Popular Science

Popular Science has been demystifying the worlds of science and technology since 1872. Our digital subscription delivers deeply reported stories that explain the inner workings of the phone in your pocket, explore world-changing innovations, and examine everything from the marvels of deep space to the secret lives of staples like bread.

Popular Science

What is reality?

What was the first AI?

How do AI chatbots answer my questions?

Can AI give us good health advice?

How harmful are biased AIs?

Will AI teach me to be better at chess?

How popular is AI art?

Can AI manipulate a presidential election?

Why paleontology needs fake fossils • Off a rural road in Colorado, a studio transforms dusty skeletons into dinosaurs beyond our imagination.

These space-bound robots could transform the field of emergency medicine • Bioprinted body parts and organic machines have the potential to save lives on Earth and off it. But how soon will they be ready?

Your ‘healing’ crystals might not even be crystals • Mislabeled, lab-grown, and made from plastic—fakes abound in the crystals industry. Who’s going to do anything about it?

Life after death never looked so beautiful • Nature plays tricks on us all the time—taxidermy gives Divya Anantharaman a way to play back.

The plasma that birthed the early universe • For 30 years, physicists around the world have been trying to reconstruct how life-giving particles formed after the big bang. Now they can do it inside a particle accelerator.

This gadget from 1930 let people ‘talk’ to the dead—with a magic trick • How a Popular Science tutorial for building a ‘spiritphone’ tuned into the hype of the Golden Age of Magic.