Christina Agapakis is a biologist, designer, and science writer. She makes art with microbes, soil, and food. Lucky Peach was a quarterly journal of food and writing. Each issue focused on a single theme, and explored that theme through essays, art, photography, and recipes. This story is excerpted from Issue 13, “Feel the Joy: The Holiday Issue.” On a Sunday that’s usually a week or two after “Western” Easter, my parents set up an electric spit to roast a whole lamb in their suburban Massachusetts backyard....

Americans generate about 4 and a half pounds of trash per person, per day, or 254.1 million tons total per year. In order to dispose of all that trash in a volcano, you’d need to first locate an active volcano, and lug the trash there. That’s the first problem. Not many people live near active volcanoes, so transporting trash to a volcano would cost time, money, and a whole lot of fuel....

The project is a collaboration between research institutions in the US, Canada, and Singapore along with a few corporate partners. Everything needed for the system would fit inside a milk-carton-sized container on the surface of the International Space Station. It’s a complex topic, so let’s start with the basics: A photon is a basic unit of light that can behave both like a particle and a wave. Meanwhile, entangled photons would behave like they’re connected, regardless of the physical distance between them (a phenomenon also known as “spooky action at a distance”)....

Inside were six clear plastic containers, full of stingless, parasitic wasps, each the size of a poppy seed. As the sun warmed the containers, the wasps sprung to life, and began bouncing up the sides of the plastic like popcorn. The freshly excited wasps, called Tamarixia radiata, prey primarily on Asian citrus psyllids, gnat-like, sap-sucking insects. The tiny wasps lay eggs under the bodies of psyllid nymphs, and their larvae grow by eating the host and sheltering in its husk....

In the past handful of years, wildfires have been the focus of headlines all across the world from California to Australia—but even more parts of the world are at risk of them directly and indirectly. Natural or controlled fires are actually an age-old phenomenon that has kept forests and wildlife healthy for centuries, but when human-started fires get out of hand it can be catastrophic for everyone involved. However, these massive fires pose a risk to wildlife, the health and safety of nearby residents, and even health of people far away thanks to risky air pollution that can travel for miles, especially as more humans move out closer to the wilderness....

BLURAY: Short Blu Ray is doing well, but not quite well enough to meet the prop payout criteria of populating 14.4 million US homes. 10.7 Million sure ain’t bad, though. DEADPAN: Long This one was easy. Read the payout statement closely: This proposition will pay out at POP$100 if Pandora.com is not shut down by January 1, 2009. It’s still going strong, so some of you lucky winners just made 100 Pop Dollaz....

This model features a silver stainless steel case with a silver Milanese loop wristband, GPS, and cellular capabilities. You can track your fitness goals, follow your blood oxygen levels, monitor your sleep, and take an ECG—just like the Series 8. It also includes safety measures like fall detection, irregular heartbeat notifications, and Emergency SOS call selection. There’s a reason Apple highlighted the Watch’s lifesaving capabilities at the beginning of its keynote event last week—a legacy the Watch Series 7 helped start and revolutionize....

This year’s entries in the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, like past years’, include abstract looks at the tiny world around us. This year we have more than a few shots of the odd-looking fruit fly and an unexpectedly colorful image of garlic. Click through the gallery to see them, and look for the winners on Tuesday, October 23.

When Google Docs first appeared more than a decade ago, the idea of software running in a browser was a strange and unusual one. Since then, Google Drive has grown in strength, with millions now relying on the free word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools it offers. But just because you use Google Drive doesn’t mean you’re using it to its full potential. The suite offers unexpected—and powerful—features when you scratch its surface....

On July 4, 2012, a panel of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced the discovery of a new particle, the long-anticipated Higgs boson (or something very much like it). The Higgs is the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that accounts for everything we experience in our lives, from rocks to puppies to stars and planets. After decades of searching and billions of dollars, the Higgs discovery marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, which scientists will embark upon in 2013....

PFAS were first developed in the 1940s, with 3M quickly becoming one of both their earliest producers and users. Since then, over 9,000 variations of the appropriately monikered “forever chemicals” have become ubiquitous as non-stick and water resistant coatings across the furniture, food packaging, apparel, and cosmetics industries, just to name a few. But that convenience has come at a steep and sometimes deadly cost to the planet and human health....

However, for serious bookmarkers, there are also dedicated apps that can improve what your browser can do, offering benefits like better organization tools and improved search functions. If you need a better bookmarking system and find yourself drowning in web links, these apps are worth a look, and the good news is you’ve got several top-quality options to pick from. You can decide how to use your collections and keep your bookmarks categorized....

While we have limited control over the light design we encounter while out and about, we can match the lighting in our homes to the rhythm of our days, providing soothing calm when it’s nighttime, or an energy boost when we need it. In a 2015 study conducted at a Netherlands elderly care center, researchers found accent lighting could help cheer patients up or reduce anxiety. Brighter lights with cool blue accents had an uplifting effect, while dimmer lights with orange hues in the same room created a cozy, calming ambiance....

Each bar is a “color trend timeline” showing what colors were used for the books’ covers over the years. The longer a certain cover was in print, the more space Buxton gives it on the timeline. As for the individual covers: Buxton reduced each one to its five most common colors, then gave those colors space that is directly proportional to how prominently they figured on the cover. And there’s some interesting stuff here!...

Click to launch the photo gallery_ The words “brain cancer” are pretty evocative on their own, connoting fear, surgery, and possible death. But actually seeing a cancerous tumor, watching how its tentacles infiltrate white matter, is another thing entirely. Such deeper understanding is the goal of the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation. The 2012 winners were announced yesterday, and they include a map of brain cancer; a poster representation of how owls can turn their heads 270 degrees; a video of the electromechanical science of the heart; and much more....

Here at PopSci, we’re against buying things just to have them. We think you should only fill your online cart with stuff that you genuinely need or really want. We’ll be updating this list through the 13th. Some of the items will have considerable discounts beyond what you typically see. Some of the items are just really good products at solid prices. Some of the items are weird stuff that I’ve managed to sneak in while the rest of the editors are “eating dinner” or “spending time with family instead of trying to trick people into buying garden gnomes on Prime Day....

In the work, a rescued sea otter named Selka worked with UCSC’s Sarah McKay Strobel to show off her ability to use her sensitive paws and whiskers to explore the world around her. Strobel’s findings, documented in a paper published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology, show Selka proved to be much faster than humans at identifying the world around her by touch—which might illustrate how key touch is to aquatic mammals like sea otters....

Our latest contender, however, isn’t just some newbie looking to make a name for themselves. On Monday, Sir Michael Francis Atiyah, a retired and well-renowned mathematician from the UK, delivered a talk at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum where he outlined what he claimed was a proof of the Reimann hypothesis. If Atiyah’s work holds up to scrutiny, it would be a pretty wild and unexpected conclusion that earns him $1 million in prize money....

Not so fast, though: YouTuber Austin Everett of Speed Phenom recently pitted his own Z06 against the massive all-electric truck, and the results were much closer than you might think. Here’s what a race like this can teach us about the difference between being fast and being quick—and what aspects of a vehicle contribute to those qualities. Quick vs fast For a traditional drag race, two vehicles generally start side by side on a flat, straight quarter-mile strip....

Most of the time, the CDC’s job is to monitor already-known diseases. Outbreaks of listeria, prostate cancer deaths, and tuberculosis cases all fall under its purview—and all are fairly straightforward to track. We know what they all look like. This illness is different. Acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, pops up unexpectedly, mostly in children, and thus far the CDC hasn’t been able to figure out exactly what causes it or even what’s happening inside the body....