February 2025

The amplifier remains a transformative invention for being able to receive the human voice and boost it so thousands of people can hear it at once. Without the microphone, politics itself may have evolved differently; the device has been ubiquitous in everything from public protests to political rallies. Amplifiers have also transformed entertainment, astronomy, search

During her time in a drug discovery lab, structural biologist Kavyashree Manjunath first started thinking about how much plastic her group used, even for a single experiment. From the smallest of tips used to draw solutions to pipettes, bottles, and more — the plastic waste from her lab alone was enough to shock the average