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Just before dawn on the morning of November 15, 1988, the Energiya rocket stood fueled and ready on the launch pad at Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s launch site. Mated to the booster was the Buran space shuttle orbiter, ready for its maiden flight. It looked to strongly reminiscent of NASA’s Space Transportation System, colloquially known as the space shuttle, but the two spacecraft weren’t identical. NASA’s decision to pursue the space shuttle on the heels of the Apollo program came down, in short, to funding. On January 5, 1972, President Nixon announced that NASA would turn its attention to building a new spacecraft to transform the final frontier, something that could shuttle astronauts between the Earth and an orbital space station, though the station would come later. The shuttle would make spaceflight routine while keeping the cost low, thanks in large part to the Department of Defence who would be sharing the cost with the space agency in exchange for using it to launch milit...

So you've been stung by a jellyfish. The good news: there’s no need to get your friend to pee on you. The bad news: all the other solutions you’ve heard of will probably only make it worse. A jellyfish sting is like a thousand tiny spears injecting you with poison all at once—literally. Their tentacles have millions of tiny lances embedded inside nematocysts, which launch the little stingers out and into your skin upon contact. They latch on, like those little burrs that get in your dog’s fur, and let loose a stream of venom. If the jellyfish that gets you happens to be, say, a box jellyfish, you could be dead in minutes. If you’re a character from a hit ‘90s television series, you’re probably thinking, “yeah, but you can just pee on it, right? Everyone knows that the ammonia or whatever counteracts the sting.” But that’s where you’re wrong. Know what else doesn’t work? Almost everything that Google suggests. Two researchers from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa recently rev...

There's more to Google search than meets the eye. Cody Slingerland/Unsplash Google is the go-to destination when you need to find something on the web—the verb "to google" even made it into the dictionary. But while everyone's heard of the popular search engine, very few know how to make the most of it. Behind the unassuming Google interface, you'll find a host of useful tricks to help you zero in on what exactly you want to find. Looking for an obscure recipe or rare photo? Read on to start using Google like an expert. SEARCH OPERATORS You can include or exclude specific keywords. David Nield/Popular Science When you type a bunch of search terms into Google, it's smart enough to understand—more or less—what you want. However, the search engine sometimes provides results that match most of, but not all, of the words you typed. To be more specific, you can point out which keywords are the most important: Put a plus symbol (+) in front of words y...

BUCKYBALL: THE MAGIC MOLECULE From Popular Science, August 1991 Popular Science, August 1991 This past weekend, British chemist Sir Harry Kroto passed away at the age of 76. He is the co-discoverer of buckyballs, a form of carbon that is made up of 60 atoms and shaped like "a hollow soccer ball." The discovery won Kroto and his team the Noble Prize in chemistry. This cover story, written by Edward Edelson and originally published in the August 1991 issue of Popular Science, explores how buckyballs were accidentally discovered and the future of possibilities to those scientists in 1991. A revolution in chemistry is taking place in a small room in a converted mining building in Tucson, Ariz., where a woman wearing a soiled smock and a face mask is painstakingly scraping soot off a metal container. Although it's not too exciting to look at, this is the world's first production facility for a newly discovered, exotic material, dubbed "buckyball," that ...