In August we celebrated the 170th anniversary of the founding of Scientific American, born on a Thursday, the 28th, and let you know we were kicking off several months of activities. (See our In-Depth Report here.) In this issue, the editors and I are pleased to close out the year by sharing with you a special report that showcases the wonders wrought by human ingenuity.
Perhaps we're optimists by nature, but we've always found ourselves looking forward to a future powered by the basic research that is emerging from labs today. So it's only natural that we begin the feature well in this issue with our annual “World Changing Ideas.” In this section, you will learn about 10 advances that will help drive progress in the years ahead, including software that translates eye movements to control devices, a new method that identifies every virus in a given sample with near-perfect accuracy, and the rise of deep-learning computer networks that act more like a human brain to foster artificial intelligence, or A.I.
But Scientific American also grew up with the science and technologies that its editors have covered since 1845. We are unique in having scientists—Nobelists among them [see below]—regularly write about their work alongside our award-winning journalists, providing a knowing and expert eye over the unfolding proceedings. Click here to take an armchair ride through an editorial time machine. You can journey through the landmark discoveries in the cosmos, an evolving understanding of our brain and physiology, and the increasing pace of communications and computing. Want more? Please see the link below.
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Our Nobel Honor Roll
Every year when the Nobel Prizes are announced, we editors are not only excited to see what scientific advances get recognized, but we are also always rooting for our past authors, many of whom contributed long before receiving science's high honor. To date, 155 Nobel laureates have written a total of 249 articles for Scientific American. We salute three past writers who will receive medals this month:
TAKAAKI KAJITA (“Detecting Massive Neutrinos,” August 1999) and ARTHUR B. McDONALD (“Solving the Solar Neutrino Problem,” April 2003) won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on puzzling out the riddle of the elusive neutrino.
PAUL MODRICH (“Engineering Life: Building a FAB for Biology,” June 2006) shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on how cells repair their damaged DNA.
All the articles by our Nobel authors are available at ScientificAmerican.com/magazine/sa