Popular Science

THERE WAS A LOT WE DIDN’T know a year ago when we picked “Play” as the topic for this issue. We didn’t know that a pandemic would put much of the United States and the world on lockdown. We didn’t know the Olympics, one of the reasons we selected the

Spotting the common denominator in Bonnie Tsui’s life is simple: It’s water. Her parents met at a pool in Hong Kong, she was a competitive swimmer as a teenager, and now she hits the waves in the San Francisco Bay Area with her surfboard. Being aroun

PLAYING SPORTS CAN TEACH teamwork, boost self-esteem, and improve health, but they’re not all fun and games. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are about 8.6 million recreation-related injuries each year, ranging from hand

HUMANS HAVE BEEN PLAYING games for centuries, but we’re still not perfect at them: We make mistakes, underestimate opponents, and can think only a few moves ahead. Computers have no such shortcomings. An artificial intelligence can master most of the

HUMANS DON’T HAVE A MONOPOLY ON horsing around. Animals of all sorts use play to prepare for real-world situations—but their shenanigans can look pretty different from ours. You might catch baby rats mischievously battling to figure out how to fight,

THE PARALYMPICS—SO CALLED for the Greek prefix para, meaning “alongside”—give elite disabled athletes the chance to compete at the highest level. Not all contenders in the games, which typically run after the Olympics, use wheelchairs, but those who

JOANNA HARPER’S RESEARCH STARTED NOT IN A LAB, but on the track. Though she didn’t have a background in sports science—she held a master’s in medical physics, and her work involved tailoring cancer radiation treatments—she was an athlete in a unique

THE CHEAP YO-YOS OF YOUR youth spun simple physics into fun. Fling down the plastic body, then snap it back up with a gentle tug on the string. Or let it sleep and roll along the floor to “walk the dog” before calling it home. Competition-grade model

The 522 snap-together parts in Ubtech’s Jimu Competitive Series ChampBot Kit combine to create three different configurations, including this catapult. Once a child has one built, they can use an iOS or Android app and program actions via Google’s Bl

Pro gamers demand smooth graphics rendering so there’s no fight-ruining lag between their commands and what happens onscreen. The burly multicore AMD processor inside the Alienware Aurora Ryzen stores data in an extra-large cache to avoid any hiccups

PRO BASEBALL PLAYERS OBSESS ABOUT WOOD.That’s because, the logic goes, the harder the bat, the faster a ball will fly after contact. The AP5 Pro Model from Marucci, a Louisiana company that rivals Louisville Slugger for the title of most-swung brand

The Revolution Core 32 helps hone your balancing skills. Perching on the 32-inch board atop the weighted roller is a challenge, but you can work your way up to rocking back and forth or even nailing rad kickflips. The electric Onewheel Pint can hit 1

Electronic monitors in places like the front wheels and gearbox keep tabs on traction in real time. The driver selects one of four terrain modes—such as mud, rock, or trail—and the computer doles out just the right amount of power to each 30-inch tir

Arrange the rubberwood pieces from the Kubb Empire standard size set into two rows, 26 feet apart. Players hurl six batons at their opponent’s formation until they’ve knocked over all the blocks. Then they can fire at the king in the middle of the pi

It is 10°F outside of the wood-beamed shelter at St. Croix State Park, a 34,000-acre pine-and-oak expanse in eastern Minnesota. Hell, it’s cold inside, despite two fireplaces blazing, their smoke pulled into flared metal chimneys that resemble the bu

Attached to a metal shaft, the forged steel head was about the same size and weight as its contemporary wooden cousins, but differed in one key way: It was hollow. That configuration kept the mass at the perimeter, making the club slightly more forgi

WHEN SCIENTISTS BRING dolls into the lab, the toys transcend their role as playthings. They can expose racism and unleash aggression. The humanoid forms are easy to identify with, allowing them to serve as scientific stand-ins and therapeutic compani

It was the first Saturday of December 2018—tournament day—and he thought the cars he’d built could outperform anyone’s. They were compact. Sleek. Speedy. He watched anxiously as his pinewood derby racers took their spots at the top of a long, sloping

THE OLDEST KNOWN JOKE DATES BACK NEARLY 4,000 years, and it’s a fart gag. The fact that we’ve been crackin’ wise for so long suggests there’s something innate about the need to laugh. Heck—chimps, rats, and perhaps even dolphins do it. Neuroscientist

ONE OF THE BEST SURF SPOTS in the United States to practice aerial tricks is in central Texas, some 200 miles from the Gulf Coast. On a brisk December day at the BSR Surf Resort, Caroline Marks was ripping a front-side air reverse. Aquamarine water s

No matter how hard you try to spin the house balls at your local bowling joint, they rarely curve. That’s because they are simple spheres built for durability, not fancy moves. But a small handful of companies—among them Storm Bowling—create gear tha

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN challenging their wits since at least the third millennium BCE, when ancient Sumerians carved riddles into stone tablets. (Try this one, for example: “There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?”) Over tim

The track, home to the British Grand Prix and among the most famous in racing, features a tricky series of sweeping curves best approached with a delicate balance of gas and brakes. Baldwin, however, attacks them at 110 miles per hour, risky given th

BARBARA EBERSBERGER, VICE PRESIDENT OF APPAREL AT REEBOK When the first exercise bra debuted in 1977, it resembled two jockstraps sewn together, which is actually what inspired it. More than 40 years later, despite all the R&D put into shoes and othe

MARIANA BRUSSONI, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA Recreation works best when it’s unstructured and mostly unsupervised. Negotiating and building teamwork fosters proper higher-level thinking abilities and so

JESSICA PHILLIPS-SILVER, ASSOCIATE RESEARCHER IN MUSIC NEUROSCIENCE AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER Moving to rhythmic music is a universal human behavior. Even babies can bounce along to a song’s beat. But some people simply can’t synchroniz

JESSICA ROLPH, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER OF LOVEVERY When my son was 6 months old, he had a toy that always caught my attention: When you pressed a button, a purple cow would pop out, music would play, and lights would flash. It mesmerized him, but I wasn’t

MICHELLE CLEERE, ELITE PERFORMANCE EXPERT I specialize in helping athletes develop mental skills to face challenges both in their sports and in life. I try to emphasize to my clients, most of whom are between the ages of 11 and 15, that they have to

KATIE LIM, DIRECTOR OF TOY DESIGN FOR SUPER CHEWER Appealing to a dog’s natural instinct to hunt is a great way to get them to have fun. We test all the contents we send to our BarkBox subscribers by observing pups in play sessions. We look for a lot

WAITING IN LINE CAN TEST EVEN the most patient person, but the happiest place on earth can make the longest of queues fly by. All it takes is these three tricks of the mind—no Disney magic necessary. When you wait for Space Mountain, for example, wal

• The Rube Goldberg machine above is not the first that art and photography duo The Voorhes have created. But building one composed exclusively of playthings that fit on an 8-foot-by-8-foot bright-yellow wall while still leaving room for the text on

IN THE 1996 FILM SPACE JAM, Bugs Bunny supplies his demoralized Looney Tunes teammates with Michael Jordan’s “Secret Stuff,” which delivers the boost they need to win the game. But unbeknownst to Daffy and the gang, it’s just water. The scene depicts