Popular Science

The longest half-hour of my life was spent in an MRI machine, getting my knee scanned after an athletic injury. If you don’t lie perfectly still, the image could blur and…

Patrick Priebe isn’t Iron Man, but he’s getting pretty close. In a video uploaded to YouTube earlier this week, the Priebe shows off his homemade Iron Man gauntlet, which…

In recent years, researchers have figured out that the constellation of diseases known as cancer is in fact hundreds of distinct diseases. Though each one may manifest…

One does not simply look at an exoplanet. In order to learn more about these space rocks lurking many light years away, researchers have various indirect methods for…

Drones are well known for their ability to search. Now, an emergency rescue service in Maine is going to see how well drones can do rescue too. Down East Emergency Medical…

It looks like Muggles have finally caught up with the wizarding world. Neuroscientists from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet gave 125 study participants the illusion of being…

China and Russia, as part of closer strategic ties, have finalized a long awaited deal for very long range S-400 surface to air missile system. The deal is not only the…

The normal human response to reports of a deadly shark in the water is to boil the sea, move inland, and spend the rest of one’s life in peaceful isolation at the top of a…

In 2013, almost 600,000 people died of malaria, a disease caused by a parasite passed to humans through mosquito bites. But these deaths--mostly among children in…

People find all sorts of inventive ways to continue the legacy of their recently deceased relatives. Some start charity funds; others hang on to photographs or old keepsakes. But as Katia Apalategui, a 52-year-old French insurance saleswoman, mourned the death of her father seven years ago, she was inspired to try to capture his scent in a perfume. She teamed up with researchers from the Université du Havre, who have also been working on distilling the human scent. Though no one has disclosed exactly how the technique works, one of the researchers said that all they needed was a piece of…

Falcons are perfected aerial machines, evolved over millennia to be very, very good at being falcons. Unfortunately, upstart Homo sapiens have put a few obstacles in the…

North of Norway, the robots wait. From a laboratory on Svalbard, a team of researchers led by Christopher Zappa of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory…

The Progress Eagle is a gigantic concept airliner by designer Oscar Viñals. It's an amazing air transit behemoth, with solar panels and a giant wind turbine, all for a…

DORA, a student-built robot with a highly-articulated neck, maps its head movements to an Oculus Rift. This is telepresence done right.

Crispy cricket tacos, bee larvae sandwiches, banana worm bread--you may already know that bug-based recipes are all the rage lately. But even in the face of evidence that…

A controversial project to build a telescope atop the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Kea was targeted by a cyberattack over the weekend.

If you’ve ever been behind the mic at a karaoke bar, you know the agony of a senseless backing track. Slow down your tempo for dramatic effect and the track blindly rolls…

Portable music players are everywhere you turn: smartphones, tablets, iPods, and laptops. But to the true audiophile, it’s all junk. That’s because most play compressed sound files--great for jam-packing your hard drive with music, bad for sound quality. The new Sony Walkman ZX2 aims to fix that. This portable hi-fi music player is a far cry from the original Walkman that launched a million mixtapes when it debuted in 1979. The ZX2 plays just about every file type on the planet, and when it’s paired with a headphone amplifier, there aren’t many products that can match it for quality and…

For the past 30 years, Nikon has held a contest for the year’s best microphotography images, and competition has been fierce. In 2011, they brought those still images to…

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