Technology

Many Americans are familiar with the astronaut heroes of the 20th century space race — names like Gus Grissom and Neil Armstrong. But who did the calculations that would successfully land these men on the moon?

Several of the NASA researchers who made space flight possible were women. Among them were black women who played critical roles in the aeronautics industry even as Jim Crow was alive and well.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg are smiling, standing in front of a backdrop emblazoned with the question: "Can we cure all diseases in our children's lifetime?" They're announcing a $3 billion initiative to achieve that goal, and they're calling it Chan Zuckerberg Science.

No sickness in the whole world by the time today's babies, like the couple's 9-month-old daughter Max Zuckerberg, are old folks?

Congratulations are in order, kind of, for a few exemplary researchers and one massive multinational corporation.

This year's Ig Nobel awards — the rather-less-noble-than-the-Nobel awards for "improbable" research and accomplishments — were announced Thursday night.

The honorees included a man who lived as a goat, a man who lived as a badger, a man who put tiny pants on rats and tracked their sex lives, a team who investigated the personalities of rocks, and Volkswagen.

If you looked at Google Maps this week, you might have noticed something strange: less green.

Typically, mint green highlights designate publicly owned wild spaces on Google's maps. But as of this writing, some of those public lands have gone gray. The locations are still searchable, but if you don't already know the park or forest exists, and where exactly, you might not be able to find it.

To millions of people in New York on Monday morning, the first word of a suspect in the New York and New Jersey bombings arrived at 8 a.m. with a jarring, screeching sound of their mobile phones.

Screens lit up across New York City with an emergency alert: "WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-year-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen."

People born without sight appear to solve math problems using visual areas of the brain.

A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pokemon Go trainers will do almost anything for a rare find, including getting into a car and speeding around to catch them. And then they tweet about it. According to a study, there were over 113,000 social media messages in 10 days last July that showed people getting into potentially unsafe traffic situations while trying to catch cute virtual monsters.