Popular Science

LAST YEAR, Popular Science celebrated 150 years with an abundance of pomp and circumstance. We paid homage to our founders, poked fun at zany old experiments, corrected the record, and nerded the heck out. But change is inevitable, even for a magazine with a mighty legacy. In a world that craves newness, our age is showing. As AI upheaves the internet, gene therapy reshapes medicine, and electric batteries bring transportation up to speed, PopSci needs to evolve to keep our readers entertained and informed. People consume far more information than they did a century-and-a-half ago, with vastly different channels—and we’re challenging ourselves to bring rigorous, creative storytelling to as many of those as possible. Our all-digital publication will now be published on PopSci+ first, giving subscribers access to features, galleries, and…

KC DAVIS is famous for leaving dishes unwashed, forgetting to sweep, and, perhaps most of all, never folding laundry. But many of her 1.5 million TikTok followers credit her with helping them keep their homes cleaner than ever. Through her experience living with ADHD and her training as a licensed therapist, Davis has learned that a functional space isn’t always a tidy one. Her unique approach to what a well-kept dwelling should look like has helped followers, patients, and Davis herself radically reimagine how and why they clean. Davis first started posting TikTok videos about parenting and housekeeping as a way to socialize during COVID-19 lockdowns. She’d just moved and had a second child on the way, and the added stressors of 2020 brought her lifelong dislike of cleaning tasks to…

IN 1989, rock-and-roll legend Chuck Berry attended one of the biggest parties of the summer. The bash wasn’t a concert, but a celebration of two space probes about to breach the edge of our solar system: NASA’s Voyager mission. Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977, identical twins Voyager 1 and 2 embarked on a five-year expedition to observe the moons and rings of Jupiter and Saturn, carrying with them Golden Records preserving messages from Earth, including Berry’s smash single “Johnny B. Goode.” But 12 years later, out on the grassy “Mall” of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists celebrated as Voyager 2 made a previously unscheduled flyby of Neptune. Planetary scientist Linda Spilker remembers the bittersweet moment: the sight of the eighth planet’s azure-colored atmosphere signaled the end of the mission’s…

WHEN EUROPEANS first arrived in North America, the continent was home to between 60 and 400 million beavers. Streams from the rainy Pacific Northwest to the Utah desert were strung with their dams. The fur trade of the following centuries nearly wiped the animals out, and in their place, colonists built their own dams, replacing the dense tangles of beaver wetlands with quiet, deep reservoirs and plowed fields. Beavers, like humans, shape their ecosystems not just by eating or excreting, but also by building and tearing down. And because of those similarities, the rodents have become North America’s best-known “ecosystem engineers.” But the scientific idea of ecosystem engineering wasn’t born in a beaver lodge—it came from Israel’s Negev Desert. The pea-size rock-eating snail sticks to the underside of limestone boulders and has…

IN 1989, Albert Wood and Peter Dunn thought they had unlocked a critical chemical door to treating hypertension and recurring chest pain. The two British Pfizer scientists reportedly created a new drug, named sildenafil, that reacts with a specific protein in muscle cells to allow for increased blood flow to the heart. But a few years later, human clinical trials revealed the drug was only effective when given multiple times a day and had a poor reaction with other existing cardiac treatments. What’s more, the blood rush was going to unexpected places in the body in addition to the heart. In one study, a nurse observed that most of the male volunteers were lying on their stomachs in embarrassment. The reason? Erections. Wood and Dunn had inadvertently stumbled upon the medicine…

OFF-THE-GRID LIVING is experiencing a renaissance. Dwellings devised to support a sustainable lifestyle could help us adapt to some of our biggest present-day challenges—from a lack of housing for the world’s growing population to pollution and extreme weather. With the climate crisis in mind, architects are looking to more resilient options that don’t depend on the overdrawn electrical grid at all. Some designers are reinvigorating decades-old “biotecture,” like the 1970s Earthships made from reclaimed and natural materials; others are rejecting synthetics and leaning on Indigenous practices of building with natural materials. Meanwhile, weather-resistant domes and 3D-printed dwellings could house more people with fewer resources. We asked architects and engineers about off-the-grid living solutions that could help us adapt to changing environments. Earthships The definition of the term off the grid usually focuses…