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Great cosmology research requires accounting for an enormous number of variables, everything from nuclear detonations to bird droppings. In this animation from Nature, the American radio astronomer Robert Wilson discusses how a pair of pigeons living in a large antenna frustrated attempts to measure the minimum brightness of the sky. Even once the pigeons were removed, the measurements still weren’t right. The issue, it turned out, was cosmic microwave background radiation left behind by the Big Bang – a discovery that would eventually earn Wilson part of the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics.
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
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Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
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Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
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Biotechnology
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Physics
Imagining spacetime as a visible grid is an extraordinary journey into the unseen
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Engineering
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