Wired Weird Science

Fast food giant McDonald's volunteers to buy only chicken raised without routine antibiotic use, a move likely to shake up both the food industry and agriculture.

The post Your McNuggets: Soon Without a Side of Antibiotics appeared first on WIRED.

Light can be a particle and a wave, and now researchers have taken a picture of light acting like both things at once.

The post The Weird Quantum Behavior of Light, Captured in a Lab appeared first on WIRED.

A camera has been developed to show photographs of snowflakes in freefall.

The post Photographing Snowflakes in Freefall appeared first on WIRED.

Health care workers who caught Ebola while treating its victims in the US and in Africa continue to struggle with poor health and the stigma of the disease.

The post Ebola’s Not Over For Health Care’s Volunteers appeared first on WIRED.

A baby wooly rhino was found in the Siberian ice by two Russian hunters.

The post Hunters Find a Frozen 10,000-Year-Old Baby Woolly Rhino appeared first on WIRED.

How far back in time do you have to go such that the number of your ancestors is equal to the human population?

The post Human Population and My Ancestors appeared first on WIRED.

Villarrica unleashed an impressive lava fountain as the recent unrest continues at the Chilean volcano.

The post Chilean Volcano Spews a Spectacular Lava Fountain appeared first on WIRED.

Last week, The New York City Panel on Climate Change released a new report detailing exactly how climate scientists expect New York City to change over over the next 100 years, focusing on projected increases in temperature and sea level. Sea level rise will certainly transform the shape of the city’s coastline. But Manhattan’s edges are […]

The post How Climate Change Will Alter New York City’s Skyline appeared first on WIRED.

Toward the end of World War II, the Nazis blocked all food and fuel supplies to the Netherlands, leading to famine. Many babies born during this famine suffered long-term effects, including a higher incidence of a variety of conditions such as heart disease, obesity, glucose intolerance, and obstructed airways. Severe trauma altered the victims’ gene […]

The post Fat? Sick? Blame Your Grandparents’ Bad Habits appeared first on WIRED.

Photographer Andrew Testa accepted the assignment right away. “As soon as I read ‘camel racing’ and ‘robots’ in the same sentence, I was in,” he says.

The post The DIY Robots That Ride Camels and Fight for Human Rights appeared first on WIRED.

The first survey of New York City Rats in 90 years finds some have fleas that can carry plague. But don't panic.

The post Plague, Fleas, and the Rats of New York City appeared first on WIRED.

The bloody conflict in Syria—which enters its fifth year this month—has killed almost 200,000 people, created 3.2 million refugees, and given rise to the murderous extremist group known as the Islamic State. The roots of the civil war extend deep into Syria’s political and socioeconomic structures. But another cause turns out to be global warming. […]

The post How Global Warming Helped Cause the Syrian War appeared first on WIRED.

A neurosurgeon thinks he can sew one person's head on another person's body, and he thinks he can do it in two years. What's the problem? Um, everything.

The post Full-Body Transplants Are a Crazy, Wildly Unethical Idea appeared first on WIRED.

The coelacanth (pronounced SEEL-uh-kanth) is an enormous, bottom-dwelling fish that is unlike other living fishes in a number of ways. They belong to an ancient lineage that has been around for more than 360 million years. Coelacanths can reach more than six feet long and weigh about 200 pounds, and they’re covered in thick, scaly […]

The post The Creature Feature: 10 Fun Facts About the Coelacanth appeared first on WIRED.

Great shots of volcanoes erupting somewhere on Earth in the last month.

The post Eruption Update for February 27, 2015: Volcanoes Seen from Space appeared first on WIRED.

On February 28, 1998, the eminent medical journal The Lancet published an observational study of 12 children: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive development disorder in children. It might not sound sexy, but once the media read beyond the title, into the study’s descriptions of how those nasty-sounding symptoms appeared just after the kids got vaccinated, the impact was clear: The measles-mumps-rubella […]

The post Scientists Are Wrong All the Time, and That’s Fantastic appeared first on WIRED.

Perhaps the most contentious title out there is “World’s Greatest Mom.” My mother probably thinks she is, but so too does her mother, and I think they could both make pretty strong cases. But the sacrifices that human moms make pale in comparison to what’s going on in nature. There’s a bug, for instance, whose […]

The post Absurd Creature of the Week: The Legless Amphibian That Eats Its Mother’s Skin appeared first on WIRED.

Not since Monica Lewinsky was a White House intern has one blue dress been the source of so much consternation. (And yes, it’s blue.) The fact that a single image could polarize the entire Internet into two aggressive camps is, let’s face it, just another Thursday. But for the past half-day, people across social media […]

The post The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress appeared first on WIRED.

On a blog post at PLOS, the tropical disease expert Peter Hotez and postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Herricks take a run through the data on the biggest killers of children around the world in 2013, part of a new dataset from Global Burden of Disease study published in the January Lancet. The main one is malaria, […]

The post Good News! Kids Aren’t Dying as Much as They Used To appeared first on WIRED.

In 1991, Alaska's governor proposed building a pipeline to bring his state's water to drought-stricken California. 25 years later, the state is in a worse drought, and the idea is still crazy as hell.

The post Should Californians Resurrect a Plan to Pipe in Water From Alaska? appeared first on WIRED.