It’s an age-old tradition: Millions of Americans, from infants to the elderly, attend fireworks shows for the Fourth of July. There’s nothing quite as patriotic as sitting out on a blanket and watching hundreds of explosions light up the sky in honor of your country’s birthday. But how do fireworks work? Well, we’re here to arm you with some fun facts about the most patriotic science: pyrotechnics, the chemistry of explosions....
Flight relies on two principles of aerodynamics, or the study of how air moves around objects: thrust and lift. Thrust is when an object is pushed forward with force. Planes use their jet engines to achieve thrust: the engines suck in air, compress it, mix it with gas, and ignite the mixture it in a burst of energy that shoots out the back of the engine, which pushes the plane forward....
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft rocketed off our planet at 5:34 a.m. on October 16, 2021, so Levison and his team had been up all night preparing. It was a spectacular, “picture perfect” launch, recalls Levison, who is the Lucy mission principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The spacecraft would soon be on its way to the Trojan asteroids, unexplored fossils of the solar system that sit roughly the same distance from the sun as Jupiter....
The T206 Honus Wagner baseball card is the ultimate find for collectors. It was part of a limited-edition series issued in tobacco packs between 1909 and 1911. Production of Wagner’s T206 reportedly stopped early, so it’s the rarest of the bunch. There are somewhere between 50 and 75 of them in the world—depending on who you ask—and 33 have come through our company for authentication and grading. When a card arrives at our office, we first make sure it’s real, then assess its condition on a scale of 1 to 10....
Alright, it may be more accurate to say you’ll need three inexpensive accessories—at least if you want the best results. That means a wireless charging receiver that attaches to your phone, a case to hold the receiver in place, and a charging pad to actually charge the phone. Here’s what I recommend. The wireless receiver In order to pull this off, you’ll need a wireless charging receiver that plugs into your phone’s USB port....
Years ago, owning a portable recording rig meant schlepping around what felt like a truckload of gear (sometimes literally—see, for instance, the Rolling Stones’ infamous mobile rig sessions for “Exile on Main St.” in the South of France). Now, anyone with a smartphone is essentially walking around with a studio in his pocket. Even artists like Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West have laid down epic tracks on iPhones and iPads....
If any of that resonates, you’re not alone. The ongoing, prolonged pandemic has unbalanced our health and wellbeing in every sense, including our ability to focus and pay attention. The good news is that this damage is (for the most part) reversible. Stress and anxiety are among the most well-understood factors influencing memory. When we experience immense or chronic stress, it’s normal for our brains to stay in survival mode, says Carmen Sandi, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland....
Look inside the apps you already use We won’t go through every music and movie streaming service in detail here. But whatever streaming apps you’re subscribed to will provide a recommendation or discovery section somewhere within its menus. If you haven’t found it already, simply click or tap around inside its interface to turn up this option. Of course, taste is personal, but we’ve found personalized ways to get recommendations about what to listen to or binge-watch next....
Lice have infested human hair for as long as humans have existed, and outbreaks are still a common occurrence anywhere that you find small children. But there’s still a lot of misunderstanding about what, exactly, you should do when the insidious bugs reach your home. So we asked the experts everything you need to know about head lice. What is a head louse? The head louse, or Pediculus humanus capitis, is an insect that has adapted to live on the scalps of human beings....
Fortunately, reducing the waste we produce doesn’t have to be all or nothing. In fact, there’s plenty we can do on an individual level to help keep single-use out of use, starting with a simple trip to the grocery store. What is zero-waste? As the name implies, zero-waste is a way of living that produces as little waste as possible. And it’s not just something universities, cities, and states are increasingly committing to—it’s an achievable mission for individuals and families, too....
The moon is a photographic tease. It hangs up there in the sky, all big and bright. Then you try to take a picture of it and you get a pathetic white blob floating in a sea of digital noise and darkness. It’s frustrating, especially when you’re experiencing a super moon, or a blood moon, or a harvest moon, or any of those other moon phenomena that don’t really mean anything, but are extremely good at helping websites rack up page views and Instagram users gather likes....
And perilous might be an understatement: once hatchlings emerge from the sand, only 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 will actually make it to the Gulf Stream where they feast on algae, seaweed, and jellyfish as they grow into adults. Of the millions of eggs laid each year along Florida coasts, only several hundred turtles are likely to make it to sexual maturity. That’s because the hatchlings that make it to the water without getting picked off by sea birds or led astray by distracting lights on the beach may succumb to boating or fishing accidents or trash and pollution in waterways....
The current theory is that the blast, which killed five scientists and blanketed the immediate region with a still-unknown amount of radiation, most likely involved a missile equipped with a miniature nuclear reactor. Though the incident doesn’t seem to have involved a live nuclear warhead, submarines armed with such weapons are a key component of Russia’s nuclear deterrence strategy—same as in the United States. And following the collapse earlier this year of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty that limited weapons-testing, the world may see more and more nuclear weapons tests....
One night we unintentionally shifted our sleeping positions, dozing off on opposite sides of the bed. That’s when I felt the kick. Not once, but multiple times. The next night, I watched as my partner fell asleep. His feet started shaking, but then the shaking turned into jerking, and the jerking turned into kicking. Sharing a bed with a restless sleeper can be an exhausting experience. The common result is sleep deprivation for all parties involved, and oftentimes people see sleeping in separate beds as the only solution—even if they don’t want to....
To be fair to Dad (and the millions of other parents and caregivers facing similar appeals) it’s hard to fully understand the pervasiveness of online surveillance. The corporations that run the web amass personal information that is snatched up by data brokers in places as far away as Russia and China, according to a recent report by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. And although kids have to navigate the internet as part of their schooling, little has been done to prevent the commercialization of kids’ sensitive data....
Fortunately, these kinds of encounters are rare, and deaths, even rarer. Prior to 2012, the last mountain lion attack in Big Bend was in 2003, and that victim also walked away with only minor injuries. You see, mountain lions—also known as cougars or pumas—are solitary creatures that tend to stay out of sight and away from hikers. This makes attacks even more surprising. But even if attacks are rare, you should still be prepared when you step into terrain mountain lions call home—a vast area that spans from Mexico to the Canadian Rockies, California to Florida....
This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “A Reflective Dashboard for Your Morning Routine.” Stats Time: 2 hoursCost: $30Difficulty: Easy to medium Materials Android smartphone or tabletAcrylic two-way mirrorPencilScissorsBlack construction paperGlue stickDouble-sided adhesive stripsDrillHooks or nails Instructions Assembly Photos
After seven months of Apple exclusivity, Substack’s mobile app has arrived on Android. Now, both software ecosystems have access to a reading tool the newsletter platform has touted as “like your email inbox, but better.” We’ll leave the accuracy of that statement for you to decide—we’re just here to show you around. Tap any post to read it, and a new bottom bar will appear. From there, you can tap the heart icon to like the article, the speech bubble to comment, the share icon to, well, share....
Unlike Facebook, Apple is specifically trying to be more of a news source to its users. You can use the redesigned Apple News app in iOS 10 (which is just labeled “News”), to browse the most important, breaking stories of the day from almost all the publications that you want. You can even allow News to send you push notifications —it’ll ask as soon you open the app for the first time — so that you won’t miss anything....
The process of visual perception is a best guess scenario. When we look at something, the brain uses visual cues—sensory signals that convey information—to help work out what that thing is. This means that our perception of the world is not a simple reflection of sensory information, it is an interpretation of it. Along with color and motion, the perception of depth is very important to help us visually perceive things....
