interviews

Baratunde Thurston delves into technological and scientific innovations in the new television series Popular Science's Future Of, premiering on the Science Channel Monday, August 10 at 9 p.m. (ET/PT). As a comedian, political pundit, and author, he guides us through the future of play, war, sex, security, and many other topics affecting human life. In Monday's premiere episode, he will go to the MIT Media Lab to try out new technology that will shape our leisure time in the future.

PopSci talked to the man about television, the future, and defeating Michael Phelps.

Will future brain imaging allow scientists to read your mind? What does "nothing" really mean, and what is time? Does free will exist? Has intelligence evolved in parallel amongst many species, or is it unique to humans? These are just a few of the topics that will be tackled over the next four days at the second annual World Science Festival. The festival brings together an impressive list of participants: E.O. Wilson, Oliver Sacks, Alan Alda, Glenn Close, Yo-Yo Ma, and Dean Kamen, to name a few. The crème de la crème of the scientific community (including a number of Nobel Laureates), performing and visual artists, innovators in business, and policy-makers will engage in a public discussion about science and encourage scientific discovery and education.

Science geeks, Trekkers, and action-movie fans have now had a few days to digest the newest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise. PopSci set out to answer some of the movie's most puzzling questions (aside from what Winona Ryder was doing on Vulcan): Can we time-travel through black holes? Can we seed said black holes using something called "red matter"? How about teleportation -- will someone named Scotty (or Chekov) ever beam someone up?

PackBots roam the streets of Iraq defusing bombs. Remote-controlled SWORDS robots shoot rifles and rocket launchers with deadly accuracy. Predator drones piloted by soldiers in Nevada drop missiles on Iraq and Afghanistan. The Wasp robot flies over neighborhoods full of insurgents, recording what's below with a camera as small as a peanut.

If this sounds like a futuristic science fiction story, it's not. As of today, over 12,000 robots are working in Iraq, up from zero five years ago.

Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist is the best film ever to depict what goes on inside a real science lab -- period.

Above is one of the first scenes in the movie. It introduces one of the protagonists, a graduate student named Robert Townley. Go ahead -- watch it.

With her team, Kathy Vandiver, director of the Community Outreach and Education Program at MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences, creates eye-catching animations of cellular processes like meiosis, mitosis, and DNA translation and transcription, using Legos. These sophisticated simulations of what is going on in the cell are used as teaching aids for both school-aged and adult students, mainly to pique their interest in the subject matter at the beginning of a class.

Popular Science spoke to Dr. Vandiver about her Lego creations.