The Protein Synthesis Dance [Video]

Biology was comparatively boring by the time I got there, but if you were in high school sometime in the 70s, maybe you’ve seen this. The only way I can even begin to explain this is with a conspiracy theory: Jim Morrison took a season off from touring with the Doors to teach Bio II. […]



Building a Dinosaur From a Chicken [Video]

Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He’s found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he’s taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even […]

Hard Drive Anatomy 101 [Video]

In the following video, Bill Hammock, the Engineer Guy, explains everything there is to know about a hard drive by tearing one apart to show us the role of each of its components. This is by far the best explanation I’ve heard on how hard drives work. Check it out:



Seeing the world through the eyes of an astronaut [Video]

An intimate tour of Earth’s most impressive landscapes… as captured by astronauts with their digital cameras. Dr. Justin Wilkinson from NASA’s astronaut team describes the special places that spacemen focus on whenever they get a moment. [Via]

Antimatter gets its 16 minutes of fame

Researchers at CERN have revolutionized the ability to isolate and hold onto antimatter, a move which could transform our ability to study the issue. It was only last year that researchers being able to trap anti-matter and hold onto it for 0.2 seconds was considered a literally epic win. Now the staff of the ALPHA […]

Space Age Designs from the PopSci Archives

Years before Sputnik launched and even longer before The Jetsons debuted, Popular Science was tracking Space Age trends in automobiles, appliances, architecture and interior design. Check out the PopSci gallery of Space Age-design articles from 1951 – 1968, which include everything from rocket-shaped cars to a lunar-base summer camp. [PopSci]

7 Things I Learned from This Week’s Infinite Monkey Cage

This week saw the start of the fourth series of British radio series The Infinite Monkey Cage, which aims to present “a witty irreverent look at the world according to science.” (The show has proven so successful it even produced a national live event tour, which I reviewed recently.) British readers who missed the show […]

Solar-Cell “Super Skin” Is Better Than Yours

Stanford University chemical engineering Professor Zhenan Bao has developed a flexible, stretchable solar cell, which she envisions as a future component in artificial skin for robots, human prosthetic limbs, or even clothing. The film stretches up to 30% from its original size along two axes without losing function or resulting in loss of elasticity. That kind of […]