Transoceanic freighters haul 80 percent of the world’s commercial goods. But those boats inadvertently carry destructive cargo as well. An empty ship can suck up more than 10 million gallons of water to stay balanced as it crosses the open ocean. Upon its arrival into another port, the crew pumps the ballast water and any small animals or plants living in that water—sometimes thousands of organisms per gallon—into foreign harbors, where they invade and damage local ecosystems.

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Sorry, vinyl aficionados, but CDs most accurately capture the clarity of musical performances. If you look at the grooves of a standard long-play record, or LP, through a microscope, you’ll see that each is filled with what look like rolling hills. These are, in fact, an extremely close replication of the shape of the sound waves from the musician’s instrument. But because the needle that carves the groove is shaped slightly different than the needle that reads it, the LP will never sound exactly like the original performance.

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Making a dent in the climate crisis is going to take more than solar panels and recycled toilet paper. Scientists are finding ever more creative ways (pig pee! DIY tornadoes! mini nuclear reactors!) to clean up the Earth

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Filming conventional high-speed action fare is hard enough, but to bring the classic cartoon Speed Racer to life, the Wachowski brothers had to contend with 300mph racecars sporting fanciful features like robotic reconnaissance pigeons and wheels that can rotate 180 degrees. With 2,300 visual-effects (VFX) shots—twice as many as last year’s eye-popping 300—it heralds the future of summer-blockbuster fare: The entire movie, aside from the human actors, exists only in a computer.

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When Rajiv Bhushans father complained of blurry, browned vision and pain from bright lights, doctors told him that surgically replacing his eyes lenses was the only way to correct the cataracts that had left him legally blind. Instead, after learning that cataracts result from an age-related accumulation of proteins and lipids in a persons lens, Bhushan, an electrical engineer, set to work concocting a chemical solution to break up the molecules clouding his fathers eyes.

Six years later, the eyedrops, called C-KAD, are entering the final stages of clinical testing. If all goes well, they will hit pharmacy shelves in two years, becoming the first non-surgical treatment.

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He says go straight for three miles and turn east. She says drive past the school and turn right at the green house. Both sets of directions will get you to the same grocery store just as easily, but they embody the language barrier between the sexes that lurks behind many a front-seat argument.

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You have to listen very, very closely, but yes, cells produce a symphony of sounds. Although they wont win a Grammy anytime soon, the various audio blips produced by cells are giving scientists insight into cellular biomechanics and could even be used to help detect cancer.

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