Popular Mechanics • May 5, 2023

Scientists Say Water Can Change Whiskey Flavor For the Better, But Don’t Dilute It Past This Point

Neat, or on the rocks? Or maybe just a touch of water?

Popular Mechanics • April 28, 2023

This Quiz Measures Your Level of Food Disgust. Learn the Science

Social media has been buzzing with commentary after a popular test began circulating online that purports to measure food disgust. Disgust is a very large but not well-explored area of study, from human evolution to cultural familiarity and all points in between.

Popular Mechanics • February 22, 2023

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

itch.io • February 1, 2023

No Substitutions: A Browser Game About Cooking

This is a word substitution game made for Gaming Like It's 1927. Explore eight real passages from a "domestic science" book, then swap out words found elsewhere in the book.

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 11, 2023

Broken MacBook Keyboard? Apple Could Owe You Up to $395

After years of frustration and recalls, Apple is about to pay out to thousands of consumers over its infamous butterfly mechanism keyboard.

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.

Stacker • December 8, 2022

From smart kitchens to robocooks: 10 tech innovations transforming restaurants

What must it have been like to run a restaurant before the invention of electricity and air conditioning?

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

Stacker • November 17, 2022

The history behind 5 e-commerce tech advancements

E-commerce retail sales reached about $960 billion in 2021, making up a little under 15% of total retail sales for the year, according to Census estimates.

Unwinnable • November 8, 2022

An Hour Making Games in the Belly of Demonicon

What is an hour, really? The division of time into small pieces of each day is very, very old.

Popular Mechanics • November 8, 2022

A Billion Crabs Have Gone Missing

In October, news broke that scientists were estimating the “disappearance” of up to one billion wild crabs from the usually steady supply in the Bering Sea. This represents a 90 percent drop in the crab population, they say.

Stacker • November 7, 2022

How employees' hours are being tracked in today's workforce

Working from home is the new normal for 58% of Americans doing so once a week, per McKinsey's 2022 American Opportunity Survey.

Stacker • November 7, 2022

Think you're immune to cybercrime because you're young and tech savvy? Think again

People tend to believe that different kinds of crime could never happen to them—notably cybercrime.

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 • October 21, 2022

Impostor: When the Monster Makes You a Monster

The other day, I was discussing “monster theory” with Unwinnable’s editor in chief.

Popular Mechanics • September 30, 2022

Some Bowling Balls Float, While Others Don’t. The Reason Why Is Surprisingly Straightforward

• You might be surprised to learn that some bowling balls can float, a fact that was tested on the YouTube series Good Mythical Morning. • Bowling balls that weigh under 12 pounds can float, while heavier ones can’t. • The answer lies in an object’s density, which is its mass divided by its volume. Recently, the popular daily YouTube series Good Mythical Morning welcomed Cookie Monster and some very random objects in order to test their knowledge of what floats or not. Hosts Rhett McLaughlin a

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.”