ConsumerAffairs • February 20, 2024

The 10 Most Dangerous Things Inside Every Home May Surprise You

What are the most injurious surfaces and objects in your home, as reported by U.S. hospitals? Here’s the definitive list from ConsumerAffairs. Read our full methodology below . Floor-related injuries surpassed 2 million in 2022 for the first time in a decade. That was a dramatic increase of 45% from the year prior. Nearly 2,000 deaths resulted from floor-related injuries in the home in 2022. That’s more than double the deaths caused by anything else in the home. A sampling of injury reports ma

Popular Mechanics • January 16, 2024

This Is the Perfect Size Table for Your Jigsaw Puzzle, According to Math

• A fun, delightfully short paper shows us the math of how much space a jigsaw puzzle takes up. • The answer relies on how circles “pack” into a space, which is a major topic in physics research. • Representing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle as circles reflects how people lay pieces out and manipulate them. In new research posted last month to the ArXiV preprint server (meaning the work has not yet been peer-reviewed) biophysics researcher Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, Ph.D., and her family explore a

Popular Mechanics • October 30, 2023

Baking in Space Will Pose a Major Challenge

Here on Earth, preparing food is a universal activity. We do it every day, or pay for food that others have prepared. But preparing food in space presents unique challenges at almost every turn. American astronauts eat a combination of rehydrated freeze dried foods, traditional dried foods like jerky and fruit, and some foods that come in carefully prepared envelopes. There are also some foods that can occasionally be sent fresh, like garlic and onions. But will it ever be possible to bake in s

Popular Mechanics • October 16, 2023

Hyperrealistic Cakes, With Regular Hardware Store Stuff

Hyperrealistic cakes (like the one pictured above) have been all the rage the last few years, from massively popular TikTok and Instagram accounts to Netflix’s 2022 competition show Is It Cake? The skilled and patient people who create these sweet treats strive for them to look just like everyday objects. But you may not know that many of the tools of the realistic cake trade (and of cake decorating, in general) aren’t from a fancy specialty shop—they’re from your local hardware store. With tha

Popular Mechanics • August 10, 2023

Cooking the Burgess Shale with Mythical Kitchen

The in Victoria, British Columbia, is one of history’s most iconic fossil sites, bringing together a large collection of creatures from the Cambrian Period, 500 million years ago and an entire evolutionary world away. Charles Doolittle Walcott, a paleontologist and then-leader of the Smithsonian, discovered the fossils while on an expedition with his family. (During his life, he also started a catastrophic beef with the Wright brothers. I couldn’t believe the same guy did both things.) These cr

Food Bank News • May 19, 2023

Boosting Farmworker Wages to Cut the Food Line

It’s widely acknowledged in the hunger relief community that the people who grow the nation’s food also tend to be among the most food-insecure.

Popular Mechanics • February 22, 2023

There Are 389 Ways a Train Can Derail—Here’s What May Have Happened in East Palestine, Ohio

Popular Mechanics • February 15, 2023

Prison Islands Are Desolate, Lonely Places—And Their History Is Just as Bleak

What happens when an island is taken over, turned into a prison or penal colony, and later left deserted?

Popular Mechanics • January 31, 2023

Physicists Are Pretty Damn Sure We Can Travel Faster Than the Speed of Light, Research Shows

A faster-than-light “observer” would take general relativity to new quantum places.

Popular Mechanics • January 9, 2023

Reports Claim Humans Can Spontaneously Combust. Here’s What the Science Says

The culprit is wet hay, which is counterintuitive if you don’t know much about the underlying science; turns out, there are many ways for materials like hay to spontaneously combust.

Popular Mechanics • December 16, 2022

The Extraordinary Reason Why Crabs Are Taking Over the Animal Kingdom

In a new piece for The Conversation, evolutionary paleobiologist Matthew Wills revisits the internet’s favorite idea: carcinization.

Popular Mechanics • November 22, 2022

Together, We Can Avoid the ‘Great Filter’ That Ends Advanced Civilizations

• The “Great Filter” is a hypothetical disaster event that stops growing civilizations from reaching the stars and contacting other advanced civilizations. • A NASA scientist writes about the biggest risks to humanity—like climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence—in a new paper. • These are serious, frightening possibilities—but we can work together to prevent many of them. In , a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) brings together an eclectic team of researcher

Unwinnable • October 27, 2022

Papers, Apples, Microphones, Chairs: Immortality’s Spatial Miscellany | Unwinnable

My favorite author, China Miéville, calls himself a “weird fiction” writer – a callback to the time before genre labels emerged, when anything “other” was simply weird. In games, there’s something even more satisfying about thinking about the idea of weirdness. Games can induce you to feel weird so viscerally. And this is where Sam Barlow’s game Immortality, which came out August 30 on Steam and Xbox GamePass, enters the discussion. In the game, you scrub forward and backward through footage, r

Unwinnable • October 22, 2022

Sponsored: Mind the Gap

This series of MegaGrant spotlights is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Epic Games.

Unwinnable • September 28, 2022

There Swings a Skull Completes the Bigger Picture with Grim Tidings

This column has superficial spoilers for There Swings a Skull: Grim Tidings. The game contains “immolation, smoking, hanging, drowning, spiders, apocalyptic themes, and harsh language.”

Unwinnable • September 21, 2022

Paradise Killer is On a Heavenly Trip

This is the fifth and final installment in my kickoff Paradise Killer series. So far, we’ve explored the game’s design and genre, use of space, nonlinear open world, and passage of time.

Unwinnable • September 8, 2022

Paradise Killer’s Biggest Secrets are Straight Up

Unwinnable • August 18, 2022

Roam Paradise Killer If You Want To

Even the hugest games can never be infinite, and everything in them is always constructed. But how do we create something that acts and “feels” as large as possible? On a reasonable budget? And how do we make it feel good? Talking with Oli Clarke Smith about open worlds.

Unwinnable • August 11, 2022

Reaching for Truth in Paradise Killer

In this column, I hope to explore the ways games play with space. Paradise Killer is a murder mystery set in a lore-stuffed open world adventure. To help me pull apart the world of Paradise Killer, I talked with the game’s creative director (and Kaizen Game Works cofounder) Oli Clarke Smith.

Popular Mechanics • August 5, 2022

Find Out How the Changing Hats Code in the Among Us Game Works

In the hit game Among Us, a group of players are dropped into a spaceship and given small tasks to do like maintenance and engine repair. But for one player, the “small task” is to kill all the others. We talked with Shahrin Khan from Innersloth, the makers of Among Us. She shared a piece of code from the game that will help us tell the story.