Posts Tagged ‘archive’
Archive Gallery: The Best of Biomimicry
How caterpillars, seagulls and winged sycamore seeds became tanks, airplanes and helicopters.
We realized a long, long time ago--centuries, perhaps even thousands of years before the publication of Popular Science, shocking as that sounds--that nature provides the best . We've borrowed canals from beavers, towers from termites and reflectors from cat's eyes. More recently, George de Mestral patented Velcro in the 1940s after seeing how burrs stuck on the fur of his dog. Although the words "bionics," "biomimetics," and "biomimicry" became popular only after the 1960s, history shows that nature has always provided ideas on solving everyday problems. Our don't go back to the time of Leonardo da Vinci and his bird-like flying machines, but we can take you to the late 19th century, where we applied those same principles for building our first practical airplanes.
To prepare for their flight at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers studied the movements of pigeons to figure out how they stayed aloft when they were heavier than air. Their success inspired scores of successors to improve on the airplane by studying various facets of nature. One of Orville Wright's pupils caught and stuffed seagulls to examine their wingspan. His gull plane, which could reportedly take off and land in your backyard, actually resembled a seagull (see above photo). Meanwhile, two French inventors examined whirling sycamore seeds in an effort to apply those same motions, reversed, to a hovering helicopter.
Some examples are more literal than others. Frank Lloyd Wright based his designs for the SC Johnson & Sons research laboratory on a tree, but on the outside, it looks a typical imposing minimalistic structure. On the other hand, Barney Connett's fish submarine actually looks like a fish - scales, bulging eyes, paddle tail and all.
Some bio-inspired concepts have yet to be invented. In the 1960s, the US Army commissioned several university professors to conduct research on the motor skills of animals in hope of applying those same abilities to tanks. Tanks that gallop like horses or jump like grasshoppers -- sounds monstrous, doesn't it? But imagine how life would change if we could achieve that.
Click through our to read about tanks and caterpillars, eels and boats, and other technologies that were directly influenced by nature.
Archive Gallery: Science Solves Crimes
How earographs, invisible ink detectors, and the famed "Stamp Detective" used science to catch unsuspecting crooks.
Nowadays, we're so used to seeing forensics dramatized on TV that we take criminology for granted, but for a generation raised on Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, these developments were nothing short of marvelous.
Like the first article in our series says, science has trumped Sherlock Holmes as the most trustworthy detective. It takes a clever man to detect circumstantial evidence, but a few damning clues can't compare to solid proof that a week-old bloodstain comes from a particular person. To help our readers understand how the scientists glean knowledge from trace evidence, we visited experts like firearms identification pioneer Calvin Goddard, who used his helixometer, to show us how uses microscopic grooves to differentiate between bullets.
Sometimes we covered cases that were less violent. In a feature called "Hidden Crime Clues Bared by Chemist's Magic," we described how scientists could decode messages written in invisible ink by dipping them in various fluids. A couple of years later, police squads nationwide intercepted similar messages by using amphibian airplanes to trail carrier pigeons owned by the underworld. If that sounds a little quaint, you'll laugh at gems like our feature that lauded earography, the science of identifying criminals by their ears.
As silly as it sounds, the earograph apparatus isn't the strangest tool detectives-turned-scientists used during the early days of modern forensics. Click through our to see what else we have in store.
Archive Gallery: How the World Will End
A new ice age, exploding stars, the hypothetical Doomsday Machine, and more scenarios that are almost certain to eradicate life on Earth
During the first half of the 20th century, we focused our imaginations on cosmological disasters. Billions of years from now, the sun will explode, vaporizing the Earth in a ruthless inferno. Or perhaps a swarm of asteroids would bombard our cities and crash into our oceans, resulting in a series of megatsunamis. Other scenarios included one where the Earth's surface would shrink so tightly, that its core would explode with the pressure, turning our beloved planet into just another asteroid belt. The most bizarre theory was that a rogue star would cross into our solar system, swallowing our planet within streams of deadly solar rays.
More terrifying, however, than the prospect of getting zapped by cosmic rays is the possibility that mankind will bring about its own destruction. Between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, sections of Popular Science essentially functioned as guides to surviving nuclear fallout. Nowadays, "Doomsday machine" sounds like an antiquated sci-fi myth, but type those terms into our and see if you don't feel unsettled by the paranoia surrounding this hypothetical weapon.
At any rate, we lived through the Cold War, although there's no telling which impending disaster will scare us quite as badly. In the meantime, click through our for more creepy scenarios for how our world will end.
Archive Gallery: PopSci Fights the Battle of the Sexes
PopSci attempts to determine, once and for all, which is the superior gender
For the most part, we answered no. Like it or not, our magazine has always been a product of its time, and for at least the first 70 years of our , we held men in higher esteem because science and feminist literature had not yet given us reason to believe that women could accomplish much on a grand scale.
While the battle of the sexes began thousands of years ago, we began paying extra attention to it in 1920, when women won the right to vote. Women began to matter, and as a male-dominated publication, we weren't sure we approved. We balked women female athletes either broke, or came close to breaking records held by men. We scoffed at women who thought they could drive without getting into an accident. "Men, it seems, are able to beat women in sports just because they are men, endowed by nature with superior qualities of speed, strength, and stamina!" we wrote after arguing why women's sports were a farce.
Still, we couldn't deny the psychology reports demonstrating that male and female students scored equally on intelligence tests. We couldn't deny that the male and female brains donated to science bore the same weight and measurements. A few of our writers conceded, saying that men and women were separate but equal. Their intelligence and temperaments complemented each other.
But this is the pre-Betty Friedan era we're talking about. Calling women equals in the mid-1920s might have been a step forward, but later that decade, we took two steps back after publishing Dr. Prescott Lecky's article on why women can never achieve greatness.
"Women do not count large among the geniuses because they do not want to be geniuses," he wrote. "They want to be women."
Offended? Amused? Or (lord help you) inspired? Click through our to read more about the early 20th century's attitude toward female intelligence, athletic ability and driving skills.
Archive Gallery: Mankind’s Eternal Fascination With the Mysterious Moon
What's on the moon? Here are the "midget-sun hypothesis," lunar snow, and more wild speculations we made prior to the Apollo 11 mission in 1969
There's only so much you can figure out about the moon with a telescope, though. Between the late 19th century and the mid-1950's, we studied our pale satellite for answers about its origin, perhaps signs that it'd once sustained life as dynamic as ours here on Earth. Where did those craters come from? How tall are its mountains? And of course, what lies on the dark side of the Moon?
In 1917, just thirty years after we published a piece speculating that an ancient, now dead, civilization had once resided on the moon, we featured more recent findings lamenting it as little more than a desolate wasteland of volcanic debris. Two decades later, we confirmed that the moon virtually lacked an atmosphere. All the while, astronomers continued debating the origins of the moon itself. One camp believed that it'd been thrust by gravity out of the Earth's crust, while another camp believed that the moon was the shell of an ancient, miniature sun.
If there's one thing that remained consistent within the pre-Moon Landing era of our , however, it was our eagerness to send a human being up there to study the lunar landscape for himself. In 1920, Robert H. Goddard hinted at the possibility of sending a rocket to the moon and having it explode upon impact, providing people on Earth with a brilliant light show. Although people scoffed at his ideas, 40 years later, another scientist wrote about the possibility of exploding atomic bombs on the moon (as if it didn't have enough craters, right?)
If anything, the gorgeous illustrations within our pages show that despite our increasingly desolate discoveries about the moon, the idea of it is as romantic as ever. Click through our to read more about how we studied the moon before we had the technology to go there.
Archive Gallery: This Is PopSci On Drugs
How PopSci chronicled the American drug trade, as well as the methods old-time smugglers used to peddle their wares
"I'm totally insane," he said. "I know because I can see reality as it flicks past, just a little slit of sunlight. I'm in a giant maelstrom, swirling, whirling, with reality only a small slot in the side."
Although it was written to simply describe an LSD experience, the vividness of Gannon's article inadvertently reinforces the allure of illicit substances. You can't read something like the sentence above without understanding how drugs have become such an integral part of contemporary society. Drug addiction is nothing new, but as our will attest, the organized drug trade is constantly using sneakier ways to smuggle increasingly sophisticated products.
At the turn of the century, cocaine, heroin, and opium ruled the drug scene. Smugglers sewed dope into their jacket hems and injected heroin into oranges, which were then sold to prisoners who were already serving time for selling drugs.
The drug problem only got worse once Prohibition came into effect. We explored how the methods people used to snort up drugs and the possible physical effects, including "saddle nose" -- or what is today known as "coke nose."
As the decades wore on, researchers worked to develop a non-toxic medication to wean addicts off drugs. The University of Virginia labored to create a "dopeless dope,"while scientists attempted to breed hemp that didn't contain the marijuana component.
It's been a good 60 years, and scientists are still working to perfect the technology. Those experiments might not have ended well, but plenty of other anti-drug measures did. Click through our to read about how we covered the rise of marijuana in the 1960's, the corruption among dope-addicted diplomats, and how one agent who dubbed himself "Flash" busted drug rings on the regular.
Archive Gallery: A Century of Aviation, From the Wright Brothers to Stealth
In just over 100 years, we've gone from the first powered flight to a scramjet capable of Mach 6. Amazing.
Click to launch the photo gallery
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On December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers embarked on the first sustained, heavier-than-air, man-powered flight aboard the Wright Flyer. Although they made history that day at Kitty Hawk, people were skeptical of aviation technology's potential. An examined what the brothers' feat meant for aviation before concluding that the machines would never develop into commercial carriers. "To say nothing of the danger, the sizes must remain small and the passengers few....navigable balloons and flying machines will constitute a great mechanical triumph for man, but they will not materially upset existing conditions as has sometimes been predicted."
Well, shame on us, because just over a hundred years later, we're launching wingless jets and maneuvering There's even talk of
Of course, the progression we've made in aviation was largely a matter of trial and error. For every legendary fighter jet that soared, there was a sausage plane or a zeppelin that went under. Still, as the content our will attest, a little imagination and perseverance went a long way.
Click through the gallery for our favorite airplanes, airships, flying boats, and spaceships.