TechnologyFixer

SERVICING THE HUBBLE Astronauts Steven L. Smith and John M. Grunsfeld are photographed during the December 1999 Hubble servicing mission of STS-103. NASA/MSFC Last month, six astronauts convened at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City to discuss the 2009 mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. As it approached its 20th birthday, the telescope was in desperate need of an upgrade; the orbital optics, batteries, and other equipment had slowly deteriorated due to sun exposure and age. NASA deployed Space Shuttle mission STS-125, the last Hubble servicing mission, to renovate the telescope in a series of space walks. “For a lot of missions, they say don’t worry about things, we can always get that done next time, you don’t have to try and rush,” Scott Altman, the former mission commander, tells Popular Science. “But we knew this was the last time anyone was going, so anything we didn’t get done, wasn’t going to get done.” Eventually Earth's gravit...

Unfortunately—oddly—it all began with Hitler. For the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Adolf Hitler wanted to draw on the ancient Greeks to bring a certain authoritative, classical air to modern Germany. The head of the Reich sports office had just the plan to do it: hold an elaborate relay to bring a symbolic Olympic flame from Greece to the games. The original torch was meant to be emblematic of German engineering and excellence, so the contract to produce them went to the Krupp Company. The same group would later provide the artillery necessary for the Nazis to take over much of Europe. The design was simple, with one primary function: to keep the flame burning. That’s still the goal today. Since 1936, the torch has taken on a different form for every Olympic relay and undergone various transformative redesigns to make it more resilient and less likely to burn out. It’s a strangely singular goal for an engineering project, but it allows for almost limitless creativity: The torch de...

President Obama's official portrait uses flowers to tell his story. Infographic by Tom McNamara The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. is full of familiar faces. Since it opened in 1968, the museum's sole purpose has been to showcase the images of "men and women who have made significant contributions to the history, development, and culture of the people of the United States." A visitor could wander the halls for hours, but there's now more reason to high-tail it to the Presidential Gallery. As of February 12, former President Barack Obama's portrait has been added to the hall, and with it some truly beautiful botanicals. Painted by pattern-loving portraitist Kehinde Wiley, the piece features Obama seated in front of a fortress of leaves. From this deep green background emerges three types of flowers, each representing a part of the former president's history. The white flowers are jasmine, representing Obama's birthplace and childh...

RUBIK V. GOD Lars Karlsson via Wikimedia The world has waited with bated breath for three decades, and now finally a group of academics, engineers, and math geeks has discovered the number that explains life, the universe, and everything. That number is 20, and it's the maximum number of moves it takes to solve a Rubik's Cube. Known as God's Number, the magic number required about 35 CPU-years and a good deal of man-hours to solve. Why? Because there's 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions of the cube, and the computer algorithm that finally cracked God's Algorithm had to solve them all. (The terms "God's Number/Algorithm are derived from the fact that if God was solving a Cube, he/she/it would do it in the most efficient way possible. The Creator did not endorse this study, and could not be reached for comment.) A full breakdown of the history of God's Number as well as a full breakdown of the math is available here, but summarily the...

You've planned your road trip, downloaded your science apps, and bought yourself a pair of shiny new spectacles: you're ready for the eclipse. But is your eyewear is up to the task? American Eclipse With the Great American Eclipse approaching, demand for eclipse glasses—with special lenses designed to keep the sun from harming your peepers—is surging. And counterfeit glasses are everywhere. In fact, Amazon is so swamped by reports of possibly unsafe glasses that the company is allegedly sending out recalls and refunds for products that are certified as eclipse-safe. How can glasses be counterfeit? It's supposed to be super simple to determine the effectiveness of eclipse lenses. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) uses a standard called ISO 12312-2 to certify these products. To achieve ISO 12312-2 compliance, companies have to file paperwork proving that their lenses block a certain amount of UV light. If they meet that standard, then the bus...