Chief among the many wonders encountered by Renaissance explorers were the novel plants never before seen in Europe. In Spanish geographer Martín Fernández de Enciso’s 1519 account of his experiences in the Americas, “La Suma de Geografía,” he described a delectable new fruit, writing, “when it is ready for eating it turns yellowish; that which […]
From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read more from the series here. Around the turn of the last century, more than 12,000 cannons were installed across Europe. This particular form of artillery was […]
From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read more from the series here. Decades before the first “test tube babies,” there were “biological cradles.” In fact, artificial wombs, which may soon be entering […]
From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read more from the series here. In 1953, dozens of teens at Brooklyn High School for Automotive Trades took one of the first-ever realistic driving simulators out […]
More than a billion of Americans come down with the cold every year, but scientists continue to wrestle with developing a universal vaccine.
Leaps in quantum computing is inching physicists closer to teleportation systems, but we’re still a long ways off from ‘Star Trek.’
The US is home to more than 150,000 miles of railroad tracks—the most in the world—but expanding into high-speed trains has been slow.
The Artemis mission is NASA’s initial step to create a lunar outpost—but are we really ready to establish long-term bases beyond Earth?
Ocean explorers have long tried to chart the contours of the seafloor, but today’s maps still pale in comparison to those of distant planets.
From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read more from the series here. Nothing captures the human imagination quite like the thrill of flying. Not the middle-seat-on-a-plane kind of flying, pressed between the lucky […]
