Read the latest articles from Popular Science (Page 1259)

"The reality is we have a person's life at stake, so our primary concern is making sure conditions as safe as possible to get in the air."

The predawn hours are dark and still at the Roswell International Air Center, where today Felix Baumgartner and the Red Bull Stratos team are preparing for his 23-mile-high skydive. There's currently a weather hold due to high winds at 800 feet. Once that hold lifts, here’s the play-by-play of how the morning should unfold from the project’s technical director Art Thompson.

Yevgeny Salinder found an extraordinarily well-preserved fossil in northern Russia (complete with its 1.5-meter-long penis intact!).

Roswell, New Mexico, was the drop zone for some of the first high-altitude skydives, precursors to Baumgartner's record-setting dive scheduled for Tuesday. Here, from the archives of the UFO Museum, is a look at those early government efforts--and how they created a public panic.

Andrew W.K. soundtracks David Blaine's newest stunt. Turns out, when you add stupid to stupid, you get something a little bit transcendent.

Writing in 1925, British scientist A.M. Low predicted that we'd eat breakfast via feeding tubes and bald would be beautiful. This guy totally augured Go-Gurt and Vin Diesel.

Modeled after a Nerf gun--but with 200,000 volts under the hood

Martha Harbison, a senior editor at Popular Science and former physical chemist, introduces a new column on the science of homebrewing.

On Monday, Baumgartner will attempt a record-breaking skydive from 23 miles up. Can he pull it off? And is it just a stunt, or does it stand to benefit science?

Popular Science's editor-in-chief stars in a new National Geographic show.

How Thomson Reuters analyst David Pendlebury makes impressively accurate predictions of who will win.

A recent study finds that only 21 percent of all retracted papers were due to legitimate error rather than scientific misconduct.

The backers of the Wiki Weapons Project want to create a free, opensource digital file for printing a working handgun at home. But can they do so legally?

Forget Nixon sweating in black and white--HDTV and direct-to-audience feedback are enough for people to change their opinions. But that might not even matter.

Another study casts doubt on the famous arsenic-life findings, showing the bacterium actually grabs phosphorus wherever it can be found.

And how that compares to sending a dog or a human into orbit

How everyday engines got their boost

Drug panic followed news that Sons of Anarchy actor Johnny Lewis went on a violent rampage last week after allegedly ingesting the new designer drug 2C-I, aka "Smiles," but there are a lot of factors to consider other than a direct drug-to-violence link.