• The Environment

    Giveaway: Yellowstone, Battle for Life

    By Posted on 9.29.2009 37 Comments

    America’s first National Park, Yellowstone, is home to some of the richest wildlife on Earth beyond the plains of Africa. Available today on BBC Video DVD and Blu-ray release, Yellowstone: Battle for Life follows the intertwining stories of Yellowstone’s iconic inhabitants – including America’s last great bison herds, the grizzly bear, the grey wolf, and the antelope– as they battle to survive.

    9.29.2009 at 12:48pm - Comment by jojohoser

    Yellowstone is one of my favorite places to visit. I hope I'm dead before the supervolcano blows, though...

  • The Environment

    A Gallery and a Giveaway! "Wild Pacific" on PopSci.com

    By Taylor Hengen Posted on 9.25.2009 43 Comments

    The newly released Wild Pacific series, from the award-winning BBC Natural History Unit that brought you Planet Earth, is here (and we're giving away ten free copies of the DVD)! This breathtaking series shows some of the surprising effects that isolation has on life, as animals evolve and adapt to their surrounding environments in unique ways.

    8.4.2009 at 12:48pm - Comment by jojohoser

    It's great to see a program that gives us so many reasons why the wild is worth preserving.

  • The Environment

    Happy Earth Day! Videos, a Gallery, and Our Biggest Giveaway Yet

    By Posted on 4.22.2009 55 Comments

    Earth Day is a big deal here at PopSci. It's a time for admiring our incredible planet, and for giving back-- to the Earth, and to our readers (that means you). We've teamed up with the BBC to bring you a gallery of stunning images from the popular Planet Earth series, video clips (so you can appreciate the full affect), and our most extravagant giveaway yet.

    4.22.2009 at 04:01pm - Comment by jojohoser

    A great contest for a great site!

  • Science

    Why Does War Breed More Boys?

    By Laura Allen Posted on 12.17.2008 20 Comments

    A curious shift occurs during and right after a war: more boys tend to be born than girls. It’s been documented for decades in many nations, especially during long conflicts with many troops deployed. The cause of this boy boom has long flummoxed thinkers and scientists. Ideas have veered from the theological—a divine call for new men to replace those lost in battle—to the coital—returning soldiers have lots of sex, and so will be more likely to fertilize at a time in their ladies’ cycle that’s ripe for making boy babies.

    12.17.2008 at 04:31pm - Comment by jojohoser

    I have noticed the same effect in my family. Over the last 4 generations, the males in my family have averaged 4 male children for every female child born. I tried to explain that to our ob-gyn as he performed an ultrasound on my wife, but he insisted it was a straight 50/50 shot. Who's laughing now? Well, he is, I suppose, since he still makes 4 times what I do.

  • Science

    Lock and Roll

    By Stuart Fox Posted on 10.8.2008 4 Comments

    Werner O. Merlo’s patio umbrella refused to stay locked in a tilted position. Frustrated, he replaced the sagging sunshade’s flimsy ball-and-joint with a self-designed mechanism that swiveled smoothly yet held fast at an angle. His umbrella never flopped over again. "I'm not really the umbrella-manufacturing type, so the first thing that came to mind was, What else can I use this for?" says Merlo, a former chemist at the University of Alberta.

    Article Rating:
    10.8.2008 at 05:44pm - Comment by jojohoser

    Personally, I'm a big fan of the "bomb-diffusing" robot, spreading bombs wherever it goes, like a psychopathic Santa. Good article, though.

  • Science

    I Want Your Antibodies

    By Julia Wallace Posted on 9.24.2008 9 Comments

    Welcome to the inaugural post of The Sex Files. Almost every publication worth its druthers has a sex column these days, full of Carrie Bradshawish musings about life and love, men and women, this and that. Here's our take on the genre. Instead of faux-sociology, we'll give you a broad view of new research and ideas in the sexiest of the hard sciences: reproductive biology, evolutionary anthropology, and genetics. This is sex from the inside out. Keep track of the column at popsci.com/sexfiles, where you can also sign up for an rss feed. Disassortative mating alert! A group of European scientists led by Oxford biostatistician Raphaelle Chaix has provided some of the most compelling evidence yet that we humans pick our partners based on how different their immune systems—or officially, their Major Histocompatibility Complexes—are from our own.

    9.25.2008 at 03:58pm - Comment by jojohoser

    I fail to see why a given Mormon couple should be viewed as more genetically similar than any other couple. We're talking about a religious group, not an ethnic group (that is to say, a religious group with millions of members in the United States alone, as opposed to the isolated--and therefore more closely interbred--Anabaptists).

  • Science

    Tiny Naked Astronauts

    By Molika Ashford Posted on 9.9.2008 6 Comments

    In space, no one can hear a tardigrade scream. They can, however see the tiny organisms (also called water bears) survive a trip through that icy, radiation filled void relatively unscathed.

    9.10.2008 at 04:42pm - Comment by jojohoser

    Was there no control group?

  • Technology

    Is the Web the Newest Front Line?

    By Posted on 8.14.2008 7 Comments

    As the actual ground combat between Russia and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia grinds to a halt, security and Web experts have begun to focus on what might have been a secret third front in the conflict: the Internet. With numerous Georgian government Web sites defaced or shut down, the virtual attacks that preceded the actual invasion may go down in history as the first war in cyberspace.

    8.14.2008 at 12:48pm - Comment by jojohoser

    Wasn't "The Internet Is a Battlefield" a song?



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