Popular Science

Clean, drinkable water is unfortunately out of reach for hundreds of millions of people around the world, contributing to a vicious cycle of poverty and disease. People who…

The first virtual reality experience that you try will be a video game, at least if Oculus has its way. The Facebook-owned company unveiled the first consumer version of its…

As much as we may try, humans can’t see in complete darkness. But even in the presence of just a few light particles, special cells in our eyes activate. For decades…

It’s the ultimate doomsday scenario: Astronomers spot an enormous miles-wide asteroid headed for a collision course with Earth. An impact with our planet means a fiery…

Mankind is about to visit one of the strangest places in our solar system. Out beyond Neptune, the Kuiper belt is home to hordes of cold, lumpy worlds—some of which are large…

Artificial intelligence, or machine learning as it’s also referred to, is starting to touch more products we use on a daily basis. Take Google’s new Photos product as an…

Aiming to build better drugs, scientists unravel a toxin's past.

Airliners aren’t supposed to go vertical. Boeing’s 787-9 Dreamliner is the latest in the aviation giant’s modern airliner series, and Boeing is eager to show the plane off at…

Dyna-Soar had many lives. Here's the story of the Air Force's space plane that never flew.

There was more to the DARPA Robotics Challenge than watching machines destroy themselves. Here's a closer look at how this landmark contest played out.

Some robots of the future will see the world through the eyes of insects. In a study published this week in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, researchers have…

Disease is an easily underestimated killer of humans. Shortly after World War I, a flu outbreak killed more people than the conflict itself. In every war America fought in…

Tim Hunt is a nobel-prize-winning biochemist, with an apparently well-earned reputation of chauvinism. Speaking to a conference of science journalists earlier this week, he…

On Monday at E3, Microsoft executive Sax Persson demonstrated a holographic version of Minecraft.

You know that saying "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it"? There's a group in Amsterdam that has decided that's not good enough. Instead, they're planning to 3D print…

As manager of outreach at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, physicist Spiros Michalakis is charged with not only researching quantum mechanics but also getting people excited about it. To do so he makes science-themed comics and videogames and consults on movies, including this summer's Ant-Man and the planned remake of Fantastic Voyage. We spoke with Michalakis about how the science in sci-fi blockbusters holds up--and whether it even matters that it does.Popular Science: In Ant-Man, the hero gains super-strength when he shrinks. How would the physics behind that…

Metropolis (1927)Scientist: C.A. RotwangHubris: Builds a robot to replace the woman who rebuffed him and later diedComeuppance: Hoping to destroy the city and its ruling…

Good news for prey: Genetic engineering is woefully ill equipped to produce bespoke killers of any kind. That’s because building a life-form is a messy and unpredictable…

It’s tempting to imagine the brain as a biological computer, with the tissue as hardware and electrical activity as software. If that were the case, mind transference might…

In 1974, astronomer Frank Drake tried to contact aliens by firing a three-minute-long broadcast, from the Arecibo radio telescope, into a globular star cluster 25,000…

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