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Northrop Grumman X-47
Northrop Grumman X-47 Courtesy Northrop GrummanFully autonomous drone refuels and lands with no human intervention Today's "robot planes" are pilotless, not autonomous; a joystick-equipped human on the...
View ArticleSlow-Motion Video: Blender Versus Pomegranate
A celebration of a beautiful fruit Now is the time of year when pomegranates are at their sweetest and juiciest. This video celebrates the season in one of our favorite ways: by tossing a pomegranate...
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How Mollusk Blood Could Cure Cancer
Medicinal Shellfish A large protein in limpet hemolymph contains epitopes, which trigger an immune response in humans. Hal Beral/CorbisThe incredible Mr. Limpet The giant keyhole limpet's hemolymph...
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Tested: Wilton B.A.S.H. Sledgehammer and Two-Faced Crowbar
Strong Hold B.A.S.H. is the only sledge to thread the handle through the head. Typical sledges rely on friction to hold the two together. Claire BenoistCan anything break a steel-reinforced sledge?...
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You Built What?! A Wearable LED Television
Color by Numbers David Forbes's TV vest contains 14,400 green, red, and blue LEDs that together make 4,667 pixels. Steven MecklerThis 160-by-120 pixel TV will get you stopped at the airport David...
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Predictions for 2012: Garage Rocketeers Approach Orbit
Garage Rocketeers Todd Baxter in 2012, two large, well-funded companies, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, will begin making regular journeys to suborbital and orbital space, commencing the post-NASA era of...
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NASA Rings in the New Year As Twin Grail Probes Arrive at the Moon
GRAIL At the Moon NASA Happy New Year! NASA may not launch any people into space in 2012, but a successful robotic mission just as the new year dawned sets the stage for the space agency's near-term...
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FaceTime for Apes: Orangutans Use iPads to Video Chat With Friends In Other Zoos
Orangutan iPad An orangutan named Mahal plays with an iPad at the Milwaukee Zoo. Orangutan Outreach Orangutans living in captivity will soon start using iPads for primate play-dates, using Skype or...
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A Rethought Calendar Makes Each Year Identical to the One Before
The Mayan Calendar If you squint, you can clearly see the part where it says the world will end in 2012. That's right, keep squinting . . . Smithsonian via Wikimedia As the calendar turns over to a new...
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Nobel-Winning Quasicrystals Appear to Have Come From Space
Quasicrystals Within this chunk of mineral unearthed in Russia's Koryak mountains are crystalline structures that likely originated in space and were delivered to Earth via meteorite, a new study...
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Video: Swiss Jumpglider Bot Leaps Into Flight, Inspired by Insects and Bats
Jumping Microglider EPFL For animals and animal-inspired machines, launching into flight takes lots of energy. Some animals have evolved to achieve air not by accelerating and lifting off, but by...
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Video: Groombot Brushes Cat, Ushering in a New Era of Remote Robo-Petting
Robo-Grooming Telepresence is cool, but it's currently not very versatile and--at least if you're going the commercial telepresence robot route--pretty expensive. For a princely sum, you can remotely...
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FYI: What's the Point of Nose Hair?
NoseClamp Henrik Sorensen/Getty Images To strain out the nasty stuff we breathe in. It's like an air filter in your house, says Justin Turner, an otolaryngologist (short, sort of, for...
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Mae Jemison, Who Was the First Black Woman in Space, Will Now Lead 100-Year...
Mae Jemison Wikipedia/NASA A project to pave the way for humanity's journey to the stars will be helmed by a former astronaut, Mae Jemison, already a pioneer in her own right. She will lead DARPA's...
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Male Wolf Spiders Swipe Other Males' Dance Moves
Wolf Spider Wikimedia CommonsAfter watching them on TV Researchers at the University of Cincinnati performed an experiment on a type of the widespread and unnerving wolf spider that shows that these...
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The USAF's X-37B Secret Space Plane Appears to Be Tracking China's New Space...
The X-37B, Pre-Flight USAF Here at PopSci we don't like to spread rumors. And that's how I generally like to start off a post wherein I intend to propagate some kind of hearsay rooted mostly in...
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Video: Phobos-Grunt Will Make Its Fiery Return to Earth Next Week
The Phobos-Grunt That Wasn't A Roscosmos rendering of Phobos-Grunt approaching Mars and its moon Phobos. RoscosmosThe doomed Russian spacecraft is expected to re-enter next Sunday When the German...
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Enter the 2012 Popular Science Invention Awards
The Popular Science Invention Awards John B. Carnett Do you have an invention you KNOW will someday change the world? Have you been toiling for years in your basement, building prototype after...
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Monkey Embryo Mashup Results In First Primate Chimeras
Scientists have produced the world's first chimeric monkeys, developed from stem cells harvested from separate embryos. They contain genetic material from as many as six genomes. The infant rhesus...
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On Land Destroyed by the Tsunami, Japan is Building a Futuristic Robot Farm
Devastation Wrought by the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami U.S. Navy via Wikimedia You have to hand it to the Japanese; Last March's Tohoku earthquake and associated tsunami wasn't the first natural (or...
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