There are lots of things that we don't fully understand, because we just can't see them. Individual atoms and molecules have been captured in still images, but capturing videos to see their movement requires more power at a faster rate. To do this, researchers at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC used to stand for Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), use an x-ray laser that fires at incredibly fast speeds (quadrillionths of a second) to make stop-motion videos of chemical reactions. The laser is nearly two miles long. And now, it's getting an upgrade.

How do you survive when the world is crumbling around you, and basically all of your neighboring species are going extinct? You can either use tools to adapt to your new environment, or you can start having lots of kids in the hopes that maybe they can make something of themselves in this strangely spacious new world.

John Grunsfeld has announced he'll be retiring from NASA at the end of April. Grunsfeld is a former astronaut who has performed eight spacewalks, including the final mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. He retired that same year, but came back to NASA in 2012.

Every one of your cells contains DNA, the molecular blueprint that makes you you. Accessing that blueprint may seem like a job for scientists. But extracting DNA from your cells is actually surprisingly simple.

Microsoft thinks that the future of computing will be some combination of the holograms from Star Wars and the holodeck from Star Trek, which is why the company has developed the HoloLens — a headset that displays virtual characters as if they're right beside you. Microsoft said it would begin mailing out the first Hololens headsets for software developers, which cost $3,000 each, last month. And now it's published a video showing what you get for ponying up all that money.

Messaging giant WhatsApp, which transmits conversations consisting of text, photos, videos, and location sharing, just turned on complete encryption for nearly one billion people. This means that no matter what happens, neither WhatsApp nor anyone else (including governments) can see the messages sent within the app. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, which recently voiced support for Apple in its fight against the FBI.

Robots that hunt other robots are my favorite robots. This is Delft Dynamic's Dronecatcher, a big drone built to hunt smaller drones. It works as advertised:

Robots can't feel shame, which saves them from any awkwardness when they ask a human to touch their buttocks. Humans are not so lucky, and when asked by a robot to touch part of its body, humans will get uncomfortable if that body part is generally thought of as private. No problem at all touching a hand:

The planet KELT-4Ab orbits not one, not two, but three stars. That's a whole lot of sunshine. The planet's discovery is announced in a study published in The Astronomical Journal.

Drones are clumsy. They bumble through the air, largely unaware of their surroundings, and that's a problem for anything in the air that doesn't want a drone crashing into it. It also limits where drones can fly: the small size and maneuverability of many unmanned aerial vehicles make them ideal for work in buildings or dense areas like forests and cities, provided they don't crash all the time. That's where Ross Allen and Marco Pavone, at Stanford University's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, come in. They're teaching drones to avoid obstacles so well that they can even fence:

While it's easy to dwell on the potential threats of artificial intelligence, much more often the field promises to make humans' lives better. A.I. algorithms are meant to help us connect with our friends, find information, and even transport us through the physical world.

When Clostridium difficile was discovered in 1935, it was considered to be an occasional pathogen of humans. Yet, in 2005, that changed with a rampant outbreak in Canada that killed over fifteen percent of its victims. The bacterium spread worldwide and in 2011, was responsible for over a half a million infections and approximately 29,000 deaths in a single year.

Forty years ago, theoretical physicists predicted that certain magnetic materials could enter a bizarre state wherein their electrons would break into pieces. Now researchers have observed these fractional electrons in a two-dimensional material, proving that a so-called quantum spin liquid can really exist.

April 4th is the official opening day of the 2016 Major League Baseball season, and Popular Science is celebrating the occasion by looking back at the first ever patent for the baseball glove. It was filed in 1885 by George R. Rawlings, who owned a St. Louis sporting goods' store and wanted to create a device that used felt and padding to protect the fingers and palms of those who were flocking to the relatively new sport, which became popular during the Civil War.

Early airplanes were a mess. Human flight was new, and as technology moved from “a barely functioning jumble of cloth, wire, and engines” to “deadly war machines” in less than a decade, all sorts of wacky configurations were attempted along the way. One of these early innovations was the truss, a support structure connecting the wing to the body of the plane, which can still be seen in small, prop-driven planes to this day. Jet planes mostly moved away from the design, but now NASA wants to ... brace yourself ... bring it back.