Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Contrary to conspiracy theories, the Earth’s core isn’t hollow. The dense, hot ball instead contains a stew of precious metals including platinum, ruthenium, and pretty much all of the planet’s gold. As lucrative as that sounds, there’s essentially no way humanity…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A laser named after the most powerful god in ancient Greece is living up to its name. According to the University of Michigan, the first official experiment from the Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System (ZEUS) yielded 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts)…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For years, archeologists assumed the ancient Homo erectus population that lived on present-day Java existed in general isolation from nearby island relatives. However, a pair of fossilized skull fragments recently found off the Javanese coast are helping experts recontextualize the lives…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Archaeopteryx represents a pivotal point in the grand evolutionary journey linking dinosaurs to their avian descendants. But paleontologists still have questions about the Jurassic era animal’s anatomy and behavior roughly 165 years after its discovery. One of the most pressing lingering…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Conspiracy theories about cell phone towers and wireless communication have existed as long as the technologies themselves. But in an age of rampant disinformation, objectively false claims about these subjects are more widespread than ever, and increasingly difficult to combat. Take…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 You can now get a sense of the awe-inspiring Parthenon in all its former glory thanks to a multiyear endeavor merging history and 3D computer modeling. University of Oxford archeologist Juan de Lara combined primary source information, astronomical data, and CGI to digitally recreate the ancient Greek pilgrimage site…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 The world’s largest and most powerful superconducting electromagnet is ready to become the pulsing “heart” inside of a massive tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. Developed over 40 years in collaboration with over 30 countries, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) facility in southern France aims to finally demonstrate nuclear fusion’s…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 The mighty Incan empire wasn’t the first society to spread across the Andes Mountains—2,000 years earlier, there were the Chavín. Although their own name for themselves remains unknown, the Chavín of Peru clearly shared common agricultural techniques, buildings, and artwork from roughly 900 BCE to 650 BCE. They also…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Our solar system is approximately 4.6 billion years old, but countless planetary neighborhoods are still just getting their start. Identifying and studying these newcomers isn’t always easy, but thanks to recently developed techniques an international research team has captured some of the sharpest images ever seen of protoplanetary disks…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 It was a rough start to the week for the Department of Defense. On April 29, sailors aboard the USS Harry S. Truman witnessed a $60-70 million fighter jet vanish into the Red Sea after they “lost control” of the F/A-18E Super Hornet and its towing tractor. The incident…
