Researchers convert the classic video game Tetris into an instrument that probes the human mind.

As the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan becomes more and more serious, so do worries about radioactive material leaking from the reactors. PM explains what the reactors are releasing now, and how bad the situation could become.

Making a liquid laser requires patience, but yields the world's coolest party trick: Hit it with enough focused energy, and a gin and tonic can be transformed from a predictable beverage into a super-chic space-age libation.

It’s the early 20th century. You want to take in a magic show. You’ve got your spats on, your mustache is all waxed and ready. Now you’ve got to choose between the two preeminent magicians of the age: Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston. “Those guys lived and breathed publicity,” says Jim Steinmeyer, author of the new book The Last Greatest Magician in the World. “They were scrambling over each other to get the public’s attention.”

Mike Brown set out to expand the galaxy, not shrink it. He spent much of his childhood surveying the night sky, hunting for alien worlds in the outer reaches of the solar system. Then he grew up to become a planetary astronomer at Caltech and really did find something. He called it Eris, but being only slightly bigger than Pluto and three times as far from the sun, it just didn’t seem worthy of planet status. And this caused a major problem. If Eris didn’t qualify as a planet, then neither did Pluto. The result: Pluto officially lost its planet title in 2006. In his new book, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, Brown describes his sordid role in the biggest astronomical controversy since Sinbad’s appearance on Star Search. We asked him how it feels to be a destroyer of worlds.

Medical researchers are trying a new approach in their decades-long quest to control and cure cancers--they are seeking the help of experts in unrelated fields such as physics, engineering and computer science

A year ago, scientists sequenced the genome of the nasty microbe that caused the Irish potato famine in the mid-1800s. Now they have uncovered how this destructive bacterium spreads and adapts to new species so quickly—and how to stop it.

Google recently pledged $1.8 billion for infrastructure to deliver offshore wind power to homes along the northeast coast, but there aren't any turbines in the water just yet. Who will be the first to generate clean power off America's coasts?

Last week nearly 500,000 brainiacs swarmed Washington, D.C. to explore a smorgasbord of inventions and experiments at the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Rocket ships, giant squids, battling robots, musical machines and gonzo engineering competitions provoked visitors to step inside the minds of the nation’s leading thinkers. Popular Mechanics captured pictures of some of these science-crazed characters running loose on the National Mall.

If there is a hell, Sam Harris—author of The End of Faith and atheism’s poster boy—is going there. But while the faithful may argue that godless scientists are doomed to soul-destroying nihilism, Harris’ new book, The Moral Landscape, attempts to redeem the science-based worldview, arguing that it offers a clearer path to morality. Wired called Harris—from out of lightning-bolt range—to discuss his argument.

How engineers are using two massive cranes and creative construction methods to build one of the country's most ambitious—and important—infrastructure projects.

The EPA recently approved a higher blend of ethanol for cars, but only those made since 2007. Both automakers and ethanol producers worry the new policy will complicate fueling decisions for consumers. Is no one happy about the decision?

One of them shot at the moon and discovered water, another invented a light-giving soccer ball called s0ccket, the third created a bacteria-detecting cell phone, and another programs magnets to do his bidding. They created all this on a tight budget—relying on much off-the-shelf engineering. Here are some lessons the panelists took while pursuing their projects, by embracing their limitations…and having an ebay account.

If we all go down in a cataclysmic hurricane, expect to see Reed Timmer right in its eye, wielding his videocam. The star of Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers, Timmer pursues extreme weather with the help of the Dominator, his trusty armored SUV. Timmer’s new book, Into the Storm, details his adventures as a professional storm chaser. We caught up with him over the summer at his home in tornado-prone Norman, Oklahoma, during a brief parting of the clouds.

If you tried to use your laptop or mobile phone on Venus, where the average temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit, frying the electronics would not be your main concern. Silicon, the building block of all modern computing, can actually withstand such intense temperatures. It's the data itself, stored within the semiconductor material, that would suffer.

A new study out from the Renewable Fuels Association suggests that gasoline containing 15 percent of ethanol (E15)—rather than the current 10 percent standard mix—will not adversely impact fuel systems in older vehicles. The study is not the final word on the issue. That verdict rests in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency.

NEW YORK — Ken Levine said at the premiere of his new game last week that BioShock Infinite’s plot was inspired by American exceptionalism — the idea that the United States is special among the nations of the world.

Showing the new game for the first time in the Plaza Hotel in New York City, the creative director of Irrational Games read a second-hand quote supposedly said in 1899 by former U.S. President William McKinley about his annexation of the Philippines

NEW YORK — There couldn’t have been a more fitting place for BioShock designer Ken Levine to unveil his latest videogame vision than the Plaza Hotel’s Terrace Room.

“The time for silence is over,” Levine told reporters gathered Wednesday evening in the grand room, which has been meticulously restored to its 1920s-era opulence. Members of the media were led down a black-draped corridor and a spiral staircase for a preview of Irrational Games’ BioShock Infinite, which will ship in 2012.

Watch out, humans, the U.S. military has released an all-seeing, unmanned helicopter-like aircraft into the wild, according to Aviation Week. The Boeing A160T Hummingbird was photographed in Belize, where it was test flying a tree-penetrating Darpa radar called FORESTER. Locals were given a heads-up thanks to a press release from the U.S. Embassy. There’s no sign of the document on the website, but local reports say that the the Belize government invited the U.S. to test the Hummingbird in a mountain range 25 miles from the Guatemalan border. A few dozen military personnel – both Belizean and American – are involved in the testing, which will last until September.

The Department of Defense continues its quest for the ultimate (or at least a working) ray gun, asking small businesses last week to submit ideas for lasers that sense, communicate, illuminate targets and shoot missiles out of the air.

No surprises here — the military wants ‘em small, light, efficient and devastatingly powerful. To date, real-life ray guns are still too big, bulky and complicated for the battlefield, even when they’re powerful enough to blow things up.

If, by some chance, you end up surviving the nuclear apocalypse, don’t count on the U.S. military to be around to help you rebuild. Or don’t expect all its fancy electronics and communications equipment to work, at least.

That’s the strongly worded, rather ominous assessment from a joint Defense Science Board/ Threat Reduction Advisory Committee Task Force, which warns in a recent report that the military needs to wake up to its vulnerability to nuclear attack.

In mid-June, a single-turbine helicopter took off from a test field in Mesa, Arizona, avoided obstacles during flight, scoped out a landing site and landed safely. It’s the kind of flight choppers have made tens of thousands of times before. Except this time, the helicopter did it entirely on its own — with no humans involved. It was the first fully autonomous flight of a full-sized chopper, ever.

A nuclear submarine in deep dive may be the last place on Earth where it’s impossible to get a phone call, a text message or the day’s dose of spam. But all that may soon be over, if a Lockheed-led program works out as planned.

The subs glide quietly along the depths of the ocean for weeks at a time, isolated from communication with surface dwellers save arcane one-way messages delivered at very low bit rates by Extremely Low Frequency (3-3000 Hz) or Very Low Frequency transmissions (3000-30,000 Hz). In order for subs to respond, or if communication beyond slow alphanumerics is required, they must come up for air or stick an antenna above the water.

There’s no end to what the U.S. military has tried against improvised explosives: mand-made lightning, bomb-handling robots, radio frequency jammers and electronics-frying high electromagnetic pulses. Now, they may have gone one step further, developing explosive-killing microwaves that don’t just damage the weapon’s circuitry, but are powerful enough to actually detonate a bomb before the enemy does. Think of it like a directional microwave oven. Except munitions are on the menu.

Last November, the Gucci web designer turned do-it-yourself fusion engineer Mark Suppes hunched over a silvery chamber with wires and plastic tubes sprouting in every direction. Engrossed in his work, he finally looked up, smiled, and said, “Okay, I think we’re almost ready to fuse the atom.”

Making final preparations in his dusty Brooklyn workshop on his second fusion attempt, Suppes could hardly contain himself. Just a week earlier, he got his first evidence of fusion from a lipstick-case–sized glass chamber called a bubble detector. The device detects neutrons — subatomic particles that are produced during a fusion reaction. He has since been confirmed as the 38th amateur to fuse the atom.

NEW YORK — A new remote-control light cycle toy scales walls just like the sci-fi vehicles do in the upcoming film Tron Legacy.

“In the movie, the light cycles drive in 3-D on the walls, so we wanted to re-create that,” said Chris Heatherly, vice president of toys and electronics for Disney Consumer Products, at a press event here Monday showing off the company’s new line of Tron-inspired toys, games and gear.

NEW YORK — According to Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, atoms are the new bits — and because of this we are on the brink of the next industrial revolution. It’s happening in hackerspaces across the country where inventors aren’t just building prototypes, but taking their inventions directly to market, foregoing the traditional factory. The open-source movement is catching on with hardware hackers, who want anyone to be able to build and design their own furniture, tools, or even cars.

For those of you counting down to the robot uprising, you may be interested in the latest news from engineers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. They’ve created autonomous robots that randomly dock with each other on the ground and then rise into the air– no human intervention required.

The little hexagonal modules that make up the flying drone are completely self-sufficient. In the context of a robot army, that means the airborne robot could be indestructible. Because the magnetically connected ‘bots easily break away from each other, they could blow apart under attack, and then reassemble themselves on the ground, good as new.

On March 26, 1983, just three days after Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan, the U.S. military tested what might go down as the nuttiest anti-missile machine ever: a giant laser, powered by a nuclear bomb and its cascade of x-rays.

The brainchild of Manhattan Project physicist Edward Teller, Project Excalibur was supposed to fire off atomic-powered lasers from land or space at incoming missiles. There was just one problem — studying the laser proved difficult because the bomb kept destroying its sensors at the Nevada Test Site’s underground facility before scientists could receive the data.

In the Internet age, it’s hard to tell the difference between the next big thing and the next big flop. For tech-savvy entrepreneurs hoping to ride the wave of the next version of the World Wide Web, called the Semantic Web, hype plays a key role in their financial futures. It’s not always easy to tell, really, how far off their promises are of an intelligent Web that will enable search engines that don’t just dumbly return word matches but instead actually understand your questions.

Could something as harmless as a phone call actually crash a plane? Or is the pre-flight announcement to “please turn off all portable electronic devices” simply to create a sense of calm and focus for the passengers as a glistening hundred-ton hunk of metal implausibly takes off into the air?

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Ned Seeman sees DNA as his own personal nanoscale erector set. Last summer, the chemistry professor’s group at New York University figured out how to make DNA assemble itself into a three-dimensional crystal. The results were published in Nature in September.