Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired by Springer, ScientificAmerican.com has learned. Open access is the movement, recently bolstered by Congress, to make studies available for free online, instead of charging taxpayers who funded the research (and others) to read them...
Three men who study broken symmetry -- the phenomenon that "conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface," according to the Nobel Foundation -- have won the Nobel Prize in Physics: Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago; Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan; and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan...
Harald zur Hausen, a German scientist who linked human papilloma virus (HPV) to cervical cancer, shares this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV, the virus that causes AIDS...
What if the people who run the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) threw a party, and no particles came?
That’s what is set to happen on October 21, when CERN plans an inauguration ceremony for the supercollider...
A friend I’ve been trying to convince to join Facebook forwarded me a LiveScience story this afternoon about a study that found that a person’s narcissism can be predicted by how he or she uses the popular social networking site...
More glitches for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): The same day operators announced that a 30-ton transformer that cools part of the particle smasher had broken within hours of the LHC's launch last week, a mishap yesterday resulted in "a large helium leak" into the collider's tunnel...
After making landfall at 3:10 a.m. this morning near Galveston as a Category 2 storm, Hurricane Ike's eye was just northeast of Conroe, Texas as of 8 a.m.
It's going to be a long night for the people of coastal Texas. As Hurricane Ike whips up the waters of the Gulf of Mexico on its way toward land, hurricane-force wind gusts have already been reported on Galveston Island, according to the National Hurricane Center...
Hurricane Ike continued its path of destruction Sunday afternoon in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, as Cuba scrambled to evacuate residents of the eastern part of the country that the Category 4 hurricane is likely to slam into later today and tonight...
The island nations of the Caribbean are bracing for more dangerous weather as Hurricane Ike maintains its strength. As of 11 p.m. EST Saturday, Ike was near or over Turks and Caicos, according to the National Weather Service, and was expected to hit the Bahamas tomorrow, followed by Cuba tomorrow night...
Tropical Storm Hanna may not be a hurricane, but it's still dumping tons of water on the US east coast as it moves northeast this afternoon. US officials have not reported any deaths from the storm, which is bearing down on New Jersey and will likely travel over Boston very early tomorrow morning, according to the National Hurricane Center...
Tropical Storm Hanna made landfall on the border of South Carolina and North Carolina this morning. Reuters reports that the storm was not quite at hurricane strength, with top windspeeds of about 60 miles per hour, but had enough force to knock power from about 10,000 homes...
When Barack Obama speaks at the Democratic National Convention tonight, many of us will tune in to hear whether he addresses health care reform.
That reminded Scientific American to catch up with Democratic Rep...
I just got off the phone with Erik Vance, a freelancer covering the Bigfoot press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., for us. We'll be posting his story as soon as we can this afternoon, but here are the highlights: -- The three men claiming they had found Bigfoot -- Matthew Whitton, Rick Dyer , and veteran Bigfoot tracker Tom Biscardi of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc...
North Korean shooter Kim Jong Su is disqualified for taking drug that slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure
As the world turns its attention to the spreading fight between Russia and the Republic of Georgia, it’s worth a reminder that war can have lasting effects on the soldiers who fight it and the citizens who get caught in it...
Should journalists be hanging out on Facebook? I only joined about two months ago, after some prodding from other reporter friends. My answer, though, is an emphatic yes, because I got a story within about 20 minutes of signing up...
Nineteen years ago today, the U.S. Air Force flew a B-2 Spirit bomber—better known as the Stealth Bomber—for the first time. The flight came at a cost of billions of dollars, as the sophisticated technology that allows the bomber to evade radar detection required far more development than the Air Force had budgeted...
We were on hand in Atlanta last week as more than 1,500 students competed for $4 million in prizes
When I wrote last week about Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Wisc.), an allergist-turned member of Congress who turned down the vaunted Federal employee health insurance plan and has his own plan for health care reform, I had no idea just how quickly he planned to work...
