A quick shout-out to our Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina, who this week was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for the section on General Interest in Science and Engineering...
Unless the price of oil magically surges to $52,831 per barrel on December 31, New York Times columnist John Tierney and Rita Simon, the widow of the economist Julian L.
Readers of the Wall Street Journal may have been surprised by an editorial that appeared Tuesday. We editors at Scientific American certainly were. In his opinion piece, techno-utopian intellectual George Gilder takes California's Silicon Valley to task for its green initiatives to create jobs...
Mark your calendars: for two weeks in October, the U.S. celebrates science with a nationwide effort. Festivities kick off on October 10 with a concert of science songs performed by 200 children and adults at the University of Maryland...
If you're reading this from a feed via a viewer, click on over to the Scientific American Web site and take a look at our redesign. Last night, we took the old site offline at around 10 P.M...
On September 16, President Barack Obama announced a major addition to the "Educate to Innovate" campaign: the formation of a nonprofit called Change the Equation , a CEO-led effort to dramatically improve education in science, technology, engineering, and math...
The science blogosphere is shrinking and growing at the same time. Today, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) starts a new network called PLoS Blogs .
The retail giant Wal-Mart will place radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on underwear, jeans and other consumer items, according to several news reports, including one today from the Wall Street Journal ...
Back in 1995, I had the pleasure of visiting the IBM Almaden lab of Donald Eigler, who was announced today as a winner of this year's Kavli Prize for his work on nanoscience.
A local conflict could produce a global nightmare
News of Martin Gardner's death began circulating on Saturday night. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his work, here's a taste of the kinds of puzzles he was famous for bringing to the world...
For 25 years, he wrote Scientific American's Mathematical Games column, educating and entertaining minds and launching the careers of generations of mathematicians
In addition to reacting to news as it breaks, we work to anticipate what will happen. Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050
This past weekend, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking joined what seems to be a growing chorus of cautious naysayers—or nervous nellies?—when it comes to possible contact with intelligent aliens from other worlds...
A friend once told me how, as a child visiting a zoo, his eyes focused on one of the many monkeys in an enclosed exhibit. The monkey, in turn, began looking back.
Got an idea for a better tomorrow? Enter it into our video contest. Continuing the theme of Scientific American 's December 2009 cover story, “World Changing Ideas,” which highlighted the power of science and technology to improve the world around us, we are encouraging readers to submit video entries about innovative ways to build cleaner, healthier, smarter ways of life...
You can say "Watson and Crick" in one breath, but should you try squeezing in "Nirenberg"? Along with Robert W. Holley and Har Gobind Khoran, Marshall Nirenberg won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for deciphering the genetic code—a discovery that never did for Nirenberg what the double-helix did for James Watson and Francis Crick, although it probably should have.Because maybe then, people would not misattribute the work...
The man who could recite whole books by heart but could not button his own shirt has died. Kim Peek, born November 11, 1951 (on a Sunday, he will tell you) passed away last weekend from a heart attack...
The National Organization of Italian American Women (NOIAW) has selected Scientific American editor in chief Mariette DiChristina as one of its "Three Wise Women" of 2009.
DiChristina becomes the eighth person to assume the top post in the magazine's 164-year history
