Our editors scrounged up some truly frightful facts.
What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s newest podcast.
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The spookiest things we learned this week
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Is my headache actually eye strain?
Why tired eyes cause you pain.
You’ve got a headache for the third time this week, and the culprit could be anything. But what if the pain is just coming from eye strain?
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Behold the mighty elephant bird, blindly crashing through the Madagascan forest
Sightless, flightless, and 10 feet tall.
Islands breed strange animals. Isolated from the rest of the world, these ecosystems often produce creatures uniquely adapted to their idiosyncratic environments.
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We created a frankenhouse of the most common phobias
Explore the things that keep humanity up at night—and learn why they haunt us.
What keeps you up at night? This frankenhouse is the ultimate fear factory, based on humanity’s most commonly diagnosed phobias. Learn why they get to us.
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Bitcoin is probably bad for the planet, but exactly how bad remains to be seen
An alarming new study may also be "deeply flawed."
This study claims that Bitcoin mining could warm the Earth by 2 degrees C within 22 years, all by itself. One energy expert calls baloney.
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The swamp science that lured travelers to their doom—and inspired the jack-o’-lantern
And led to one of the first American science experiments.
A mysterious light hovers over a marsh, luring travelers to their watery dooms. This real phenomenon earned the nickname will o' the wisp—or jack-o'-lantern. Here's the…
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Scientists set up a haunted lab to figure out why we like being scared
Or why some of us do, anyway.
The researchers set up their makeshift lab in the basement of the haunted house, recruiting people who had already purchased tickets.
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The next novel you read may be in Facebook Messenger
Facebook, Hooked, and other platforms are changing the way we read.
We aren't exactly a nation of readers. But these tech companies want to change that, by putting fiction on our smartphones.
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Frankenstein was based on some very real (and very creepy) experiments
Scientists really did believe that electricity might be able to bring the dead back to life.
The idea that electricity really was the stuff of life and that it might be used to bring back the dead was certainly a familiar one in the kinds of circles in which the…
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Kepler finally ran out of gas, but it will always fuel our planet-hunting ambitions
It defied the odds to discover thousands of planets.
NASA’s TESS mission launched in April and will take over the exoplanet search.
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Google and Apple Maps have plenty of errors. Here’s how to fix them.
Flag missing roads, update restaurants' opening hours, and more.
We constantly consult mapping apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps. But we can also contribute to them. Edit existing data, add new information, and even register your…
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Even short dressers can crush kids, so anchor them to the wall
Regulations don’t govern furniture under 30 inches, but a new Consumer Reports investigation shows they’re still deadly.
Among the litany of screws and plastic doo-hickeys remaining after you assemble tall IKEA furniture, you may have noticed a separate plastic bag containing brackets.
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Humans have altered almost the entire planet—we need to save what’s left
Wild lands are disappearing fast.
The world's last wildernesses are disappearing fast, and we need to act quickly if we want to save them.
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McLaren's $2.4 million Speedtail hypercar can hit 250 miles per hour
Sadly, they only made 106 and they're all sold out.
It takes a lot of engineering to make a car this fast.
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Folding phones, a Facebook TV camera, the death of Twitter's like button and the rest of the current tech rumors
Catch up on all the technology gossip without all the hype.
Keep it real with your tech rumors.
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Whoa, dinosaur eggs looked more dope than we thought
Colorful eggs aren't just for the birds.
Colorful eggs evolved among dinosaurs when they started nesting above ground. The dinos then passed the trait down to their modern descendants—birds.
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Extreme summer weather will be back next year . . . and probably forever
Some research suggest these outliers are shifting to norms.
It’s not just in your head: we really are experiencing more dangerous and extreme weather events than ever before in modern times.
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Add USB ports to your outlets without springing for an electrician
Make charging easier.
Ever feel like you have plenty of charging cables, but not enough adapters to plug them into the wall? Here are two easy ways to add USB ports to your walls.
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How do planes fly?
A simple answer you can explain to your friends.
Flight relies on two principles of aerodynamics, or the study of how air moves around objects. These are thrust and lift.
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Surprise! Kids' apps are full of manipulative, unregulated advertising
And that’s just the start of a kindergartener’s gaming woes.
A new study shows that 95 percent of children’s apps contain at least one type of advertising, a number that worries physicians and parents, and isn’t regulated under…
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