Popular Science

Much like humans, crows have a preferred side and may be right- or left-eyed.

In the far Western corner of Texas, where the state almost spills over into New Mexico, the U.S. Army is building an airport for drones. Located within Fort Bliss, the new…

In January 1963, Popular Science anxiously awaited the day when humans would set foot on the moon. The president had just promised it would be a reality before the end of the decade. Naturally, we had lots of questions, and who better to answer them than the man who was in charge of designing the rockets to get us there? So began a multi-year conversation between Popular Science readers and NASA engineer Wernher von Braun. “If my daily mail is a suitable yardstick, space science is a popular science indeed,” he wrote in the January 1963 issue. Through his monthly question-and-answer…

Researchers find that repeating short phrases – the kind used every day – lead to improvements in kids’ language later in life.

Here on Earth, water, oxygen, and an atmosphere provided just the right conditions for single-celled organisms to evolve into walking, calculating creatures (like us). Still,…

On August 25, an explosion tore through the southern Alaskan sky. The blast shook the remote island that houses the Kodiak Launch Complex, where the U.S. Department of…

The family that birds together, stays together.

Like the planet itself, some data is constantly changing—so a static visualization will always be out-of-date. Cameron Beccario’s animated globe displays real-time data, at…

The sound of the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive failing is actually a handful of sounds, layered one atop the other by genius sound designer Ben Burtt.

It’s hard out there for an armored car. Overshadowed by tanks, but less friendly than a minivan, armored cars have the unenviable duty of carrying troops to the front lines…

For more than a century, elevators have gone pretty much just up and down. Ever since the first elevator was introduced in 1854, a cable-based design has pulled the…

We would have never guessed the stuff was once such a focus of chemical innovation.

The latest addition to the exoplanet freakshow…

A short animation of bright bursts of light shooting past a window pane rocketed to the front page of Reddit today, with good reason. The clip, above, shows the view from…

Scientists have created new images of the wreckage of the SS City of Rio de Janeiro which sank into the San Francisco bay in the early morning of February 22, 1901. Only 82…

Xiaoji Chen set out to find patterns in the air pollution that plagues Chinese cities. Using data from the country’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, she created spirals…

We love it when science and art intersect. Sometimes that happens in the form of a stunning infographic, a colorful map, or a well-timed photograph. Microscopic imaging in…

Deploying Nemo…

When Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad launched aboard Gemini V on August 21, 1965, they were the first astronauts to have mission patches sewn into their suits, a patch…

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