Any car can outpace a typical human-powered bike. But within an aerodynamic carbon-composite casing (picture a large bullet with a windshield), even an average cyclist can accelerate to more than 50 miles per hour. “Here’s this teardrop missile going at highway speed, and all you can hear is the sound of air going over the body and tires on the ground,” says Alan Krause, president of the International Human-Powered Vehicle Association (IHPVA). The organization has been holding competitions since 1976, tracking the new speed records set as bike designs improve.
1976: The Beginning
The…
Clocking The Fastest Bicycles On Earth
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Hacked Hardware Could Cause The Next Big Security Breach
In late summer of 2006, the Japanese division of McDonald’s decided to run a new promotion. When customers ordered a Coca-Cola soft drink, they would receive a cup with a code. If they entered that code on a designated website and were among 10,000 lucky winners, they would receive an MP3 player pre-loaded with 10 songs.
Cleverly constructed, the promotion seemed destined for success. Who doesn’t like a Coke and a free MP3 player? But there was one problem the marketers at McDonald’s could not anticipate: In addition to 10 free songs, the music players contained QQPass malware. The moment…
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Building The House Of Virus
For decades, research has tried to determine how viruses package themselves inside the cell. Now new research reveals this may happen thanks to an RNA linchpin.
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How To Turn An Old Screwdriver Into A Chisel [Video]
True independence means making your own tools. Luckily, Popular Science columnist Chris Hackett knows how to do just that.
In the latest episode of the Rebuild video series,…
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The World's Most Sophisticated Malware Ever Infects Hard Drive Firmware
Kaspersky Labs has uncovered a sophisticated suite of malware used to infect high-value targets, likely created by a group connected to the NSA.
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Could Analyzing How Humans Think Make Better Video Games?
Recently, on a cold, solitary evening, I decided to reprise one of my teenage pastimes: I played Super Mario 64. At first it was a little different than I remembered—the…
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You'll Be Able To Buy A GMO Apple In 2017
The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the country’s first genetically modified apples for sale this Friday. The apples are dosed with extra copies of apple genes so…
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Climate Change May Be Helping Infectious Diseases Spread To New Places And Hosts
Infectious disease outbreaks such as Ebola have constantly been a major threat to public health, and they're likely to become a bigger problem in the future. According to an opinion piece in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, infectious diseases are spreading to new places and new hosts--including humans--with the help of climate change.
Zoologists Daniel Brooks and Eric Hoberg have been researching parasitic infections in the tropics and the Canadian Arctic for the past 30 years. Over time, they've noticed that as climate change upsets habitats and displaces animal…
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When We Weren't Looking, A Star Passed Within 0.8 Lightyears Of Earth
70,000 years ago, earth was a pretty bleak place. Homo erectus had just gone extinct, and we were all in mourning. But while we were distracted by things like the near-extinction of our own species, some fantastic stuff was going on in the furthest reaches of our solar system, including a visit from a star and its sidekick, a brown dwarf--too large to be a planet, and too small and cool to be a star.
In a paper published this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters scientists found that 70,000 years ago the star grazed the outer reaches of the Oort cloud, the loose group of icy bodies on the…
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How The Brain Creates Marijuana-Fueled Munchies
O, Mouse! What have you not done for science? But perhaps this experiment was not as bad as most: In a recent study, an international team of biologists used mice to figure out which brain cells are involved in creating the marijuana munchies.
Since humans have many of the brain cell types that mice do, with similar behaviors linked to them, the studies findings provide a clue as to how the munchies work in people. The research is also part of a larger effort to understand how the brain controls people’s appetites, which is important to health. Such research might eventually help…
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New Species Of Dragon Found In Museum
Sea horses just got a cool new cousin. Researchers have just discovered the Ruby Seadragon—which really does look like a dragon—lurking in the archives of the Western…
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Cafeteria Trash Could Become Valuable Nanotechnology
Trash into treasure indeed. A European Union-funded research project is working on turning thrown-away food into graphene, the Guardian reports.
Graphene is a…
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Build Your Own Interactive Chalkboard On The Cheap
Interactive whiteboards are generally run into the thousands of dollars. Three students built their own for a hacking competition for under $40.
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NASA Wants To Send A Nuclear Submarine To Saturn's Moon Titan
There are places beyond the reach of NASA’s current army of robot space explorers. Impressive and capable as Curiosity and other land rovers are, they’d be pretty useless…
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How A Tiny Bat Might Interrupt A Massive Oil Pipeline
Not the pipeline you're thinking of — at least not yet.
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Why Thousands Of People Are Willing To Die On Mars
Editor's note: Mars One recently narrowed its pool of candidates to 100 people--many of whom we featured in the November 2014 issue (part of which exists here). We've…
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A Map Of America’s Noise Levels
If you're looking for a quiet getaway, you might take a bit of very old advice and head for the west. This map, showing the quietest places in the contiguous United States,…
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Sea Snail’s Teeth Just Dethroned Spider Silk As The Strongest Biological Material
The strongest biologic material in the world rivals the strength it takes to turn carbon into diamonds. It doesn’t come from one of the biggest creatures, but rather the…
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DARPA Wants To Make Computer Networks Look More Like Sci-Fi Graphic Novels
Even for the experts, lines of computer code can be tedious to read. But what if it all looked like a video-game world, or like a rendering of the stars in space?
DARPA,…
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Beam Is A Projector Disguised As A Lamp
Beam is a novel projector that can screw into a standard lightbulb socket and display the screen of your iOS or Android device, as well as run its own apps.
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