Preschoolers can get their first drone experience playing with Scoot, a simple indoor drone just under 5 inches in diameter that lights up, lifts off, and whirls around your home like a tiny flying saucer. Infrared sensors guide the drone away from obstacles, which means you can force the drone to change direction by placing your hand nearby. Scoot will take off with a simple toss into the air, and will stop when caught by your child or a confused pet....

Composed of touch-sensitive pads mounted on a frame and connected to a digital control center that holds the drum set’s sounds, electronic drum sets are arrays designed to emulate the sonic signatures of studio-quality acoustic drum kits through a tactile experience that’s as close to that of a real drum set as possible. And since electronic drum sets typically come with an output for headphones (or plug into a computer, which lets you route audio to the personal monitoring device of your choice), you can practice and/or record at all hours without having to worry about waking loved ones, roommates, neighbors, etc....

Best overall: HP LaserJet MFP M234dweBest color laser: HP LaserJet Pro M255dwBest budget laser: Brother HL-L2370DWBest inkjet: Epson EcoTank ET-2800Best photo printer: Canon Pixma TR8620aBest portable printer: Canon Pixma TR150 How we chose the best printers for Chromebooks As a longtime freelance writer who has covered technology for publications like Reviewed, Popular Mechanics, Engadget, and, of course, Popular Science, I’ve spent a lot of time using printers and staying up-to-date on the latest offerings....

Best overall: TCL 6-Series Roku TVBest 65-inch: Hisense U6GR SeriesBest 55-inch: TCL 5-Series Roku TVBest QLED: TCL 6-Series 8K Roku TVBest budget: TCL 4-Series Roku TV What is a smart TV? The smart TV interface has become an essential component of the TV-watching experience. Data from Comscore suggests that internet-connected smart TVs are the primary way households consume streaming content. They eliminate the need for a dedicated streaming device, streamlining the process of finding what you want to watch when you turn your TV on....

It’s meat season. Knives are sharp, grinders are churning, and vacuum sealers are running hot. Most of us have our own traditions of how we wrap or vacuum seal game before freezing it. We do it the same way every year because … it worked last year. Why change it? Well, at the start of this season, I got curious. What actually is freezer burn? And is there a specific way of processing wild game or otherwise fresh meat that will prevent it from occurring for a longer period of time?...

Ballistics is a rather complicated topic. When a bullet is fired out of the barrel of a gun it can have a velocity of up to 1000 m/s and a rotation rate up to hundreds of thousands of rpm. It is immediately subjected to the downward pull of gravity, and a large air-drag force slowing the bullet down. While the rotation stabilizes the bullet by the same principle that a spinning gyroscope is hard to knock over (conservation of momentum), this same rotation can result in a small upward or downward force along with a sideways drift as a result of the Magnus force....

Undistracted by the Woodstock-like bacchanal, Knievel stoically climbed a 150-foot-high earthen mound at the lip of the canyon and approached a steel launch tower. Mounted onto the girded structure was the Skycycle X-2, a red, white, and blue rocket ship with wheels on its belly and Knievel’s name emblazoned down the side in gold. When he reached it, he didn’t even glance back to acknowledge his fans. He simply raised his scepter to the sky....

Six years later, the 31-year-old pharmacologist is spearheading an innovative way to bring better drugs, and more of them, to the developing world. The Johns Hopkins Clinical Compound Screening Initiative is an open-source effort to collect and index more than 10,000 known medications and determine which of them are also effective against hundreds of low-profile, Third World killers, such as Chagas disease, cholera and leprosy. The library will function something like a Wikipedia of drug discovery, where scientists around the world can contribute to the database and even provide samples or screen drugs themselves, thereby saving millions of dollars on R&D....

See all of PopSci‘s coverage of the Large Hadron Collider at popsci.com/lhc.

The announcement arrives after years of hype. The original run went for three full decades until OJ Simpson’s televised police chase profoundly shifted its public identity. It began in 1966, positioned as an alternative to Jeeps that maintained the burliness, but offered a more comfortable ride and comforts like a radio. Like the Wrangler, Ford built the new Bronco with genuine off-roading chops. You can order 35-inch tires straight from the factory at every trim level....

For maximum power, Element One paired their fuel cell with ultracapacitors, which can rapidly discharge power for intense acceleration and recharge quickly in pit stops. But to reach 60mph-plus racing speeds with a modest 48-horsepower electric motor, they also needed to make their kart as light as possible. “Rather than going with a steel tubular frame like most of our competitors, we built a 100 percent non-tubular carbon-fiber frame, which is normally used in the airline industry, and it saved us 40 pounds,” says body-and-chassis team leader Camille Robbins....

The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of organic chemistry and the growth of the chemical industry, as industrialization provided ample carbon-rich material for chemists’ new experiments with synthesis. Some of these chemicals were strongly aromatic. August Hofmann, the distinguished chemist and member of the Royal Society, analyzed the chemicals behind these imitation flavors in his report to the Crystal Palace exhibition jury. “The striking similarity of the smell of these ethers to that of fruit had not escaped the observation of chemistry,” he wrote....

It’s his job to figure out what it can do in combat, and to teach that to hundreds of other fighter pilots.The F-35 started arriving here at Luke Air Force Base this past winter. It is the most sophisticated fighter ever built. It is stealthy, so it can appear the size of a golf ball to enemy radar, if it’s detected at all. It can also jam enemy radar—or make it seem there are 100 golf-ball-size targets in the sky....

“It’s like driving a car around town, if you don’t watch your gas gauge it will be too late and you’ll be empty,” said Project Coordinator Jean Luprano. “You need to know whether to slow down or if you can go faster.” Monitoring levels of sodium, potassium, sweat rates and sweat pH is all within reach. Understanding how to interpret and adjust per the data is still to be determined....

How to fight pests with plants Before there were powders, dusts, and sprays, plants needed their own defenses against insects and other creatures. Some developed noxious odors, while others used poisons and unpleasant flavors to protect themselves. Ancient farmers picked up on these characteristics, discovering that “pesticide plants” grown alongside cultivars resulted in better yields and less labor-intensive growing. Companion planting was born. No matter how you spin it, toxins are bad for your health....

Don’t know what I’m talking about? In 2006, scientists discovered there is a gene—indeed, a single letter in all of human DNA—that determines whether people have wet or dry earwax. People of African and European ethnicity usually have the wet type. Nearly all people of Native American and East Asian ethnicity have the dry type. Now, scientists have made a second important discovery about my favorite gene. It also leads to earwax that smells different....

Titanium has long been a go-to for very good reasons. It offers one of the highest strength-to-weight ratios of any metal on the planet, which means companies can make massive 460cc drivers that butt up against the PGA’s maximum size without adding weight that can slow down a swing. Like all metals, the material is also flexible, which allows it to bounce back after deforming at impact. The allure of carbon fiber is that it’s even lighter than titanium, but it brings its own complications....

To get to that location from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the SEAL team (and a dog) flew in two helicopters, a trip of some 90 minutes. Those choppers, as former president Barack Obama describes in his new memoir, A Promised Land, were “two Black Hawk helicopters that had been modified for stealth.” That the US employed stealthy helicopters that hadn’t been previously acknowledged to exist until that day was fascinating even for people who don’t consider themselves to be aviation geeks....

If you were one of the thousands of visitors who tour the cave every month, you probably wouldn’t even realize it’s there. A nondescript metal box sits on a natural shelf off the main walking path, tucked away in the shadows. The only intimation that such sensitive machinery resides in the dark passageways at all is the connected readout station silently recording data in the corner of the visitor center....

The modern mythology of its fated voyage means the mighty ship is never completely out of sight. The tragic romance of James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic, the eerie 21st century submarine footage of its algae-eaten prow, and a century’s worth of PopSci coverage constantly recapitulating the icy geometry of that fateful night see to its continued relevance. But now that the virtual reality experience “Titanic Honor and Glory” has arrived, it seems those Hollywood glimpses and scientific inquiries were merely appetizers....