Science/Technology

For the first time since 2011, you can apply to be a US astronaut. The job listing went up last month at usajobs.gov. 

NASA chief and former astronaut Charles Bolden says the application requirements are not as complicated as you might think.  

There is a building in northern San Francisco that looks like a cousin to the Acropolis in Greece. It used to be a Christian Science church.

Now, however, it houses 26 petabytes of digital information in a forest of blinking, heat-generating servers. Welcome to the Internet Archive headquarters. 

“The Internet Archive is part of the vision to build the Library of Alexandria, version 2,” says digital librarian Brewster Kahle. “We hit the record button on the World Wide Web in 1996. We take a snapshot of every web site and every web page on every website.”

Was there a science, technology, or environmental book from 2015 that made you think, laugh, or gape in amazement? Now’s the time to celebrate it.

Here are some of the best science books of 2015, as chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum and Brain Pickings editor Maria Popova. Have a favorite science read from 2015? Share it in the comments! See some other reader and listener suggestions at ScienceFriday.com.

Jeff Potter is a software engineer, but he’s also a kitchen geek who worries we may have lost our knowledge of how to make basic foods — things like butter and vanilla extract. 

“I think a lot of that [knowledge loss] happened post-World War II, when it kind of got to two people in the family both in the workplace and the convenience of buying things,” Potter says, “And there is that Space Age excitement of the modern, you know, go to the store and buy something.”