Popular Science

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The Life of Popular Science • AN ALGORITHMIC AVERAGE OF OUR COVERS’ COLORS FROM 1917 TO 2018

FIVE FOR ONE

BEGIN

What’s life?

we’re really bad at making babies

THE LONGEST HAUL • Proxima b, our nearest neighboring exoplanet, is almost 25 trillion miles away. Even one of our fastest spaceships—the 31,600-mile-per-hour New Horizons—would take hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Assuming we can’t figure out how to warp space-time (seems unlikely, but fingers crossed), we’re still looking at a couple-hundred-year trip in the best-case scenario, which leads to the real problem: No human crew could survive the entire ride. Science-fiction writers have long floated so-called generation ships as a solution. Designers would outfit these interplanetary cruise vessels to support a community of adults and their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children…until humanity finally reaches a new celestial shore. Here’s our best guess for what it would take to sow the seeds of an extrasolar species.

ALIEN HUMANS

SON OF SUDAN • A frantic quest to save the northern white rhino from extinction

Welcome to SPRINGFIELD • THE SUBURBAN DREAM WASHES UP AGAINST NATURE’S REALITY

SEED SOLVERS

NO SQUIRRELS ALLOWED

Tasting my way to a new apple • BRUCE BARRITT, HORTICULTURIST AND DEVELOPER OF THE COSMIC CRISP

I’m raising the dog of the future • CLAUDIA MELIS, LUNDEHUND OWNER AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT QUEEN MAUD UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

SPROUT

Leave those kids alone • How a few members of the animal kingdom handle the transition to adulthood

Teenage dream

How to breed the perfect apple • Planting apples is a game of chance in which every seed is a wild card. The pome’s genetics are so diverse that kernels from the same core sprout into entirely different varieties. Though all cultivars are the same species, we’ve bred them into more than 7,000 types. Growers must select the best and graft their branches onto new trees to propagate each distinct fruit. Farmers have been doing this since we first domesticated the apple some 2,000 years ago. Here’s how we developed some of the varieties.

Something Borrowed • Pioneering surgeons have made it possible to transplant a human uterus that can bear children—offering hope to millions of infertile women who never thought they could give birth.

How to Relocate a Uterus • A womb isn’t loyal to its original surroundings. As researchers have demonstrated, a uterus will nurture a baby regardless of the body that hosts it. But finding a viable organ—and then applying meticulous suturing skills—is the challenge. Here’s how surgeons go about transplanting one of the most amazing structures in the human corpus.

SPROUT

INFANT OASIS

Sex, drugs, and baby koalas • KATIE DAHLHAUSEN, BIOPHYSICS PH.D. CANDIDATE AT UC DAVIS

No big deal, i just saved a child’s life • BETINA AUSTIN, NEONATAL NURSE WITH DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS

See spot? what about now?

GROW

Have your cow and eat it too

Watch a revolution grow from tweet to tweet

SALAD • DAYS • AND • DEEP   • SPACE • NIGHTS • Can gardens help astronauts go farther?

Green Space • TWO SYSTEMS—ONE HANDS-ON, ONE AUTOMATED—FOR GROWING PLANTS IN SPACE

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER

LIVES, CAMERA, ACTION

MAKING STRETCH HAPPEN

I created the first digital meme • MICHAEL GIRARD, DIGITAL ARTIST AND SOFTWARE ARCHITECT AT SUBLIMINAL FRINGE

How...