At the SciFoo conference last weekend, brain scientist and illusionmeister Steve Macknik elevated a basic principle of energy conservation—turn off the lights when you don't need them—to a whole new level...
When I was getting my solar panels installed, I couldn't wait to see my electric meter literally spin backwards. Alas, as part of the process, the utility swapped out the old analog meter...
Biologist and biology educator Joanne Manaster has a thought-provoking guest blog post today on what, if anything, scientists can do to help K-12 science education.
Mathematical structures both natural and man-made dazzle the eye
The iPhone seems like the perfect accessory for a solar power enthusiast. Right now, you have to navigate a maze of websites such as PV Watts to calculate how much energy you can expect to produce and how many years a solar array will take to pay itself off...
Last September I had an article in Scientific American about what it would mean for time to end—how the world might cease to unfold in a unidirectional sequence of cause and effect...
From yellow dwarfs to blue supergiants, stars continue to challenge astronomers' understanding of the universe
The latest to announce its demise is Google Powermeter. All the efforts to combine social networking with energy conservation seem to be pulling the plug.
Last week, the Foundation Questions Institute announced the winners of its third essay contest, which Scientific American co-sponsored. (I helped to decide on the question, judge the essays and hand out the awards at the World Science Festival in New York City.) The essay question was, "Is Reality Digital or Analog?" Is nature, at root, continuous or discretized?...
Last Saturday, at a workshop organized by the Foundation Questions Institute, Nobel laureate physicist Gerard 't Hooft gave a few informal remarks on the deep nature of reality.
Scientists have shed new light on how these structures melt
See what scientists are doing to try to understand the deepest mystery of quantum physics
Editor's Note: This post was intially published May 12 on the World Science Festival's Web site .My dad took a peculiar pleasure in fitting the maximum amount of stuff into the smallest possible space...
Editor's note: Updated at 12:15 P.M. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER—The space shuttle Endeavour took off on its final flight Monday morning at 8:56 A.M.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER—When NASA scrubbed the shuttle Endeavour 's final launch here on Friday, engineers said there was a best-case and a worst-case scenario.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER—The shuttle Endeavour suffered a minor but potentially troublesome electrical failure that delayed its launch from Friday to Monday at the earliest.
A fancy cosmic-ray detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, is about to scan the cosmos for dark matter, antimatter and more
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER—If I'd jumped, I could have touched the belly of the Discovery. Of course, I would have then been escorted unceremoniously from the Orbiter Processing Facility...
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