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 […]



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 […]

Underground worm a goldmine for astrobiology

A team of geoscientists have discovered a breed of tiny worms living around a mile below the surface of the earth. It’s already sparking speculation that this could show another way life might be able to exist on other planets. The Halicephalobus mephisto worm was discovered in a South African gold mine. It’s barely one-fiftieth […]