffery DelViscio |Fonda Mwangi
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Earlier this month net neutrality was back in the news, thanks to a U.S. appeals court ruling. The decision stated that the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, didn’t have the power to reinstate net neutrality rules—which the agency voted to do in April, with the encouragement of then-president Joe Biden. Net neutrality is one of those issues that I’ve never quite fully wrapped my head around.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
eoswetenschap.eu | Ben Guarino
De dunste pasta ooit gemaakt — laten we het ‘nanotini’ noemen — heeft een gemiddelde diameter van 372 nanometer en bestaat uit slechts twee ingrediënten: bloem en mierenzuur. Dat laatste is een bijtend middel dat gewoonlijk gespoten wordt door mieren om zichzelf te verdedigen. Net dat is de reden waarom onderzoeker Adam Clancy aan zijn creatie rook voordat hij het opat. Het is over het algemeen niet aangeraden om dingen te eten die zijn ingelegd in mierenzuur.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
On Friday the Supreme Court affirmed that it would be legal to force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the immensely popular app to a non-China-based company or to ban it in the U.S. Last week an attorney for TikTok had argued before the Supreme Court that a bipartisan law that mandated the sale or ban infringed on the company’s First Amendment rights. The Court disagreed.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
Thousands of U.S. TikTok users are joining China-based app RedNote, spawning memes, jokes and confusion
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
About 170 million people use TikTok in the U.S., but that number could abruptly plummet toward zero if a law signed by President Joe Biden goes into effect on January 19. The law forces a choice for ByteDance, the China-based company that owns TikTok: it must either sell the app to a non-Chinese company or face a ban. ByteDance has repeatedly said the app is not for sale.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
The sun has set—again—on U.S. net neutrality, the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. Last week a federal appeals court panel ruled that the Federal Communications Commission cannot classify Internet service providers, or ISPs, in a way that would prevent them from favoring certain content over others. Without net neutrality, providers would be able to slow down, or throttle, traffic to competitors’ websites.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
“Brain rot” is the official Word of the Year for 2024, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press. Here’s how that august chronicler of English defines the phrase: brain rot is the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” resulting from the “overconsumption” of trivial material—especially stuff found on the Internet. Brain rot is a symptom of mindless scrolling through nonsense memes and sludge content.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
Magnet fisher James Kane cradles a shiny, four-pound magnetic disk: a stainless-steel shell housing an alloy of iron, neodymium and boron. He hucks it into a lake in a public park in New York City, then tugs it slowly toward shore with a sturdy synthetic rope. As the powerful magnet bump bump bumps along the bottom, it kicks up a line of bubbles—and then suddenly there’s a heavy drag, as if the lake bed has turned to taffy. The magnet is stuck to something.
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Nov 2, 2024 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
Now is the best time in the history of the U.S. to cast a vote. Yes, American elections have flaws. They’re marred by voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the inherent weirdness of the electoral college and recent cases of ballot box arson. But the act of voting itself has been unfairly tarnished, most notably by former president Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
scientificamerican.com | Ben Guarino
If all 62 million metric tons of electronic waste produced in a year were loaded into garbage trucks, they’d encircle the planet bumper to bumper, according to a recent United Nations report. And hidden in that monstrous traffic jam would be startling amounts of precious metals, including gold—crucial in electronics because it conducts electricity, stretches into wires and won’t easily corrode. Modern iPhones have gold in their cameras, circuit boards and USB-C connector.
