To mark our 150th year, we’re revisiting the Popular Science stories (both hits and misses) that helped define scientific progress, understanding, and innovation—with an added hint of modern context. Explore the Notable pages and check out all our anniversary coverage here. Before physicists began to grok the laws of thermodynamics in the mid-1800s, inventors, lured by the idea of perpetual motion, sought to…
To mark our 150th year, we’re revisiting the Popular Science stories (both hits and misses) that helped define scientific progress, understanding, and innovation—with an added hint of modern context. Explore the Notable pages and check out all our anniversary coverage here. Until Heinrich Hertz discovered radio waves in 1887, the vast and invisible electromagnetic spectrum was a silent wilderness, punctuated…
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is nearly doubling its unit dedicated to cyber crimes in an effort to delve more into crypto-related enforcement. The federal agency announced Tuesday it is adding 20 positions, including investigative staff attorneys, trial counsels, fraud analysts, and supervisors, to be “better equipped to police wrongdoing in the crypto markets.” “Crypto markets have exploded in…
Late in the morning of May 3, a rocket blasted off into the heavens from a launchpad in New Zealand. Minutes later, as its second stage continued upwards towards orbit, the first stage of the rocket descended by parachute into the waiting hook from a recovery helicopter. The hook snagged the parachute line, where it was held—and then released. The…
This article was originally featured on Undark. Munesh sits by the roadside near a crowded market in Chandigarh, a city in India’s north, on a January day. She is flanked by several other women, all of them sweepers hired by the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation. She shows the smartwatch she is wearing and says, “See, I didn’t even touch it, but…
If artificial intelligence is intended to resemble a brain, with networks of artificial neurons substituting for real cells, then what would happen if you compared the activities in deep learning algorithms to those in a human brain? Last week, researchers from Meta AI announced that they would be partnering with neuroimaging center Neurospin (CEA) and INRIA to try to do…
Presuming that Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter totally goes through, things look set to get a bit more chaotic for the world’s 15th most popular social network. With Musk declaring himself a “free speech absolutist” (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), promising to defeat spambots, verify all real humans, and fix Twitter’s problems (at least as he sees…
In the last three months of 2019, well before the pandemic’s worldwide effect on air travel, Qantas Airlines operated three very long “research flights,” as it described them, to gauge the effects of all that time in the air on the well-being of the passengers and crew. Part of an initiative called “Project Sunrise,” the flights were ultra-long-hauls that each…
If virtual reality is supposed to ultimately mimic our current reality, then touch is an important sense to address. Haptics research—research around tech that can integrate this feeling of touch—has been a hot topic among virtual- and augmented reality-focused companies like Meta. Now, researchers from the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an add-on mouth haptics device…
Earlier this week, Chevrolet announced that an iconic vehicle would be getting a major revamp. According to GM president Mark Reuss, the Corvette—America’s supercar—will evolve to accept electric motors. He announced on April 25 that an “electrified” model will launch next year, while an “electric” model will follow sometime after. Hopes are high that these battery-and-electric-motor-enhanced Corvettes are the proof…