Departments

50 Years Ago in Scientific American: When Baby Boomers Weren't Worried about Wiretaps
Articles from past issues of Scientific American

June 1908: The Wright Perspective on Flight
After experiments with their Flyer in May 1908, the Wright brothers wrote the following report for the Scientific American

"Backward Time" in Literature Finds Real-World Parallel
Literature masters the fourth dimension, where physics fears to tread

News Scan Briefs

Can This Man Beat the Flu with a Single Universal Vaccine?
Walter Fiers found a protein segment on the influenza virus that could lead to a universal flu vaccine, which would end seasonal shots and provide pandemic protection

Mailbag: Yes, Earth's Crust Moves 25 Centimeters with Every High Tide
Land "Tides" -- Polar Ice Sheets -- Market Morality

Reviews: American Nerd, Coming of Age in Second Life
Thriller Physics -- Virtual Life -- Nerd-dom

Updates: Whatever Happened to Self-Cleaning Clothes?
Self-Cleaning Clothes -- Titan's Ocean? -- Synthetic Success -- Crisis Mapping

Working Knowledge: Inside the Kindle E-Book Reader

• Microsoft, Google Fighting for Unused Spectrum between TV Channels
• Blogging--It's Good for You
• Q&A with Brian Greene, Co-Founder of the World's Biggest Science Party
• Your Brain on Diabetes
• Hobbit Hullabaloo
• Need for Speed?
• Iron Exposed as High-Temperature Superconductor

• Ben Stein's Expelled Exposed

• Shakespeare to Blame for Introduction of European Starlings to U.S.

• Surging Food Prices Mean Global Instability

• Why Grassroots Initiatives Can't Fix Climate Change

 

Features

The Neurobiology of Trust
Our inclination to trust a stranger stems in large part from exposure to a small molecule known for an entirely different task: inducing labor
By Paul J. Zak

What Is a Species?
To this day, scientists struggle with that question. A better definition can influence which animals make the endangered list
By Carl Zimmer

The Ethics of Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay More Later?
Weighing our own prosperity against the chances that climate change will diminish the well-being of our grandchildren calls on economists to make hard ethical judgments
By John Broome

The Tunguska Mystery
Finding a piece of the elusive cosmic body that devastated a Siberian forest a century ago could help save the earth in the centuries to come
By Luca Gasperini, Enrico Bonatti and Giuseppe Longo

Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?
One of the most basic facts of life is that the future looks different from the past. But on a grand cosmological scale, they may look the same
By Sean M. Carroll

New Breast Cancer Treatments Help Sufferers Gain Ground
The newest targeted therapies are helping doctors to tailor increasingly effective treatments to individual patients
By Francisco J. Esteva and Gabriel N. Hortobagyi

Digital Forensics: How Experts Uncover Doctored Images
Modern software has made manipulation of photographs easier to carry out and harder to uncover than ever before, but the technology also enables new methods of detecting doctored images
By Hany Farid

Online Exclusives

Feature
Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed
Our commentaries on the new antievolution movie Expelled detail its shameful attacks on science and its attempts to blame Darwin for the Holocaust

Feature
China’s Three Gorges Dam: An Environmental Catastrophe?
Even the Chinese government suspects the massive dam may cause significant environmental damage.

News
Matter-Antimatter Split Hints at Physics Breakdown
Scientists may have a new clue to how matter beat out antimatter for dominance of the universe.

Ask the Experts
Where Did Viruses Come From?
Tracing the origins of viruses is difficult because they do not leave fossils and because of how cunningly they make copies of themselves within cells.

Video
The Monitor: The Space Episode
Episode 8 of Scientific American’s irreverent weekly news roundup deals with all things extraterrestrial.

Podcast
R.I.P.: On the Shoulders of Giants ...
Physicist John Wheeler and geneticist Salome Waelsch both had incredibly long, fruitful careers, providing numerous fundamental insights in their fields.