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Just three years after the iconic magazine abandoned its print version and went all-digital, Popular Science is now halting its subscription service entirely. The brand itself will live on — their site will still run tech stories and news articles, and they have two podcasts that will keep getting new episodes — but no more quarterly releases. While you can’t complain too much about a 151 year run, it’s still sad to see what was once such an influential publication slowly become just another cog in the content mill. Started as a monthly magazine all the way back in 1872,...

These expert navigators sailed thousands of nautical miles long before other societies.The 2016 animated family film Moana brought the long-told story of Polynesian seafarers (along with some incredibly catchy tunes) to a much wider worldwide audience. Now, geochemical analysis is confirming the oral history of ancient Polynesia’s incredible sailors in a new study published April 21 in the journal Science Advances. Long before Europeans arrived, Polynesian wayfinders sailed to islands across the central Pacific in canoes, and the stories of their adventures have survived largely through oral history. There has been limited material evidence supporting these accounts of Polynesian societies...

California scientists announced a breakthrough that could commercialize nuclear fusion in a few decades, but a Vancouver-based company has a method that claims to power homes with the technology by the early 2030s. Unlike at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which used lasers to achieve net gain energy, General Fusion compresses hydrogen plasma inside a large cylinder to increase density and temperature. General Fusion's method uses high-powered pistons to squeeze liquid metal around the plasma to build pressure until the mixture hits 180 million degrees Fahrenheit - and fusion occurs. The firm says it plans to have its first commercial power...

One of the ever-looming threats of climate change is sea level rise, which already threatens to displace millions of people worldwide and force them to move inland by the end of the century. A big part of the rising water levels are hotter temperatures at the poles—home to giant glaciers and ice shelves that hold crucial quantities of frozen H2O. The Florida-sized Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, nicknamed the “doomsday glacier,” is already losing 50 billion tons of ice each year. That in itself accounts for around 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. But unpublished research shared at the...

But can it ever hope to compete with SpaceX? Like the Falcon 9, Adeline is only partially reusable -- but the way it's meant to work is quite creative. While most of the rocket's fuselage goes unrecovered after launch, the bottom portion of the rocket housing the main engine (most expensive part and arguably the most important) is designed to safely return back home. The design calls for the first stage of the rocket to come equipped with wings and propellers, allowing it to travel back to Earth like a small plane and land gently on a runway. The key...

As Hurricane Matthew charges into Florida with winds up to 140 mph, approximately 1.5 million people are preparing to clear out of the storm’s path. By Thursday evening, the National Weather Service was imploring residents to head to safety. “Now is the time to urgently hide from the wind. Failure to adequately shelter may result in serious injury, loss of life or immense human suffering,” the agency said on its website. On Thursday, President Obama declared a State of Emergency in Florida. And then there was Matt Drudge, who was instead declaring a state of conspiracy. The founder of the...

Every now and then, a distant star called KIC 8462852 dims by as much as 20 percent. That's huge. Even a passing planet as big as Jupiter would only block about 1 percent of the star's light. Ruling out a planet, scientists have no idea what could be eclipsing the star (which is informally known as 'Tabby's Star'). The leading hypothesis is a family of really big comets, but that doesn't quite fit. Astronomer Jason Wright pointed out that the light patterns are consistent with what we'd expect if aliens had built a Dyson swarm of solar collectors around the...

Update 8:45 a.m. Tuesday: The district confirmed that Ahmed’s father met with the superintendent yesterday and requested to pull Ahmed out of the district. But technically, the Mohamed children are still on the rolls this morning, until some formalities are completed.

The beer will be called Bone Dusters Paleo Ale (Hardy har har [Okay, actually, "paleo ale" is pretty good]). The yeast come from the surface of one of the oldest marine mammal fossils ever discovered in the western hemisphere. The idea for the beer came from Jason Osborne, who co-directs a nonprofit dedicated to advancing paleontology and geology. A paleo beer, Osborne thought, would be a great hook to interest non-scientists in fossils. I think many non-scientists are quite interested in fossils already, but I cannot argue against a paleo beer. Will whale-fossil beer really taste that different from other...

Chelyabinsk, a large city in western Russia, was best known for producing tractors and professional hockey players until the morning of February 15, 2013, when a 19-meter-wide meteor screamed through the sky and exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT. The meteor generated a fireball many times brighter than the sun, so powerful it even caused sunburns. The shock wave blew out windows and knocked residents off of their feet, injuring more than 1,200. The object was the largest to strike Earth in more than a century... Asteroids that come within 28 million miles of our planet are...

The next time you hear someone dispute that human activity is destabilizing our climate, remember this pie chart. It represents geochemist James Lawrence Powell's review of 2,258 peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate change, written by 9,136 authors, published between Nov. 12, 2012 and December 31, 2013. Of all those hundreds of papers and thousands of researchers, Powell found one article, authored by a single scientist, that attributed climate change to something other than human actions: "The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming," by S.V. Avakyan, appearing in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Science, Vol. 83, No. 3....

This flows in perfectly with the Warmist notion that debate is great, and theyÂ’re willing to debate anyone anytime anywhere, but when challenged disappear and refuse. Why WeÂ’re Shutting Off Our Comments Comments can be bad for science. ThatÂ’s why, here at PopularScience.com, weÂ’re shutting them off. It wasnÂ’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to...

Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.That is not to suggest that we are the only website in the world that attracts vexing commenters. Far from it. Nor is it to suggest that all, or even close...

What is it? Orbital,non-reciprocating internal combustion engine. Piston/Cylinder structured Adaptable to all liquid or gaseous fuels Ultra efficient Patent # 7721687B1; & Patents Pending

n the November issue, we looked at how scientists are using DNA analysis to track down endangered species that are being hunted for food. Here, Dave Arnold talks about why some people prefer exotic meats. For the most part, Americans are obsessed with tenderness, and favor mild-flavored meat. We eat a fairly small number of animals, almost all of them slaughtered young, when their meat is at its least flavorful. Fortunately, some of us are starting to realize that meat can be much more interesting. As the food revolution continues to gain traction, our ancestral lust for robust, unusual meats...

Just thought this was funny. I am not math wizard but I am pretty sure that 23 months is not equal to 1 year.

One of the few constants in our chaotic world is the meddlesome nature of many people – usually, but not always liberals, to try to change the way we do things in the western world. We eat too much. We use too much oil and gas. We spew too many toxic fumes into the atmosphere. We're too wealthy. We're a bunch of arrogant, greedy people who just don't care about the world we live in. And now we have the ultimate insult. The UN is considering a policy paper stating that we don't eat enough bugs. No, I'm not making...

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As any battlefield commander will tell you, getting troops to the fight can be as difficult as winning it. And for modern-day soldiers, the sites of conflict are so far-flung, and the political considerations of even flying over another country so complicated, that rapid entry has become nearly impossible. If a group of Marine Corps visionaries have their way, however, 30 years from now, Marines could touch down anywhere on the globe in less than two hours, without needing to negotiate passage through foreign airspace. The breathtaking efficiency of such a delivery system could change forever the way the U.S....

In 8/2004 Popular Science there is an article about a bike that spray paints messages on the sidewalk similarly to the way skywriting is done. The interesting thing is that you send what you want printed via the web. "Kinberg will officially roll out the bike during August's Republican National Convention in New York, but he says the project is as much performance art as protest. The project homepage can be found at bikesagainstbush.com. See video of it in action in QuickTime or Real Video."