Feed aggregator

Astronomers have spotted an asteroid the size of nearly eight football fields, with the help of the largest digital camera in the world and a new space observatory. Asteroid 2025 MN45 measures about a half mile in diameter and is the fastest spinning asteroid of its size ever recorded. The team from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and United States Department of Energy (DOE) presented their findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Spin speed matters

To spot this asteroid, the team used the cutting-edge Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Located on a mountaintop in Chile, the observatory will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years using the 3,200 megapixel LSST Camera to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our universe. With this camera, Rubin can take an image every 40 seconds. 

“NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory will find things that no one even knew to look for,” Luca Rizzi, an NSF program director for research infrastructure, said in a statement. “When Rubin’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time begins, this huge spinning asteroid will be joined by an avalanche of new information about our Universe, captured nightly.”

While the observatory is expected to be fully up and running this year, preliminary observations taken in June 2025 revealed 1,900 asteroids never seen before. 

As these asteroids orbit the sun, they rotate at a wide range of speeds. For scientists, these spin rates offer clues about how they formed billions of years ago and can tell us more about their composition. An asteroid spinning quickly—like 2025 MN45—may have sped up because of a past collision with another asteroid. This means it could be a fragment of an originally larger object. 

Fast rotation also requires a space rock to have enough internal strength to avoid fragmentation—when it flies apart into smaller pieces. Most asteroids are considered “rubble piles,” made of many smaller pieces of rock that are held together by gravity. Without this more solid core, they have speed limits as to how fast they can spin without coming apart. 

Objects in the main asteroid belt—located between Mars and Jupiter—must rotate completely in 2.2 hours to avoid fragmentation. Anything spinning faster must be structurally strong to remain intact. If an asteroid is spinning above this limit and is fairly large, then it must be made of stronger cosmic material. 

Related Stories

How often do asteroids come near Earth?

A 3,200-megapixel digital camera is ready for its cosmic photoshoot

NASA snaps detailed photos of ‘strikingly complicated’ asteroid

Japanese spacecraft eyes tricky asteroid landing

Enter the super rotators

The new study uses data collected over the course of about 10 hours across seven nights during Rubin Observatory’s early commissioning phase in April and May 2025. The astronomers found 76 asteroids with reliable rotation periods. This includes 16 super-fast rotators with rotation periods between about 13 minutes and 2.2 hours. Three are considered ultra-fast rotators that complete a full spin in less than five minutes.

The 19 newly identified fast-rotators are about 100 yards–about the size of a football field (minus those important end zones). 2025 MN45 is about half a mile in diameter and completes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes. This combination of size and speed makes it the fastest-spinning asteroid with a diameter over 500 meters (1,640 feet) that astronomers have found.

The lightcurve of 2025 MN45 — the fastest-rotating asteroid with a diameter over 500 meters that scientists have ever found. The y-axis shows the asteroid’s brightness, and the x-axis shows its phase, or where it is in its rotation. When plotted, the resulting curve shows the asteroid’s fluctuating brightness as it spins. Lightcurves can help scientists determine an asteroid’s rotation period (the total time it takes to complete one rotation), size, shape, and surface properties. Image: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/J. PollardAcknowledgement: PI: Sarah Greenstreet (NSF NOIRLab/Rubin Observatory).

“Clearly, this asteroid must be made of material that has very high strength in order to keep it in one piece as it spins so rapidly,” added lead author Sarah Greenstreet, NSF NOIRLab assistant astronomer and lead of Rubin Observatory’s Solar System Science Collaboration’s Near-Earth Objects.“We calculate that it would need a cohesive strength similar to that of solid rock. This is somewhat surprising since most asteroids are believed to be what we call ‘rubble pile’ asteroids, which means they are made of many, many small pieces of rock and debris that coalesced under gravity during Solar System formation or subsequent collisions.”

Some of the other notable asteroid discoveries include 2025 MJ71 (1.9-minute rotation period), 2025 MK41 (3.8-minute rotation period), 2025 MV71 (13-minute rotation period), and 2025 MG56 (16-minute rotation period). 

Scientists expect to uncover more fast rotators when Rubin begins its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). These regular observations will gradually take in data and aim to provide pivotal information about the strengths, compositions, and histories of these primitive cosmic bodies.

The post World’s largest digital camera spots massive asteroid appeared first on Popular Science.

Every Christmas, my family follows the same script: a stack of board games hits the table, and a spirited debate breaks out over what we should play. But as the holidays draw closer and my work brain powers down, I started wondering whether games could be more than a way to pass the time. Is it possible to find a game that’s genuinely fun and gives my sluggish brain a workout? 

To find out, I asked experts which games do the most to sharpen your mind.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” says Dr. Fernand Gobet, cognitive scientist and author of Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games, “but the answer is none.” 

“Not even chess?” I ask. “There is a moderate correlation between chess skill and different kinds of intelligence,” says Gobet, “but this seems to be explained by the fact that more intelligent individuals tend to be more attracted to activities such as chess.”

That doesn’t mean games are useless for the brain. Rather, Gobet explains, most games teach “domain-specific skills,” or specialized knowledge. For example, if you want to boost your mathematical or business knowledge, choose Monopoly.

Many classic games—chess, Go, checkers—encourage players to think before acting, says Gobet. This is a core component of executive function, the mental skills that help us solve problems, make decisions, and navigate complex situations.

And games also foster social intelligence, such as respecting opponents and losing gracefully, he adds.

Video games might do more for your brain

A recent study suggests that while playing games in general is good for your brain, video games may have a stronger effect than board games. One reason may be that video games require players to process multiple streams of information at once and adapt strategies in real time.

While video game addiction can be a real problem, the games also provide many benefits, such as improved vision. Image: DepositPhotos

“Constantly getting new challenges and having to figure out even entirely new systems is good for the brain,” says Dr. Kurt Dean Squire, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, whose research focuses on game-based learning. “You are having to think laterally about ideas, exploring problems from new angles.” 

“Different games help build different types of intelligence,” says Dr. Nathan Carroll, a board-certified psychiatrist and author of Internet Gaming Disorder. 

Games that emphasize cooperation, such as Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and many MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), benefit social intelligence—provided they’re played collaboratively, Carroll says. 

Role-playing games, which let you control characters in fictional worlds and tend to feature dense, descriptive text, can enhance linguistic intelligence. “In fact, I personally learned to read while playing RPGs on the Sega Master System in the 1980s,” Carroll says. “To engage with them, I needed to learn the words on the screen.”

Games where the goal is to construct and manage some form of base or empire, like Minecraft, Valheim, and 4X games, encourage logical and spatial intelligence, Carroll says. 

“Augmented- and virtual-reality games offer many opportunities to develop kinesthetic (bodily/movement) intelligence,” says Carroll. “Great games for this include Beat Saber and Fruit Ninja.”

Never too old—or too young—to play

For children, games can be a powerful teaching tool. “Children in particular might be more motivated to learn if they engage in activities that are fun,” says Gobet. 

A large study involving more than 500 primary-school students found that children who played modern board games in class got better at “updating”—the brain’s ability to swap out old information for new, useful facts—and they also had better reading and math skills compared to students taught using regular classes.

Related 'Ask Us Anything' Stories

How to get better at snooker… with physics

Is fear contagious?

What are ultra-processed foods and are they bad for me?

Chew on this: The 10,000-year history of gum

How does anesthesia work? Experts still have questions.

The cognitive benefits of games aren’t limited to children. Among older adults, “trying new things, solving problems, any sort of mental stimulation has shown to lead to big gains in staving off cognitive decline,” says Squire. “Games that are social are even better.” 

Multiple studies have shown that older adults who regularly played games like Go and Ska (a traditional board game in Thailand) experienced improvements in attention, memory, and executive function (the mental skills used to plan, solve problems, and adapt to new situations).

Age appropriateness matters, Gobet cautions. Games that are too easy bore older players, while overly complex games can frustrate younger ones. “This being said, children can learn complex games such as chess at a surprisingly young age,” says Gobet. “For example, an Indian child was recently in the news for having acquired a chess rating of nearly 1600 Elo—the rating of an average amateur level—at the age of 3.”

Bottom line

Games don’t make you smarter, but they can support your brain, regardless of your age. Different games sharpen different skills—and video games may have an edge over traditional board games by demanding faster, more flexible thinking.

Perhaps it’s time to update our Christmas game stash with a video game or two. 

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Chess or video games—which actually makes you smarter? The answer may surprise you. appeared first on Popular Science.

Re civ decline, my basic story is that a key contribution to the fall of civilizations is plausibly that as a civ gets big, rich, and peaceful, its local cultural evolution process parameters get worse, at least at the culture level. There is typically lower variety, weaker selection pressures, and faster environmental change. So the process goes bad, its cultures drift into maladaption, and the civ falls. Our current civ will plausibly suffer this fate, with the added problem that due to modern cultural activism we also have higher rates of internal cultural drift.

What does this say about Christianity? Early on it was a small sect competing with many others, and the fact that it won against them suggests that it was unusually adaptive then, at least in that context. Then it took over the Roman Empire and most of Europe, and became securely in pace for millennia. And while securely in place, Christianity substantially changed its character many times. So doesn’t my theory suggest that those changes would on average have been maladaptive?

Well first notice that most Europeans didn’t know much about Christian doctrine re how to live ordinary peasant lives until about 1600 or so. Before then Christianity mainly influenced elites, cities, and larger institutions. Also, there was often lots of competition within Christianity; the cultural evolution problem would only be re cultural features that were imposed on everyone in Christianity, allowing little local deviation.

Okay, but Christianity influenced marriage much earlier, from about 1200, promoting monogamy and banning cousins marriage, and that suppressed family clans. Christianity also pushed individualism early on, via consent in marriage and the freedom to write wills, especially donations to the Church. And those wills funded many big monasteries, which slowly took over lots of European land. Also, conflicts between the church and crowns started early and weakly contributed to the lack of a single power taking over all of Europe. (Though note: most of these things didn’t actually change much over the history of Christianity.)

The protestant revolution created more competition among forms of Christianity, but it also induced record high level of religious hostility and destruction. But then the strangest thing happened: after the thirty years war (1648+), Europe suddenly agreed to great religious tolerance, at least among variations on Christianity, inducing world record low levels of religious destruction.

It turns out that religious tolerance, individualism, suppressing family clans, and preventing a single empire, were important enablers of modern capitalism, which enabled the Industrial Revolution. Which seems to have been quite adaptive in many ways, and least on the timescale of a few centuries. So does this show that some pro-adaption process was driving changes in Christianity over millennia? Or did it just get lucky?

I think Europe just got lucky. The accumulation of land by the church, and the increase in religious hostility, seem maladaptive, and suppressing family clans was also probably maladaptive at first. Then Europe got lucky in that religious hostility dramatically (and puzzlingly) reversed, crowns grabbed back most of that church land, and then individualism, suppressed family clans, and no central empire together turned out to be very good for capitalism and industry.

But maybe to get this lucky, Europe needed to make some big changes from prior cultures, and an out-of-control drifting Christian culture is part of what gave Europe the ability to make such big changes. Usually big random changes go badly, but they sometimes allow evolution to make big jumps to new peaks, in ways that wouldn’t be possible without them. Yes, this means maybe we today will also get lucky in a similar way. But don’t count on it.

xAI completed its upsized Series E funding round, exceeding the $15 billion targeted round size, and raised $20 billion. Investors participating in the round include Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX and Baron Capital Group, amongst other key partners. Strategic investors in the round include NVIDIA and ...

Read more

Elon Musk is very optimismic about AI + robotics leading to an age of extreme abundance. He sees a Star Trek future and not Terminator. The next 3–7 year transition will be very bumpy, potentially causing massive social unrest despite rising prosperity. AI and robotics is a supersonic tsunami that is already accelerating, no off-switch, ...

Read more

Menlo Park, India, 6th January 2026, CyberNewsWire

Jensen Huang revealed that latest Nvidia technology and applications including the new Ruben GPU chips. Vera Rubin addresses skyrocketing AI computation demand (models 10x larger yearly, reasoning adds compute). Post-training uses reinforcement learning and inference is multi-token. Tokens use increase 5x yearly. Costs decline 10x yearly due to race. NEWS: Nvidia has released a new ...

Read more

One of the greatest obstacles to humanity using abstract thought to help on its biggest issues is this: our main professional specialists in abstract though applied to big issues are academics, and they refuse to think abstractly about how they allocate resources.

Academics are divided into an inherited structure of disciplines and subfields, a structure that changes only slowly. The focuses within each subfield fluctuate with changing fashions, the relative size of fields changes as outside funding changes, and sometimes funding allows the creation of new fields.

The (high-dimensional) space of all possible abstract topics, however, is only sparsely populated by this structure. Most of that population is in dense “urban” clusters, with few residents of the vast “rural” tracks outside of those clusters. Most of sources of resources and prestige for academics are tied to those clusters, which discourages them from venturing outside of those clusters.

Academics are so tied to their little “cities” that they have only vague concepts of most of the space outside of it. In fact, only ~2% of academics could give a coherent intelligible (but not necessarily correct) answer to this question: “Why is your particular research nearly the most cost-effective among the options available?” (This has long been my personal experience.)

Few academics can justify their research relative to anything besides other nearby research. The sort that might cite them, and which they might cite. The question of why that whole area is funded is of little interest to them.

A big factor that causes academics to clump strongly in topic space is that they strongly prefer to use the most prestigious methods available in each area. As research is mainly judged for its prestige-potential, not its social value. This heavily favors the topics that better allow one to show of one’s mastery of prestigious methods. Other topics are neglected.

The intrinsic value of topics in this vast space of possible topics is only weakly correlated with the density of academics near them. Which means that most of the important abstract topics are not near the center of clumps. And so even if someone does venture out into the sparsely populated “rural” topic areas, and finds a topic very important to humanity, other academics aren’t much interested in evaluating what they claim to have found. Most likely, there aren’t places to publish it, there aren’t programs to fund it, and there aren’t jobs to hold specialists in it. Why bother?

Yes, if you have gained enough prestige working in the center of an academic city, more academics will listen to you to what you’ve found outside of cities, and may even be willing to stretch the city boundaries in those directions. But the few qualifying academics here usually have many other more rewarding ways to spend their time.

Yes, some kinds of non-academics also specialize in more abstract reasoning. Such as journalists or managers. But when they claim to have found something important out in the academic wilderness areas, their lack of academic credentials is usually suggested as a reason to doubt them. After all, if wouldn’t the nearest academics had said something, if there really was something to be found there?

You might think that outsiders should hold academics accountable, but a major trend of the modern era has been for prestigious professions to wrest control from outsiders. Academics succeeded at this via promoting grants, tenure, and peer review. Today funders primarily buy prestige by association with academics who decide internally who is prestigious.

The US is getting faster at war. There was previously the 12 day war with Iran and now a 2 hour war with Venezuela. USA getting faster at war. 12 day war with Iran and now a 2 hour war with Venezuela @elonmusk @stevenmarkryan @benshapiro @RandyWKirk1 @WR4NYGov @ScottAdamsSays pic.twitter.com/8jk88GO08C — nextbigfuture (@nextbigfuture) January 3, 2026 ...

Read more

2026 is the year Tesla AI starts to get to significant scale for robotaxi, optimus teslabot and using XAI Grok 5+ for voice and other early AGI capabilities. World’s first fully autonomous coast-to-coast drive, done with Tesla self-driving v14. Congrats and thank you @DavidMoss! https://t.co/NFxzA7suRk — Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) December 31, 2025 xAI NEWS: Reports ...

Read more

Most likely, our world civilization will peak in population in about three decades, and its economy will peak soon after, or maybe even before, depending on how bad Africa is at substituting for everyone else in the world economy. From then on rates of innovation will shrink faster than does the economy, and our civ will continue to fall and slow for centuries, until replaced by rising insular fertile religious subcultures (eg Amish, Haredim).

When future folks look back on this, the fall of the greatest civ so far, who will they blame? You, actually. In two polls I asked re a generic civ that rises and falls, people in which period are most to blame for that fall. In one poll I divided the civ’s history into 4 parts: start to rise, finish rise, start to fall, finish fall. In another, I divided it into 5 parts: flat turns to rise, mid rise, peak where rise turns to fall, mid fall, fall turns to flat.

For the 5 part split, 61% most blamed peak, with equal 19% going to each of the two adjacent periods. For the 4 part split, 52% say start fall, and 35% finish rise. Thus the most blame is given to those around just after the fall begins. And as most of my readers are below age 50, and about half of age 50 readers should be alive in 35 years, that’s you.

Maybe think about what you are doing to hinder our civ’s fall?

There is nearly 16,700 cubic feet of habitable area aboard the International Space Station (ISS). That makes it larger than a six-bedroom, two-bathroom house,but still small enough for a grand tour that takes less than 15 minutes. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth seeing. Far from it, actually.

Earlier this month, NASA released a high-definition video showcase of the ISS, its facilities, and its crew recorded during the Crew-4 and Crew-5 missions in October 2022. The guided tour begins in the Columbus Laboratory Module—the European Space Agency’s (ESA) contribution to the station that includes equipment for studying fluid physics, materials sciences, and the effects of microgravity. From there, Commander Nicole Mann moves into Kibo, Japan’s experiment module focused on tasks like satellite deployments and features an external robotic arm.

Along the way, viewers get fascinating looks at life in space, including what it’s like to eat in zero gravity and how difficult it is to navigate through all the controlled chaos. Orbiting around 250 miles above Earth puts supply runs at a premium, so nearly every inch of the ISS is relegated for storage, research station, wiring, or many other vital components.

Humans have lived continuously aboard the ISS for over 25 years, but the historic endeavor is fast approaching its retirement. According to the current schedule, NASA will initiate its deorbital procedures in 2031. After that, the station will fall back towards Earth and burn up safely during atmospheric re-entry.

The post Tour the International Space Station in new NASA walkthrough appeared first on Popular Science.

The public has apparently consistently disliked modernist artistic styles in many areas, including architecture:

Americans prefer traditional/classical buildings to modern ones by about 70% to 30% (regardless of political affiliation!). In a poll of America’s favorite architecture, 76% of buildings selected were traditional/classical. A study of courthouse architecture determined that … ‘most non-architects dislike ‘modern’ design and have done so for almost a century.’ Yet 92% of new federal government buildings are modern. (More)

Which raises the question of why such styles are so often chosen. The obvious proximate answer is that elites choose them to impress other elites, who tend to prefer specialist not popular evaluations, even when they represent democratic governments. But why do they do this?

Scott Alexander, author of the above quote, suggests as explanations: elites trying to hide not flaunt wealth, getting out of touch with popular tastes, becoming more Protestant, seeing timeless aesthetic truths, responding to rising labor costs, splitting off from popular tastes, or signaling taste instead of wealth. Samuel Hughes says:

Modernism was driven by artists & the intellectual circles that surrounded them. In the case of some arts, … music … literature, it never really left those circles: … In … other art forms, rich people were eventually drawn in to some degree. (more)

Which seems right, but raises the question of why artists diverged and how they were able to get away with it.

When search for explanations of social trends, it seems better if possible to focus on trends which one well understands in fundamental terms, so one needn’t ask what caused those trends. And one such key trend for understand the modern world is: the rise of professions.

Medieval guilds declined greatly in power after ~1600. Since ~1800 one’s profession has become a more central part of one’s status and identity, as religion, ethnic, and national identities have faded. The rise of work knowledge and specialization, and of living density, made it harder to pick professionals using a local network and reputation, and so people became more accepting of professions gaining more autonomy to control the quality of their members.

For example, from 1800 to 1950, academics wrested control from outsiders via replacing prices with grants, giving professors tenure, and using peer review for evaluations. Doctors gained the power to control malpractice liability, medical schools, and professional licensing. Judges prevented legislators from regulating the practice of law, so law controlled its own rules and licensing. Clergy have long had such autonomy, and engineers gained quite a lot.

The same modern attitude of indulgence toward professions seeking to judge and control their own quality also made people more willing to defer to artists on artistic quality. This supported a move from individual patrons to salons, galleries, museums listening to curators, critics, and journals.

So the move where artists successfully pushed modernism even when most customers didn’t care for it would just not have been possible a century or more before it happened. Of course this doesn’t explain the more precise timing and direction of the modernist change, which I’ve suggested is partly a response to recent social mixing of different cultures undermining tradition, the rise of abstraction encouraging that in art, and the rise of high school inducing the rise of activist youth movements.

Every fall, squirrels stash thousands of nuts and other snacks in preparation for winter. For our fluffy-tailed friends, survival depends on being able to locate these food stores months later. So, how do they do it? In this episode of Ask Us Anything, we talk about the skills squirrels use to find their food and debunk a common misconception about how many nuts they lose.

Ask Us Anything answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions—from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. So, yes, there’s a reason we have two nostrils instead of one big nose hole and no, snakes don’t just slither. If you have a question for us, send us a note. Nothing is too silly or simple.

This episode is based on the Popular Science article “How squirrels actually find all their buried nuts.” You can also read about Tommy Tucker, a dress-wearing squirrel that sold war bonds during World War II.

Subscribe to Ask Us Anything

Listen and follow Ask Us Anything on your favorite podcast platform:

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Or wherever you get your podcasts.

Full Episode Transcript

Sarah Durn: Well, we’re fully in December, so we all know what that means. It’s Nutcracker time.

[“Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” plays]

No, I’m not talking about that kind of nutcracker. I’m talking about our delightful, furry neighbors: squirrels.

[Squirrel chattering]

That’s right, every year as the weather starts to turn, squirrels get busy collecting and stealing as many nuts as they can for winter. But how are these adorable creatures able to find all their buried loot?

Welcome to Ask Us Anything from the editors of Popular Science, where we answer your questions about our weird world. From “are cats really afraid of cucumbers?” to “why are most people right-handed?” No question is too outlandish or mundane. I’m Sarah Durn, an editor at Popular Science.

Annie Colbert: And I’m Annie Colbert, editor-in-chief at Popular Science.

SD: Here at Popular Science, we’re always pondering oddball questions. Curiosity is basically our office air supply. 

AC: And this week our curiosity has led us to how squirrels find all their buried nuts in winter, something Sarah just edited a piece on. So, Sarah, how are squirrels able to find all these nuts?

SD: Yeah, well, the short answer is that they rely on a long list of special squirrel skills. Squirrels use a whole toolkit: smell, sight, memory, and they’ll even steal from one another to recover food stores. Spatial memory does a lot of the heavy lifting here, and field studies find they recover a surprisingly high fraction of what they cache.

In other words, despite the jokes, these bushy tailed hoarders are really good at finding their buried loot. 

AC: I love that. So right away we are correcting that very famous Sarah Silverman joke.

SD: Oh yeah. The one about how squirrels forget where they put their nuts and how that’s how trees are planted. 

AC: Yes, exactly. I’ve seen it on TikTok many times. 

SD: Yeah. No shade to Silverman, but squirrels aren’t planting trees.

AC: I mean, I never really thought comedians were a good source for squirrel facts. And of course, I never doubted our squirrel friends and their abilities to hide nuts.

SD: I know they’re too adorable not to be very good at their jobs.

AC: Exactly. Now, before we dive deep into the nut hoard, we wanna know what questions are keeping you curious. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to know, submit your questions through popsci.com/ask. Again, that’s popsci.com/ask. 

SD: We can’t wait to hear your questions.

AC: We’ll be back with all of the nutty details of how squirrels are able to find their winter food stores after this short break.

Welcome back. So let’s get into it. 

SD: Let’s do it.

AC: Okay. For starters, I had wrongly assumed that all squirrels stashed their nuts in the same way.

SD: Tell me more.

AC: So Eastern gray squirrels, which are common across the Northeast and Midwest, are what scientists call scatter hoarders. They stash hundreds of nuts across a wide area rather than keeping them all in one place.

Other species, like red squirrels, which are common in Europe and across Russia, basically stockpile their food in a single defended pantry of sorts. Scientists call this technique larder hoarding.

SD: Oh, now I’m imagining them in like little kitchens.

AC: Oh, Food Network, but it’s all squirrels. Oh, okay, sorry, I got distracted. But an important note is that they won’t stockpile their food near their nests.

SD: Oh, really?

AC: Yeah. I’m not sure if scientists know exactly why. Maybe it’s safer to keep the food out of the nest so other squirrels aren’t lurking around or other animals.

SD: But all squirrels do have nest, right?

AC: Yes. So tree squirrels build their nests out of twigs and leaves and moss and whatever else they might find while scrounging around. These nests are called dreys, and I actually had a squirrel build a nest right outside the window of my apartment and I will say it didn’t end well on a very windy day, but we’ll save that story for another day. 

SD: Oh no! 

AC: But ground squirrels, so ground squirrels like the California ground squirrel they live in, burrows in the ground.

SD: Uh huh, I really wish I could visit a squirrel home.

AC: Ooh, squirrel HGTV! 

SD: A whole squirrel network.

AC: Yeah, the whole cable network, just squirrels! All right, Sarah, so when the weather gets cooler, what exactly are these squirrels storing? Is it all nuts? 

SD: Nuts are probably one of the most common things that they’re storing because you know, they can last a while. But squirrels eat all sorts of things: leaf buds, wild fruits, bird eggs, tree bark. So they store whatever, you know, they can get their little paws on. They’ll even dry out things like mushrooms to store.

AC: Oh, that’s so cool, little variety. 

SD: I know.

AC: I mean, the squirrels in Brooklyn are super bold. I once helplessly watched a squirrel steal an entire baguette out of the bottom of my stroller a few years ago. He just grabbed it and scampered off for like a little bread feast with his friends.

SD: Yeah. I mean, New York squirrels are so intense.

AC: All right, Sarah, so it’s time for the all important question. How exactly are squirrels able to find all this food they’re storing? 

SD: I mean, honestly, they’re geniuses. Most squirrels have a home range that spans six to eight acres, roughly the size of four football fields. And that area can include several nests. And across those four football fields of dense forest or whatever habitat a squirrel lives in, a single squirrel can hide up to 3000 nuts.

AC: What?

SD: I know, so if they’re burying nuts primarily between mid-August and the end of November, which is when most tree nuts mature, they’re basically burying 30 nuts a day.

AC: I mean, that’s a lot. So where are they actually burying all these nuts?

SD: Well, in cold places, squirrels don’t always actually bury their nuts in the ground. They’ll stash food in tree hollows or branches so they don’t have to dig through ice and snow.

AC: Oh, very smart. What about in warmer places?

SD: Yeah, so I live in New Orleans where it’s pretty warm year round and it’s probably easier for squirrels to actually bury their nuts and other food in the ground here.

AC: Okay, so another potentially silly question. They still need to bury the nuts in warmer places, right? Like there aren’t nuts or food year-round. 

SD: Yeah, I was actually wondering that too. But basically, yes, trees will still lose their nuts and fall even in New Orleans. So squirrels still need to stockpile food for winter. But I would think southern squirrels maybe have an easier time than squirrels in say Canada.

AC: Totally. So squirrels, regardless of climate, all get busy hiding thousands of nuts every fall.

SD: Yeah.

AC: Hmm. So how do they actually find these nuts months later?

SD: Okay, so that’s an excellent question. So let’s start with the basics. Squirrels really don’t rely on a single trick. They use smell, sight, and memory, plus social cues from other squirrels. One of the sources from this story, Dr. Noah Perlut, a professor at the University of New England, who leads gray squirrel research on campus, says they “use the whole toolkit.” Spatial memory, remembering places and how those places relate to landmarks, is especially important for when they dig their food back up. 

AC: Okay, but when you say spatial memory, do you mean they remember the exact spot or more like kind of general areas? 

SD: Typically they’re returning to the exact spot, even months later. In one experiment, scientists tried to fool squirrels with fake stashes that looked identical to the real ones. And they even swapped the grass patches, so the imposter stashes carried the real scent of the original places, but the squirrels didn’t fall for it. They ignored the imposters and dug up their actual caches. That tells us that their memory for where they buried things is accurate enough to beat a scent trick.

AC: That’s wild. So smell isn’t enough to trick them. They’re actually remembering where things are buried?

SD: Right. Smell helps, especially under snow, but it’s not the whole story. Field work also shows squirrels use visual landmarks. Another layer to this is that many squirrels actually steal nuts from other squirrels.

AC: Nice drama.

SD: Yeah, so they’ll watch each other hide their winter food stores and often steal from one another.

So squirrels aren’t only keeping track of “where did I put my food?” But also “where did that other squirrel put theirs?” Scientists call this pilfering. 

AC: Hmm. That’s nice. I guess it’s a little less mean sounding.

SD: Yeah, right. Perlut thinks that squirrels actually try to pilfer AKA steal another squirrel stash first, and then if that fails, they go for their own stashes

AC: Wow. It’s a real squirrel-eat-squirrel world out there. 

SD: Yeah. At least when it comes to their nuts. To avoid getting pilfered, squirrels will even pretend to bury nuts in one place and then actually bury them in another place ultimately. And it’s all a way to confuse the other squirrels who may be spying on them.

AC: So there’s a whole social game going on. Do we know how well they do overall? Like how many hidden nuts do squirrels actually recover? 

SD: Yeah, so one urban study estimated gray squirrels retrieve about 85 percent of their cached nuts, or, you know, whatever else they’re burying. A more recent 2023 study reported that red squirrels in an urban park quickly found the majority of the nuts they cached, even with competition.

AC: Wow. They’re much better than I am when I lose my wallet or keys or everything else I lose.

SD: I know. I mean, we should all have like little squirrels help us find things we lose around the house.

AC: Honestly, that would be a dream. Welcome the squirrels to my home.

SD: I know, that would be amazing. Perlut also notes that squirrels can remember things for up to two months.

AC: Wow.

SD: And they’re really, really smart about the timing of how they eat things too. They’ll eat certain nuts sooner, for example. So acorns from a white oak sprout quickly, so squirrels often eat those first, while red oak acorns germinate more slowly, and they can be stored for longer.

AC: So wise, our little friends.

SD: I know. One thing Perlut said really struck me. He noted that gray squirrels, for instance, spend a lot of time not foraging. They rest, watch, socialize. So that’s in a way, evidence of how effective their stashing system is. They’re not busy all day hiding nuts. I love that.

AC: They work smart, but not nonstop. I feel like those are icons for all of us.

SD: So to recap, squirrels use a combination of spatial memory, smell, visual landmarks, social observation, and even watching what other squirrels are up to, plus all that fake bearing drama to throw off furry thieves to protect and recover their caches. All in all squirrels are really good at finding what they hide.

Different species go about it in different ways, whether that’s scatter hoarding all over the place or keeping one big pantry stash, AKA larder hoarding. 

AC: And they’re really pros.

SD: They really are.

AC: I’ve learned so much today. With that, we’ll be right back to wrap up this episode with the story of Tommy Tucker, a squirrel who was adopted by the Bullis family in 1944.

SD: A squirrel who wore little outfits to help raise money for war bonds and other philanthropic causes.

AC: A squirrel who even did radio spots with FDR!

SD: Clearly we’re excited.

AC: Yes, that’s coming up next after this short break.

Okay, Sarah, as promised, let’s talk Tommy Tucker, someone we’re very excited about when we discovered this story and America’s most glamorous wartime squirrel. And I really, when we found this out, I couldn’t believe that this guy actually existed.

SD: I know he is iconic, so yes, Tommy Tucker was an Eastern gray squirrel, who became a full blown home front celebrity during World War II.

AC: So how did he go from random baby squirrel to icon? 

SD: It’s an excellent question. He literally fell out of a hickory tree in Washington, DC. A little girl found him on her walk to school, fed him warm milk, and made him a tiny bed in a red wool hat. Then her family had to move and she gave Tommy Tucker to her neighbor, Zadie Bullis, and that’s when his life really took off.

AC: I am so obsessed with this.

SD: So Zadie basically turned Tommy into a tiny, furry fashion icon. He had more than a hundred handmade outfits. Everything from a silk pleated dress for company to a Red Cross nurse dress for visiting the hospital.

AC: Uh, and famously all dresses because pants don’t really work with a squirrel tail.

SD: Exactly. Life Magazine even joked about it at the time.

AC: Okay, so. How does a squirrel and a dress become a war hero?

SD: Yeah, so Bullis started taking him around DC to the bakery, the grocery store, the children’s hospital, and people really started to fall in love with him.

AC: Of course.

SD: Eventually the US Treasury built him a custom booth so he could sell war bonds. He’d show up in red, white, and blue satin, and he even had a fan club with something like. 30,000 members.

AC: Okay. That is more than a lot of influencers.

SD: And Air Force bomber crews literally carried his picture with them on missions. Soldiers wrote to him from the front lines saying he gave them confidence. During the war he traveled the country by train, making a radio appearances with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

AC: Ugh, what a furry hero.

SD: And then after the war ended, he road tripped with the Bullis’s until he died on a sightseeing trip to the Grand Canyon in 1949.

AC: Oh no, Tommy.

SD: I know!

AC: But you can still see him today, right?

SD: You can. He and all his wardrobes are preserved at the Smithsonian Archives. You just have to make an appointment.

AC: Oh, a national treasure and a style icon.

SD: Truly, may we all leave behind such an impeccable wardrobe.

AC: Absolutely a hero for all time.

And that’s it for this episode, but don’t worry, we have more awesome Ask Us Anythings live in our feed right now. Follow or subscribe to Ask Us Anything by Popular Science, wherever you enjoy your podcasts. And if you like our show, please leave a rating and review.

SD: We really care what you think. Our theme music is from Kenneth Michael Reagan, and our producer is Alan Haburchak. This week’s episode was based on our article written for Popular Science by Jennifer Byrne.

AC: Thank you team, and thanks to everyone listening.

SD: And one more time, if you wanna have something you’ve always wondered about explained on a future episode, go to popsci.com/ask. Until next time. Keep the questions coming.

AC: Yeah, don’t hold your questions. Like our furry friends for their food.

SD: Obviously.

AC: I’ve been waiting this whole episode to make a squirrel noise too, so

[Annie makes squirrel noises]

SD: I know they have really cute little hands.

The post Squirrels can find 85% of the nuts they hide appeared first on Popular Science.

Animal brains compute DNA-encoded behavioral strategies, using DNA chosen by simple natural selection. Such brains can “reason”, but not very abstractly, and mostly about how to execute their DNA-given instincts. Animals don’t reason about where such strategies came from.

In humans, DNA encodes sufficiently-sophisticated brains to let us copy others’ behaviors. As a result, in humans a cultural form of natural selection allows us to evolve behaviors far faster than do other animals. This is humanity’s superpower. It induces us to reason more, about how best to generalize from the behaviors we see, and also about which humans to copy which behaviors from.

The invention of language let humans more easily transfer many things between our brains, to do so more abstractly, and to reason more easily about it all. We humans thus became more ambitious about the scope and abstraction of our reasoning.

We humans eventually came to realize that we could try to reason critically about the behaviors which we have inherited via cultural evolution. But as natural selection didn’t document its code, we mostly made up plausible-sounding reasons for such behaviors. While some of us were sometimes willing to change behavior based on such reasoning, this typically went badly, as we didn’t understand why evolution had made its choices. Thankfully, most others didn’t much respect or heed such reasoning.

During the Industrial Revolution, humanity saw many big fast changes to tech and social practices, and initially tried to preserve prior cultural values, norms, and status markers in the face of such changes. But then around roughly 1900, elites suddenly began a big new “modernism” project to try to remake culture via abstract reason. Abstract reason was then high status, it had been credited for much of those tech and business changes, and was the central focus of the new schools that most everyone now attended into until adulthood, and which decided much about their status in life.

The cause of this sudden change seems to be a combination of a rise in mixing of folks from different cultures making their prior traditions seem less compelling, plus a rise in the autonomy of professions, here in particular of art/culture specialists. Young adults kept together in schools created youth cultures, which began youth movements to change culture, movements justified in terms of abstract reasons, and which consistently won against older opponents.

Though abstract reason has fallen somewhat in status since then, cultural change driven by young activists has continued at a rapid pace. Now if these youth activists had focused their reason on which practices, norms, and status markers could make our culture more adaptive, we might have stayed adaptive even in the face of rapid tech/social change. Alas, young activists did not much consider cultural adaptiveness in picking changes to advocate. They mainly based their abstract reasoning on strong moral intuitions, and were largely uninterested in reflecting on the cultural processes that created such intuitions.

As a result, fast cultural change largely uncorrelated with adaptiveness has been a key driver of our cultures drifting into maladaption. That and fast tech/social change, the huge fall in deep cultural variety due to increasing ease of travel, travel, and talk, and the fall in selection pressures due to increased wealth, peace, and health. This drift will plausibly cause our civilization to fall, and likely be replaced by now insular fertile religious cultures. More similar rises and falls may follow.

Our choices are stark. Either 1) do nothing and slowly go bust, 2) quit embracing abstract reason so much, returning to a world of tradition, ignorance, war, poverty, and strong selection pressures, or 3) find and adopt ways to go all-in on using abstract reason to choose adaptive cultural elements. Or maybe do this indirectly via adopting a very competent form of government (e.g., futarchy) and assigning to it a sacred goal that aligns with adaption over centuries (e.g., 1M living in space ASAP).

Alas going bust seems by far our most likely outcome. If so, our current industrial era will be remembered a unique dreamtime, with horror by descendants see us as having indulged a great excess of reason, and with a wistful sense of loss by descendants who try to recreate and improve on it many centuries later.

The presents are unwrapped, the cookies are crumbs, and that real Christmas tree will become a fire hazard soon enough. Most of us haul it out to the curb for our local sanitation departments to take care of, but some lucky trees make it into the paws of animals living in zoos. 

Since 1978, the Cape May County Park & Zoo in Middle Township, New Jersey, has solicited donations of undecorated Christmas trees from the community and unsold trees from nearby businesses. The trees are then given to the more than 550 animals that call the South Jersey zoo home. 

“Not everyone can donate money to the zoo, and that’s totally fair. We’re a free zoo so that everybody can come here. But if you want to donate a Christmas tree, I think that makes people feel really good that they were able to help somehow,” senior animal keeper and enrichment coordinator Kim Simpkins tells Popular Science.

Why Christmas trees?

Fir, spruce, and pine trees provide the animals with enrichment and an important extra shelter from the cold winter air. While the Jersey Shore is mostly associated with the warm summer days, average low temperatures at the zoo can reach the low 20s in January. The donated Christmas tree can act as wind blocks to protect the animal enclosures.

A wallaby using the Christmas trees as a windbreak. Image: Zookeeper Steph.

“To block the doors that go into their huts, we use freezer flaps. But it’s nice to have an extra layer of protection, so we’ll use Christmas trees,” says Simpkins. “We’ll do this for the wallabies.”

The nearby kangaroos will often make little enclosures out of stacked Christmas trees so that they have another warm place to go. 

The Christmas trees also provide the animals with enrichment. For any animal in human care, whether it is the family dog or a lion at a zoo, enrichment gives them a creative outlet for physical activity, mental stimulation, and a way to choose how they spend their time. 

“Enrichment is when we provide to the animal novel that is going to bring out some kind of natural behavior for the animal,” says Simpkins. “We have an enrichment plan for each of the animals at the zoo with their natural history, and then what kind of behaviors we feel like they need to exhibit here at the zoo that they might not need to because they’re not in the wild.”

Since animals in the zoo do not have to work very hard for food, the team will work in enrichment activities as a way to encourage them to use their natural foraging behaviors. For the primates, the keepers will sometimes hide bits of food within the donated Christmas trees for them to find. 

“Many might think of enrichment as simply providing food puzzle toys, but enrichment is much more than that,” Cornell University veterinarian Dr. Kate Anderson, tells Popular Science. “Enrichment is ensuring that all of an animal’s needs are met and providing appropriate outlets for emotional, physical, and mental stimulation. Their needs should include safety, predictability, hygiene, nutrition, and much more.”

Cavy is a small rodent called a Patagonian mara. Image: Zoo Education Keeper Bridget.

Simpkins adds that the zoo designs their enrichment, “ based on their natural history, the individual’s [animal’s] needs, and on our habitats.”

For the zoo, the Christmas trees also provide a free way of getting their animals these important enrichment items. According to Simpkins, durable plastic balls for lions and other enrichment items can cost $300 to $500 and do not always last that long thanks to sharp teeth and claws, so the donated items allow keepers to keep the animals entertained on a budget. 

“There are infinite ways to provide enrichment, limited only by time, funding, and imagination,” says Dr. Anderson. “I think more than providing something ‘unique,’ it’s better to be holistic in approaching enrichment.”

Play with your trees

The zoo is home to over 550 animals representing 250 species. Each animal has their own way of racing to a new Christmas tree in and around their habitat.

“The lions really like to just carry around the Christmas trees,” laughs Simpkins. “They like the smell of them.” The lions will also pee on the trees and mark their territory as they would in the wild. When they mark the tree with their urine, it is a way to make it smell like them.

Lex the lion guarding his tree. Lions particularly like the new smells a tree brings. Image: Zookeeper Jen

According to Dr. Anderson, enrichment also helps their welfare by giving the animals agency and choice. “Enrichment for animals is akin to “self-care” for humans,” she says. “Animals that are underenriched might be more excitable, hyperactive, vocalize more, play excessively or roughly, be aggressive or not sleep well. They also might display unwanted behaviors such as scratching, destructive chewing, digging, or raiding the garbage.”

The zoo’s bison also love to smell the Christmas trees, but their reaction to a new plant in their habitat can be considered a form of play. For biologists, play is considered something that an animal does just for fun, and not to look for food, shelter, or something else for survival. The zoo’s bison will head butt the trees around their yard, and also use them as wind blocks.

The monkeys and other primates will also climb on the trees and treat them a bit like a new piece of furniture. However, it is mostly all about food since the keepers are putting food in the trees for them to find. 

The bison are smelling the Christmas trees, snacking on them, and playing with them through their headbutts. Image: Zookeeper Pete.

“It depends on the species, but most of ours are frugivores, so we’ll put fruit in the tree and they’ll have to dig through the Christmas tree to find it,” explains Simpkins. “This is more similar to how they get fruit in the wild compared to a bowl. It’s great when the keepers are really creative, combining different toys to make foraging more complex or more interesting, or different.”

According to Dr. Anderson, enrichment can even be as simple as giving animals a choice and space to rest. “It’s extremely important to be mindful of an animal’s sensory experience (all animals hear, smell, and see the world differently than people),” she says. 

Interested donors can contact the zoo directly with any questions and are encouraged read all of the instructions before donating. The zoo can’t take every tree, so donors are encouraged to call soon. You can also look for local mulching events, where your tree will be turned into wood chips that nourish trees and plants. Goats also love Christmas trees, so reach out to local farms and see if they are taking donations as well. If you live along the coast, check with your town about donating your tree, since they can help reinforce protective sand dunes.

The post Donated Christmas trees get a second life at the zoo appeared first on Popular Science.

I have long posted on studies that try to make sense of how human values differ, and how they have changed over time. A new paper in Social Science Quarterly tries to compare four different proposed values models, by modeling the correlation network structure of the variables they see as central. This diagram shows their key result: three clumps of 2-4 named clusters, each which has 3-10 correlated variables:

Alas that paper doesn’t give names for the particular variables, and some of the clump names seem overly opaque. But what I can see is still interesting. The lower right clump (called “virtuous agency”) matters most to modern elites, while the middle clump (called “power and social order”) mattered more in the farming era. Did the upper right clump (called “hierarchical individualism”) matter most to foragers, and also matter more now due to a toward-forager modern trend?

I’ve suggested that many modern differences are due to moderns seeing themselves as higher status, due to their higher wealth. If so, that virtuous agency would also have mattered more to farming era elites, while the power and social order clump should matter more to non-elites today.

Researchers in Germany recently accomplished a truly audacious feat of cartography. Using a diverse array of datasets, a team at the Technical University of Munich released GlobalBuildingAtlas, the first high-resolution mapping model featuring every structure in the world at a given point in time. 

However, the open-source project isn’t about bragging rights. With over 2.75 billion buildings detailed in the map, the endeavor will help create accurate analyses of urban structures, volume calculations, and infrastructure planning around the planet.

“3D building information provides a much more accurate picture of urbanization and poverty than traditional 2D maps,” research lead Xiaoxiang Zhu said in a statement. “With 3D models, we see not only the footprint but also the volume of each building, enabling far more precise insights into living conditions.”

Zhu’s team also created a new measurement tool to accompany the atlas: building volume per capita. This translates to an area’s total building mass relative to its population, and helps measure social and economic disparities as they relate to housing and infrastructure.

“This indicator supports sustainable urban development and helps cities become more inclusive and resilient,” added Zhu.

GlobalBuildingAtlas is also unprecedented in its level of detail. An estimated 97 percent of the map’s 3D structures are classified Level of Detail 1, or LoD 1. Although high LoDs do exist, the rating still means the rough shape and height of these buildings are accurate enough to incorporate into various computer modeling projects. With a resolution of 9.8 by 9.8 feet, the atlas is also 30 times more detailed than comparable projects.

GlobalBuildingAtlas was compiled using data available as of 2019. However, given its open-access format, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes even more up-to-date and helpful. Apart from anything else, it’s also just a very cool tool to explore.

The post Browse a 3D map of the world’s 2.75 billion buildings appeared first on Popular Science.

Founding father Benjamin Franklin secured the alliance with France that led to victory in the Revolutionary War, negotiated the Treaty of Paris ending said war, signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S Constitution, discovered that lightning was electrical, invented bifocal glasses, wrote the famous Poor Richard’s Almanac, and ran newspapers. 

He also had some thoughts on farting. 

In 1781, Franklin wrote a satirical letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels on the subject of flatulence, and what, perhaps, science could do about it. Because, as he wrote, “It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it.”

Franklin was concerned with how to make farts more pleasant smelling so that they wouldn’t disrupt civilized company. But a far simpler and healthier solution eluded even this legendary thinker: The Fart Walk. 

Not only does this practice allow you to release gas in less confined space, but it has also proven health benefits like improved digestion and even weight loss. Although the smirk-worthy term “Fart Walk” only started gaining viral popularity in the past year or so (it’s generally credited to cookbook author Mairlyn Smith), the concept is far from new–in fact, there is an old Chinese proverb that goes, “if you take 100 steps after eating, you’ll live to 99.” 

Here are some ways that working Fart Walks into your daily routine can change the way you approach the expulsion of gas. 

It gets your digestive system moving

Getting up and moving around right after you’ve eaten starts a process called peristalsis, which is a rippled effect that helps force gas and food through your gastrointestinal tract. It essentially stirs up your bowels and alerts them that they have work to do. 

It might help weight loss

In 2011, researchers from the Toyodo Hijikata Clinic in Osaka, Japan, published a study that showed walking immediately after a meal–as opposed to, say, waiting an hour–actually promoted positive weight loss benefits. As the study stated, “For people who do not experience abdominal pain, fatigue, or other discomfort when walking just after a meal, walking at a brisk speed for 30 minutes as soon as possible just after lunch and dinner leads to more weight loss than does walking for 30 minutes beginning one hour after a meal has been consumed.”

[Related: Which animals can and can’t fart?]

It makes it easier to fart and burp

Gas can develop from certain types of foods, such as fiber-rich cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and Brussel sprouts, or from the intake of air as you eat. Either way, getting up and kickstarting peristalsis not only gets your digestion going but it also frees up this trapped gas and makes it easier to escape from the north or the south. Allowing the gas to be expelled reduces bloating and generally improves gastrointestinal health. 

It has far-reaching benefits

Working a “Fart Walk” into your daily routine won’t just have your gut feeling tip-top, it may guard against dementia and generally improve your mental as well as your physical health. A 2025 study published in Age and Ageing by Audrey Collins, PhD and Dr. Maddison Mellow found that people who engaged in just five minutes of daily exercise like walking had better brain health. Another study by the American Psychological Association found that daily walks lowered the risk of depression among adults by 25 percent. 

So get out there and let it rip! 

The post You should start taking “Fart Walks” appeared first on Popular Science.

They’re sugary, sweet, and not just peppermint-flavored anymore. Candy canes are a holiday staple with roots dating back to the 1600s. The story suggests that in 1670, a choirmaster in Cologne, Germany, gave children these sugary sticks shaped like a shepherd’s staff for the long nativity church service. 

While the confection has come a long way in the centuries since, the candy canes made by Hammond’s Candies in Denver, Colorado, still share one thing with that 17th century German candy maker. Their current roster of 26 different flavors of candy cane are handmade.

“Everything is done by hand,” Hammond’s head cook Victor Ortiz tells Popular Science. “Each batch takes about five to six people one hour and 30 minutes. That gives us 600 candy canes.”

Some popular new candy cane flavors include eggnog, root beer, sugar plum, birthday cake, and strawberry. Image: Hammond’s Candies. Kelsie Wonderly

Ortiz (whose favorite flavor is strawberry) first began working part time in Hammond’s packaging department 24 years ago, working his way up to head cook. The 105-year-old company makes everything from traditional ribbon candy and lollipops to gourmet chocolates to their colorful candy canes. To keep up with the candy cane demand, they must work about a year ahead. 

Here’s how that sweet treat takes shape.

Related Stories

The best chocolate chip cookie recipe, according to science

This candy scientist says her job is pretty sweet

How WWII made Hershey and Mars Halloween candy kings

The intense flavor science behind Haribo’s gummies

Liquid candy and gooey centers

Hammond’s uses four main ingredients in their candy canes—sugar, corn syrup, water, and a little cooking oil to keep it from over boiling. The ingredients are mixed together in a copper pot until they reach a balmy 300 to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The mixture is then placed onto a stainless steel cooling table that has hot and cold water running through it. That hot water keeps it from cooling down too quickly, while the cold water helps the liquid solidify, so that the cooks can cut and separate the colors that make up the candy cane.

The liquified candy is cooked in a copper bowl, just like candymakers would have done 100 years ago.  Image: Victor Ortiz / Hammond’s Candies.

“The candy is all liquidy on the table,” explains Ortiz. “That table is going to be where we add the color and the jacket, or the outside of the candy cane.”

It is also where they add the flavored and softer center of each candy cane. To do this, the candymakers use broken pieces from the previous batch of the same flavor. The broken candy is then heated up to 325 degrees where it can become a slightly gooey center of the candy cane. 

The center of the candy cane is primarily made with bits of broken pieces from the previous batch. Image: Victor Ortiz / Hammond’s Candies. 
Cut and color

Once the candy hits the right temperature, it is transferred to the building table where it’s time for the candymakers to make some cuts. If they’re making a traditional peppermint candy cane, they’ll divide the candy jacket into two different pieces—red and white. For something a bit more unique like root beer, it’s shades of brown.

The color and flavor are added to the candy with the help from a good old-fashioned candy pull. The globs of pliable sugar are placed on an early 20th century puller, just like the cooks would have done in 1920. The puller adds air to the mix and distributes the color and flavor to the candy cane’s outer jacket and softer center. The candymakers then continue to pull the candy by hand to stretch it out even further. 

The separate blobs give candy canes their colorful stripes. Image: Victor Ortiz / Hammond’s Candies. 

“When we have the center and the jacket together, we actually bring it to the center, and then put it in the middle of the jacket, and wrap the jacket around the center,” says Ortiz.

All of the extra smaller stripes on the candy cane are added to the jacket here by pulling them to various thicknesses. If the stripes are not exactly right, they will be broken up and be used for the center of the next batch. And not all candy cane flavors are the same.

“There’s a candy cane that we make called birthday cake, and it has five different colors, six with the white,” says Ortiz. “Putting all those colors together takes a long time. It may take about 15 minutes to put together the jacket for the peppermint candy cane, but when you’re making the birthday cake one, it takes about 25 minutes to 30 minutes because there’s a lot of pieces.”

The birthday cake candy canes include six different colors, including white. Image Hammond’s Candies. 
Getting hooked

After that colorful striped jacket is wrapped around the softer candy cane center, it is placed on a batch roller. On the roller, more heat is added so that the candy can be more pliable again. After about 10 minutes, a huge striped cylinder of candy is ready to be cut down into sticks about a half inch in diameter 

A giant hunk of root beer candy cane is placed into the batch roller. Image: Victor Ortiz / Hammond’s Candies. 

“They kind of eyeball the hook and shape it by hand. We don’t have any molds or anything like that,” Ortiz explains. “We train cooks to just put their hand on the piece of candy and make the hook by grabbing one end and turning it.”

If the cooks are making a lollipop, the candy making process is almost exactly the same. However, instead of shaping the hook one cook will mold the lollipop into its circular shape, while another is ready with the stick. They can also make 1,000 lollipops per batch, compared to 600 candy canes. 

After they get their signature hook, the candy canes are packaged, shipped, sold, and perhaps placed in a lucky person’s stocking. 

“A lot of companies are trying to move on with automation,” says Ortiz. “We’re still making the candy canes the old-fashioned way, which I think separates us. We put a lot of effort into whatever we are making.”

The post The magic of making candy canes by hand appeared first on Popular Science.