Looking to build some cool moving machines? Think small! Craft a tiny Ferris wheel or a super-small wobbling UFO. You might even make an itty-bitty disco ball. Tiny machines are tons of fun!

Ten fun, accessible hands-on activities teach readers how to make simple machines using STEM concepts.

Looking to host a game night? Think mini! Craft a bitty bowling alley for marble bowling balls. Create a deck of petite playing cards. Then play your games with family and friends. Easy instructions and step photos will help you become a miniature game master. Tiny games are tons of fun!

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk - a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside - more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future. Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun - and report back on what they find. Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

Popular Science gives our readers the information and tools to improve their technology and their world. The core belief that Popular Science and our readers share: The future is going to be better, and science and technology are the driving forces that will help make it better.

Getting real is the next big thing in Western living - the determined rejection of the fake, the virtual, the spun and the mass-produced, in the search for authenticity. There's a revolution going on and (however unconsciously) we're all already part of it. Welcome to the New Realism. The charms of the global and virtual future we were all brought up to expect, where meals would be eaten in the form of pills and machines would do all our work, have worn rather thin. It's not that we don't want all the advantages of progress - we do - we just want a future that manages to be local and real too. Tracking the struggle for reality from Japanese theme parks to mock-Tudor villas and from Byron to Big Brother, this book explains where our reactions against spin and fakeness come from - and where they are going. The current revival of real food, real business, real culture flies in the face of expert opinion from politicians, economists, advertisers and big business - and they're having to run to keep up as our hype attention-span gets ever shorter.