CATEGORIES

THE MIDLIFE NOT -A-CRISIS OF MARK CUBAN

Though he's soon to be out at Shark Tank, the billionaire has a massive new \"disruption\" in the works. He's certain it'll save lives.

INSIDE THE UNCANNY WORLD OF TIKTOK HOME REMODELING

Turn a tree into a luxury apartment. Retrofit a bedroom for a million children. The videos are bizarre-and going very viral. Who's behind them?

A FULL-TERM GIG

Hiring someone to carry your baby to term is a booming business. The market for surrogacy is expected to expand to $129 billion by 2032, fueled by older parents, rising infertility, and more same-sex families. Silicon Valley contributes to the growth too: Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Snap pitch in up to $80,000 toward the six-figure cost of the process.

THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE OF MEREDITH WHITAKER

It's free. It doesn't track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it's a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.

THE DAD-ROCK DIPLOMACY OF ANTONY BLINKEN

Two major wars. A rising China. Hackers everywhere. He's from the US government, and he's here to help.

THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXES TRAE STEPHENS

The venture capitalist and cofounder of the defense-tech startup Anduril has worked with Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and Elon Musk.

THE TELEVISUAL HIJACKING OF ALFONSO CUARON

Gravity, Children of Men, the best Harry Potter film-and now a seven-part miniseries?

What's the future for Western 'super apps'?

Super apps create a single interface to unify a broad ecosystem of services such as messaging, e-commerce, and transport. With consumers making all of their purchases within one walled garden, the user engagement and data benefits for the app owner are obvious and substantial. These apps have become a major part of the Chinese technology landscape, so we asked two leading experts: Could the concept successfully break through in Western markets?

WAIT, GO BACK

To mature as programmers, newer generations need to take a lesson from Google’s programming language.

THE SICK (AND SLOW) BURNS OF JOSH JOHNSON

The comedian tells jokes the way he found fame: slowly, and then all at once.

THE ULTRACOOL CASH GRABS OF BOOBI ALTHOFF

Now the Tik Tokker turned podcaster is out to prove her worth-by being herself.

Whether We Live in a Simulation - scientist Melvin Vopson, PhD, studies this exact thing- the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile. And he claims to have evidence.

In the 1999 film the Matrix, Neo discovers A truth to end all truths-the universe is a simulation. While this premise provides fantastic sci-fi fodder, the idea isn't quite as relegated to the fiction section as one might expect. . In fact, University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson, PhD, studies this exact thing- the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile. And he claims to have evidence.

Underwater UFOs - A retired U.S. Navy admiral believes that the government should look to the oceans to help solve a mystery in the skies.

A retired U.S. Navy admiral believes that the government should look to the oceans to help solve a mystery in the skies. Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, former Oceanographer of the U.S. Navy, recently published a paper arguing that unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, more commonly referred to as UFO) and unidentified submersible objects (USO) are linked, and should be studied further.

Synching Up Our Circadian Rhythms - If you've ever done any kind of long-distance travel, or just woken up feeling under-rested thanks to daylight saving time, you know how important your circadian clock is.

If you've ever done any kind of long-distance travel, or just woken up feeling under-rested thanks to daylight saving time, you know how important your circadian clock is. Like many things in your body, your circadian rhythm is more complicated than it might seem on the surface. Rather than being entirely brain-based, it's actually controlled by a collection of several circadian clocks (central and peripheral) that all work together to keep your gears turning like a well-oiled machine.

The Ancient Language of Easter Island - Today, humans inhabit- or have, at the very least, explored- pretty much every corner of the planet. But that immense proliferation of Homo sapiens across the globe was a slow process.

With the first humans leaving Africa between 60,000 and 120,000 years ago, the species slowly spread across the Earth over many millennia. And one of the last places these ancient humans made their way to was the southeastern Pacific island of Rapa Nui, known more broadly as Easter Island.Located 2,360 miles off the coast of Chile, Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated places in the world. Its native people, who are also named the Rapa Nui, first arrived on the island's shores between A.D. 1150 and 1280, and lived in isolation until the arrival of Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen in 1722.

Upgrade Your Living Room With This DIY - MID-CENTURY COFFEE TABLE

This project is easy to build and customize to fit your space.

The Existence of Wigner Crystals

PHYSICISTS FROM PRINCETON UNIVERSITY have confirmed that electrons don't even need atoms in order to party together.

SAVING THE SUGAR BUSH

A technological revolution has transformed the ancient tradition of sugar making-with big implications for local economies and ecosystems imperiled by climate change.

The Next Generation of RAM

YOUR COMPUTER WOULDN'T BE VERY useful without RAM, which is short for random access memory.

The End of the Maya Kingdom

A TEAM OF ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVERED clues from between A.D. 733 and 881 that they say represent a key turning point in Maya rule-and a very public one at that.

MANIPULATION AND MEDICAL ETHICS

The taking of cervical samples wasn't the only medical procedure of dubious consent in Lacks's story.

Henrietta Lacks

IT'S NOT SURPRISING THAT Henrietta Lacks-whose \"immortal\" HeLa cells were pivotal in developing treatments for diseases such as polio, HIV/AIDS, and COVID19-is referred to as \"the mother of modern medicine.\"

SKINWALKER RANCH REVEALED

The 512-acre ranch has captivated real-estate tycoons, TV producers, and the U.S. government. What are they searching for?

CHASING AN ASTEROID

HOW NASA DEFIED INCREDIBLE ODDS TO GET ITS ASTEROIDHUNTING OSIRIS-REX MISSION OFF THE GROUND AND IN THE PROCESS UPENDED WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT OUR SOLAR SYSTEM.

HOW TO FIX A DEAD WALL OUTLET

An outlet can lose power for any number of reasons. Here are a few of them-plus solutions.

INDISPENSABLE LESSONS FROM A POP MECH LEGEND

With people moving around so much these days, it's perfectly natural to wonder how an editor can just come along and stick like a barnacle to the hull of Popular Mechanics, lasting for 35 years.

Sea Change- Mountains, oddly, are the reason most of us have learned to think of the level of the sea as a stable point, a baseline, an unmoving benchmark against which one might reasonably measure the height of great peaks.

In 2019, a plaque was erected to commemorate the first glacier in Iceland to shrink so much that it could no longer be considered a glacier. Like the tsunami stones of the past, the plaque carried a message for the future, a warning to believe in changes that might at first seem implausible. It also carried a recognition of responsibility. “In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path,” the plaque reads. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.

Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.

Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.

This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick

Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).

To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.