Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Archaeologists in Poland are finally solving an over 2,000-year-old mummy mystery. After modern warfare erased vital information about the ancient Egyptian child, researchers were unsure about the boy’s origins and life. Now, they’ve discovered a striking detail while examining…
A new study suggests that human sperm quality follows a seasonal pattern, peaking in the summer and dipping in the winter. The research, published Feb. 21 in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, analyzed semen samples from more than 15,000 sperm donors in Denmark and the U.S., specifically the state of Florida. Across both populations,…
A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified as a barred spiral galaxy,…
There are plenty of flashy and exciting projects you can do with your smart home that can have a real wow factor. Sometimes, however, it’s the boring but practical projects that end up being the most useful. Related Building a smart home? Here’s one design principle you shouldn’t ignore ”Guest mode” is a sign that…
“Compleximers”—materials that can be molded like window glass but that resist impacts like plastic does—shouldn’t exist, researchers say. Nevertheless, a few grams of one such substance sit in a laboratory at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. In Nature Communications, Wageningen physical chemist Jasper van der Gucht and his team describe what makes compleximers as meltable…
Four people are sleeping 19,000 miles from the moon when the voice of Apollo 13’s commander arrives. “Hello, Artemis II. This is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighborhood.” Jim Lovell orbited the moon in 1968. He limped around it again in 1970 in a burning ship, his crew kept alive by mathematics…
Photonic devices, which rely on light instead of electricity, have the potential to be faster and more energy efficient than today’s electronics. They also present a unique opportunity to develop devices using soft materials, such as polymers and gels, which are poor conductors of electricity, but are easier to manufacture and more environmentally friendly. The…
New research from the University of St Andrews has shown that an important group of peatlands in the western Amazonia region of Peru developed more recently than many other peatlands in the tropics. Published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, the study analyzed more than 150 new and previously published radiocarbon dates from peats from…
ESP32 boards are inexpensive, tiny, and easy to work with, which makes them the perfect choice when you need to DIY a solution to a problem. Because they’re so widely supported and work with so many components, you can often build something that doesn’t have an off-the-shelf counterpart, giving you the flexibility to create something…
I stir in the dark. So do the others. There are around 30 of us, maybe more — all experiencing the soundscape of the quartz bowls; a tech-free hour designed for us to commune with memory, creativity and emotion. A chime brings the sound bath to its formal end, signaling us to reacquaint ourselves with…
