TechnologyRaters

We like to geek out over all kinds of things here at Popular Science. From retro-cool, to cutting-edge, to future-tech—there's nothing like a good gizmo to get our gears whirring. Here, we've put together a list of the particular gifts that have us drooling this year. Click through, fly your geek flag, and maybe pick something out for the science fan in your life. I’m a big fan of drones, and the DJI Inspire 1 is the best consumer-grade drone I’ve ever seen. Its transforming landing gears and 4K camera set it apart from all others in its class. Plain and simple—this is the best flying machine on the market. $2,900 I have a confession: I’m an audio snob, and I tend to review headphones pretty harshly. I like a very specific balance of sound, and it’s usually one that complements the jazz classics I listen to in the morning. The Parrot Zik headphones have noise isolating earphones and a smart equalizing feature, which means that they can adapt to the specific n

Pictures surfacing online appear to show a new weapon developed in China. The nation may have just installed a full-scale railgun on a warship, something even the United States Navy has yet to do. Railguns use electromagnetic energy, rather than gunpowder, to sling a projectile. The concept has been incredibly appealing to militaries, as the weapon offers the speed and efficiency of a cannon, but with the range of a missile. Photos shared on Twitter show that the Chinese Navy's Type 072III landing ship tank (LST) Haiyang Shan, #936, has a new turret installed on its bow, replacing the H/PJ76F 37mm anti-aircraft turret. There are also three shipping containers. The turret spotted indicates the presence of a railgun. It's large, for one, with a barrel that measures 26-33 feet in length and 12 to 20 inches in diameter. That's 2-3 times the cannon caliber of conventional tube artillery barrels, which generally have a diameter-to-caliber ratio of 1.25:1. Alter

For many of us, the humble text message remains an essential mode of communication. But while cloud-based services can back up our emails and social media posts when we lose an old phone or switch to a new one, our SMS (Short Message Service) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) histories tend to disappear. You've probably got some precious memories and a few important nuggets of information tied up in your text message conversations. Don't let those texts get lost—use the tips below to safely back them up. These solutions not only preserve your text histories; they can also save any texts you send in the future. Saving text messages on Android For better or worse, Android lets apps get their hooks deeper into the phone operating system. This makes it easier for them to access and export your text messages. It also means that you can swap your default SMS client if you want to—something that's not possible on an iPhone. Your first port of call should be y

Do a YouTube search for pretty much any smallish animal you can think of and there'll be several videos of a "tame" or "pet" version. Any feline, any canid, any mustelid (weasel), any procyonid (raccoon), any non-bonkers primate (baboons, which are completely terrifying, are exempt). Look at my pet kinkajou, my pet genet, my pet fennec fox, my pet ocelot. And then on the videos of cute furry animals in the wild, you'll see the comments: "omg i want it." When the internet sees a video of a red panda, the internet wants a red panda. Even though a red panda is endangered and a wild animal. In 1959, a Soviet geneticist named Dmitry K. Belyaev began somewhat secretively experimenting with breeding domesticated foxes. More than five decades, thousands of foxes, and one collapse of the Soviet Union later, the program continues at The Institute of Cytology and Genetics at Novosibirsk, Siberia. Belyaev wanted to unlock the secrets of domestication, the