So, Just How Good Are You At Puzzles?

!----> Photo Credit: Johnbod via Wikimedia Commons Project: The Picts were a group of people that lived in Scotland during the Late Iron Age. You're probably familiar with their signature artwork: highly stylized animals, beautiful spirals, and intricate knots, all carved into stone, or worked in metal. And it's one of the most famous and beautiful Pictish stones that National Museums Scotland wants you to put back...

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Weird, Extra Small Viruses Discovered In Remote Arctic Lakes

!----> Lake Linnevatnet, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Photograph provided by Antonio Alcami The Arctic lakes in Svalbard, Norway are among of the most pristine, isolated bodies of water on the planet. But that doesn't mean they're empty. In a published today in Science Advances researchers announced the discovery of previously unknown viruses. Viruses are found basically everywhere. They are minuscule...

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This Squishy Honeycomb Could Build Strong, Lightweight Armor

!----> Negative Stiffness Honeycomb The University of Texas at Austin Armor can be light, durable, and effective, but rarely all three at the same time. New research from the University of Texas Austin has a new solution: a honeycomb shape, but one durable enough to reform after impact. Man-made honeycomb structures used in armor are light: the majority of the space inside them is air. They’re also cheap,...

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Armor Yourself In The Same Megatough Material As This Boxing Shrimp

!----> A Mantis Shrimp Jens Petersen, via Wikimedia Commons Under the paddle-like objects are the shrimp's clubs, which are thick and bludgeon-shaped. Despite its segmented carapace, the mantis shrimp is known more for the punches it gives than the blows it takes. Related to the powerful pistol shrimp, the mantis is pound for pound one of the animal world’s deadliest pugilists. Researchers...

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Watch An Engine Powered By Evaporation Drive A Car

!----> Moisture Mill Joe Turner Lin Evaporation is one of the givens here on Earth, right up there with death and taxes. At any given moment, water is evaporating from the ground or oceans and entering the air in massive quantities. Now, some researchers think they may have figured out a way to harness that process to create an endlessly renewable energy source. In a published today in Nature...

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Laser-Armed Cryo Robots Could Explore Europa For Alien Life

!----> Europa, Remastered A re-mastered photo of Europa's surface. For more information, read Francie Diep's Story on the What has lasers, a torpedo-shaped body, and is capable of tunneling where no one has tunneled before? VALKYRIE, one of the 'cryobots' that is paving the way towards exploring icy moons like Europa in the future. Jupiter's moon Europa is considered a with a saltwater...

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What’s the Deal with Paranormal Ectoplasm?

!----> Paranormal Ectoplasm Jason Schneider Nineteenth-century physiologist Charles Richet first used the term ectoplasm to describe a strange material that seemed to flow from spiritual mediums during a séance. Doughy strings appeared to ooze from their bodies and assemble into ghostly faces or disembodied limbs. Of course, these ectoplasms were a parlor trick. Mediums used sleights of hand...

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Will Mind Transfer Ever Happen?

!----> Mind Transfer Prop styling by Sarah Guido-Laakso for Halley Resources 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 be technically feasible (albeit ethically fraught), at least pending the development of some extremely advanced electrode arrays. Extricating mind...

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Should We Outlaw Androids?

!----> Robotic Killers Paramount Pictures Terminator Genisys comes out July 1; Tomorrowland comes out May 22 In movies, robots typically masquerade as humans in order to infiltrate society and annihilate us. In real life, researchers are more concerned about the damage androids could inflict on our minds. Alan Winfield, a roboticist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the U.K., says...

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Can We Protect Planetary Explorers From Cosmic Rays?

!----> Fantastic Four Marvel Comes out August 7 In truth, galactic cosmic rays (GCR) don’t bestow otherworldly abilities. Their gift is an increased risk of cancer. While this isn’t a concern within Earth’s magnetosphere, which deflects radiation, astronauts on a mission to Mars could hit NASA’s cumulative, career-long radiation limit in as few as 150 days. It could take up to 260 days...

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Now Open: The 2016 Vizzies

!----> The 2016 Vizzies National Science Foundation Once again, Popular Science has teamed up with the to issue a challenge: Can you visualize a scientific idea, concept, or story in an arresting way? If so, submit your work to the 2016 Vizzies! You can enter over on the . The competition has five categories: photography, illustration, posters and graphics, interactive, and video, which should...

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The Truth (And Exaggerations) Behind This Summer’s Sci-Fi

!----> Weird Science 2015 Jonathon Kambouris This article was originally published in the of Popular Science. !----> post from site...

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Looking for Dark Matter Under A Mountain

!----> Darkside 50 Enrico Sacchetti A mile beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain lies the DarkSide-50 detector. The three-story cylinder was built to search for our universe’s most mysterious substance: . “We know it exists in our galaxy and roughly how much there is,” says Princeton physicist Peter Meyers. “What we don’t know is what it is.” The most promising lead is --weakly interacting massive...

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Robots Are Using Dragonfly Eyes To Better Track Moving Objects

!----> Scientists Zahra Bagheri and Benjamin Cazzolato, and robot. The University of Adelaide Some robots of the future will see the world through the eyes of insects. In a study published this week in , researchers have developed software that lets machines track moving objects with the same precision as dragonflies. Although dragonflies have puny brains and vision with extremely low resolution,...

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Sexist Remarks Prompt Celebration Of Science

!----> , chemist at National Institute for Medical Research MRC National Institute for Medical Research, via Wikimedia Commons 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, “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall...

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Need Clean Water? Just Add These Seeds

!----> Moringa oleifera seeds 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 have to spend large amounts of time finding safe water to drink don't have time for other things like education or work, and contaminated water often harbors deadly diseases. But there is hope, in the...

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This Computer Runs On Water Droplets And Magnets

!----> Water Droplet Computer As anyone who has experienced the devastation of spilling a glass of water on their laptop knows, H2O and computers don't mix. Almost equally as bad? Magnets. Both are terrible, horrible, no-good computer killing substances... which is why it was kind of a surprise to learn about a brand new computer built using water droplets and an electromagnet. A 'computer' is a that can follow...

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May 28 Should Henceforth Be Known As Thales Day

!----> Partial Solar Eclipse Thousands of Chicagoans will next week to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of science. Thales of Miletus, "Father Of Science" Obviously it’s pretty hard to pin down the exact date when science got its start. But the Chicago Science Fest organizers are giving the honors to May 28, because on this day in 585 B.C., a Greek philosopher...

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How Delaying A Subway Train Fixes A Subway Delay

!----> Video of A Subway Delay Story To a harried subway passenger, learning that there's a delay ahead can trigger groans, rolled eyes, or mere stoic despair. But commuters might be even more annoyed if they realized the track ahead was perfectly clear: Sometimes, the system holds a train in place to fix a delay behind it. In this 8-bit , the explains how slowing down one train can actually reduce the total delay on the line. It all has to do with maintaining an even gap between trains. Otherwise, a small delay will swell...

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Murder Suspect Identified By DNA Left On Pizza Crust

!----> Cheese pizza, extra DNA. In what has been called an four people were murdered on May 14 in a mansion in Washington, D.C. At first glance, the crime appeared to be motivated by money and seemed to be random, so investigators didn’t have much information to go on when trying to identify a suspect. But then, a stroke of luck: Police uncovered a box of Domino’s pizza, one of two that was delivered to the house...

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You Could One Day Be Identified By Your Unique 'Brainprint'

!----> A person hooked up for an electroencephalogram (EEG). Sometimes, other people interpret your words differently than you may have intended--like you’re not on the same wavelength. Turns out that the neuroscience backs up that idea; words elicit unique neurological responses in different people's brains, according to a published in the journal Neurocomputing. This revelation could lead to a whole...

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This Futuristic Concrete Heals Itself With Built-In Bacteria

!----> Concrete Concrete has been a go-to building material since . It’s durable, easy to make, and relatively inexpensive. There’s just one problem: It has a tendency to crack. There are a lot of different reasons that concrete cracks, but in general, it gets stressed either from the load its carrying, the weather, or other natural forces, and it fractures under the pressure. Regardless, cracked...

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Why Does Mold Come In So Many Colors?

!----> Jason Schneider The amazing diversity of colors produced by molds and other fungi can vary regionally, says Sara Robinson, a researcher at Oregon State University. Blues and greens are prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, whereas oranges are more common in the Amazon. But the raison d’être of this rainbow of melanins, carotenoids, and other pigments isn’t always clear. Some of the species Robinson...

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Looking for Dark Matter Under A Mountain

!----> Darkside 50 Enrico Sacchetti A mile beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain lies the DarkSide-50 detector. The three-story cylinder was built to search for our universe’s most mysterious substance: . “We know it exists in our galaxy and roughly how much there is,” says Princeton physicist Peter Meyers. “What we don’t know is what it is.” The most promising lead is --weakly interacting massive...

Read More