A Student Had a Hunch About a Stone Circle. Turns Out a 3,700-Year-Old Ritual Site Was Beneath It.George Bird knew there had to be more to the six-foot-tall standing stone.
A Revolutionary Animal Overpass Is Rising Over L.A.’s Busiest FreewayWildlife crossings help decrease the millions of vehicle collisions with large animals that occur every year in the US
Cells Are Swapping Their Mitochondria. What Does This Mean for Our Health?Researchers are studying why the energy factories are moving between cells and whether the process can be harnessed to treat cancer and other diseases.
The World Is Heating Up. How Much Can Our Bodies Handle?For 12 years, scientists thought they knew how much extreme heat human bodies could cope with. New research shows how wrong they were.
Conscious ‘Alien Minds’ Could Be Living Among Us—And We Don’t Even Know It, Scientist SaysWhat is intelligence? We can all agree that humans are intelligent and many of us would likely extend that definition to the most mentally adept creatures of the animal kingdom—from dolphins to corvids.
Laurie Santos’s Pursuit of HappinessLaurie Santos, a cognitive scientist at Yale, teaches the most popular course in the university’s three-hundred-year history, Psychology and the Good Life. One of her central messages—in the class, and on the podcast it inspired—is that, when it comes to happiness, we have some agency.
12,000 Years Later, Dire Wolves Are BackScientists are breeding dire wolf pups, back from extinction after some 12,000 years.
Looking under the hood at the brain’s language systemAs a young girl growing up in the former Soviet Union, Evelina Fedorenko PhD ’07 studied several languages, including English, as her mother hoped that it would give her the chance to eventually move abroad for better opportunities.
Consciousness Isn’t Just in Your Head—It May Be Altering Reality Itself, Scientists SayEver since we published our very first issue 123 years ago—yes, we’re old—Popular Mechanics has endeavored to help you understand all kinds of technological marvels, from the tools in your shed, to the planes in the sky, to the tanks on the battlefield.
Paralysed man stands again after receiving ‘reprogrammed’ stem cellsA paralysed man can stand on his own after receiving an injection of neural stem cells to treat his spinal cord injury. The Japanese man was one of four individuals in a first-of-its-kind trial that used reprogrammed stem cells to treat people who are fully paralysed.
An IVF Alternative Could Make Having Babies Less OnerousMore and more people are turning to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, to have babies. The process can be arduous, requiring injections of costly hormones twice a day for two weeks to mature eggs so that they can be retrieved from the body.
Quantum mechanics might have the solution to joystick driftThe Nintendo Switch may be remembered as much for repopularizing portable gaming as it will for a hardware issue that affected millions of gamers: joystick drift.
AI could soon tackle projects that take humans weeksToday’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems can’t beat humans on long tasks, but they’re improving at a rapid pace and could close the gap sooner than many anticipated, according to an analysis of leading models1.