Scientific American and the World Economic Forum sifted through more than 75 nominations for the most innovative and potentially game-changing technologies in 2020. The final top 10 span the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences and chemistry. And to win the nod, the technologies must have the potential to spur progress in societies and economies by outperforming established ways of doing things...
Microbes will help decarbonize the construction industry
The scientific process, as I have often said, is an engine of human prosperity. For centuries it has been a driving force behind the advances in knowledge and well-being that we've enjoyed as a species...
In 1894 John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh—who later went on to garner the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics—penned an appreciation in Scientific American about the work of John Tyndall, an Irish physics professor, mathematician, geologist, atmospheric scientist, public lecturer and mountaineer...
World-changing technologies that are poised to rattle the status quo
We live in a world of networks, write University of Pennsylvania physicist and MacArthur Fellow Danielle S. Bassett and Max Bertolero of Bassett's Complex Systems Group in this issue.
It was February 2001. I had just returned to Popular Science after my second daughter’s birth. Among the answering machine messages was one from another publication.
For fun, my husband and I have always followed the traditional themes for gifts marking significant wedding anniversaries, starting with paper, when he gave me a (still treasured) subscription to the New York Times ...
Have you heard about the “gender data gap”? I recently learned the phrase in an excerpt published in March in the Guardian from the book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men , by Caroline Criado Perez (Abrams, 2019)...
“I get goose bumps every time I see it.” “I saw something so strange that I had to drop everything else to investigate.” “A tale of shark bites at a Scottish pub has led us to some new ideas about rebuilding broken bodies.” Those sentences appear in three of the feature articles in this issue written by the researchers who are doing the work...
“The most outrageous object that most people have never heard of,” as one scientist calls it, is the subject of our cover story—and, to my mind at least, such amazing adventures in discovery make up a theme that resounds throughout this Scientific American issue, among many others...
