A star entrepreneur in Armenia, Marina Aghayan is an embodiment of her country’s ambitions in biotechnology—and a reflection of its grit. From her hometown of Yerevan she went as a graduate student to Spain, subsisting on a food budget of 3 euros a month. “I found a place to buy bread with 25 slices for 33 cents,” Aghayan tells me. “I found out that when you cook rice—80 cents for 1 kilogram—you triple the size and the mass of the rice. So it 
Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. After sweeping by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, it is now almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth in interstellar space. Both Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, carry little pieces of humanity in the form of their Golden Records. These messages in a bottle include spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds and images from nature, an album of recordings and images from numerous cultures, and a written m
Most of the roughly 40 trillion cells of your body have nearly identical copies of your genome–the DNA inherited from your parents, containing instructions for everything from converting food to energy to fighting off infections. Healthy cells become cancerous through harmful mutations in the genome. If a cell’s genome is damaged by ultraviolet light, for example, it can result in mutations that tell the cell to grow uncontrollably and form a tumor. Identifying
Parks, small woodlands, and even simple patches of grass not only keep a city attractive, but also help people find a sense of bliss in an otherwise bustling urban environment. With new technologies, we can plan and monitor these urban “green spaces” better than ever before. As several studies have highlighted, nature within urban settings plays a pivotal role in combating many of the global public health challenges commonly associated with urbanization. This includes maladies such
When Politico published Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would undo Roe v. Wade, a number of commentators observed how hard it would be for women in states that had made abortion illegal to safely travel to abortion clinics elsewhere. Their phones’ location histories would give them away, or maybe their search histories would. Even their texts might do so. If people want to travel
Almost three weeks after the Terra blockchain collapsed and TerraUSD lost its peg to the dollar, a new iteration of the Terra blockchain is set to launch, dubbed Terra 2.0 or Luna 2.0. A new Luna coin will also be minted in the process. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Luna 2.0? It’s a fork of the original Luna blockchain, which will see the launch of a coin named Luna. Doesn’t the Luna coin already exist? Yes, but the old Luna coin, which became virtually worthless ea
Many were left underwhelmed after this month’s Google I/O conference, which featured no notable hardware announcements and only a brush over ads. But we should consider the lackluster presentation to be a calm before the storm, because there are massive changes coming to the ad sphere. Google has always been a proponent of privacy and giving the consumer ad choices—no surprises there, with AdChoices and now Google My Ad Center. Given that 80% of the tech giant’s revenue is d
The cryptocurrency market took a heavy tumble in May, with Bitcoin still down some 22% since the beginning of the month. But despite all that, Shopify announced that it was partnering with Crypto.com to allow the more than 2 million businesses using the Shopify platform to accept more forms of cryptocurrency as payment. Shopify was relatively early to the crypto scene: Its customers have had the option to accept payments in cryptocurrency since 2013. The company already had partnerships wi
Apple, Google, and Microsoft have big plans to eliminate the password. Working with a standards group called the FIDO Alliance, all three companies are backing a system in which your phone or computer signs you into all your online accounts automatically, using on-device face detection or fingerprint recognition to verify your identity. Think of it like having a password manager, but without the actual passwords. News of the password’s potential demise has yielded a lot of enthusiastic co
This article is republished with permission from “Wonder Tools,” a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. I’m on a lifelong journey to draw. I struggled to pass art in high school. Lately I’ve been working on translating ideas into sketches. I’d like to be able to draw more creatively with my daughters. In this post I’m sharing what’s been most useful for me so far as a drawing-challenged person wh