Maryn McKenna answers questions about antibiotic resistance
Award-winning science journalist Maryn McKenna participated in a live online chat about antibiotic resistance with Scientific American 's Facebook page fans on April 11.
Stories by Robin Lloyd
Why Are Americans So Ill-Informed about Climate Change?
Scientists and journalists debate why Americans still resist the consensus among research organizations that humans are warming the globe
"Chemical body burden" researchers and advocates raise questions about biomonitoring studies and hazards regulations
WASHINGTON—The catchphrase "chemical body burden," or the presence of hazardous chemicals and their residues in humans, has started to be teased apart by researchers and environmental health advocates in recent years...
Crowd-sourced data hold potential for positive change and human rights abuses
Social media has scored big successes in helping crowds to gather and communicate online to challenge oppressive regimes in recent weeks, but digital gathering places that are basically public—and the crowd-sourced data they generate—also carry risks...
Satellite TV and Other Low-Tech Solutions Remain Key to Communications and Media in Egypt
Social media gets a lion's share of the credit for enabling Egyptians to organize protests and stay abreast of breaking news, but TV is the dominant media type and Al Jazeera is the most trusted TV news source in Egypt...
Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure
Blogging and other Web activities have allowed members of many marginalized communities to open previously locked media doors. But women still rely more on back channels and ask for less help than men do in the digital realm...
Science bloggers gather to wrestle down myths about research and themselves
DURHAM, North Carolina—TV pundit and Washington Post columnist George Will has a history of misrepresenting climate science—and it's bloggers who typically make sure the record is set straight on such points.For instance, a 2009 Will editorial in the Washington Post asserting, among other things, that the extent of global sea ice today is the same as it was in 1979 drew particularly loud howls...
Readers' choices: Top 10 Scientific American stories of 2010
Our picks for the top 10 science stories of the year were published this week, but who cares what editors at Scientific American think? Below is a list of the stories and features that visitors to our Web site clicked on the most this year...
Mobile Phones for Women: A New Approach for Social Welfare in the Developing World
Telecoms, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofits are pushing to put mobile phones directly in the hands of women in low- and middle-income countries
Antikythera mechanism: An eclipse-predicting machine made of Legos
Most of us probably aspire to build nothing more complex this year than a gingerbread house. (Tick tock.) Videographer John Pavlus spent much of 2010 writing and shooting a video about an Apple engineer, Andy Carol, who designed and built a fully functional eclipse-predicting machine, a replica of an ancient Greek device, out of 1,500 Lego Technic parts and 110 gears...
Rosalind Franklin and DNA: How wronged was she?
It's remarkable what can happen when James Watson isn't in the room.
The Nobel laureate, known for his brilliance as well as his large ego and small superego, was expected to participate in a panel discussion Tuesday night about the play "Photograph 51," which focuses on Rosalind Franklin and her x-ray diffraction work in the early 1950s at King's College London that contributed to discoveries of the molecular structure of DNA, first published in 1953...
A U.C.L.A. physicist dishes on his work as science consultant for The Big Bang Theory
Battlestar Galactica is over. Numb3rs tanked. But there's still The Big Bang Theory on CBS, a sitcom featuring the daily dust-ups of four young physicists and their blonde waitress friend, if you must have science mixed into your small-screen fare...
From Anthrax to Allium: Views from a New York Postal Facility's Green Roof [Slide Show]
A climate scientist studying the cooling effects of various environmentally engineered roofing treatments recently led a tour of a large postal facility's green roof
Asteroid Collision
An extinction-level event is unlikely, but "airbursts" could flatten a city
12 Events That Will Change Everything
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
"First fiction reading off an iPad" kicks off enthusiastic discussion of e-books
If a discussion Monday at a Manhattan bookstore is any indication, book publishers and sellers find e-books threatening, but writers, feeling generally abused for decades by publishers, are gleeful over their newfound digital access to readers—be that via the Web, iPads, e-book readers, podcasts or cell phones...
Competing Catastrophes: What's the Bigger Menace, an Asteroid Impact or Climate Change?
The authors of a recent report concerning a near-Earth asteroid impact and our preparedness disagreed on whether it was reasonable and prudent to compare NEO fatalities with those from climate change...
Policymakers take aim at new recycling frontier: Solid waste, retailers and packaging
NEW YORK—It's human nature to conserve and hoard, so a lot of Americans today take a certain pleasure in their trash habits when it comes to recycling paper, plastics, glass and cans...
Can You Learn Physics from a Comic Book?
SAN DIEGO--You won't learn much physics watching a sci-fi movie or TV show, but reading an old comic book or taking Jim Kakalios's "Physics of Superheroes" seminar at the University of Minnesota might inspire you to figure out if the Flash would consume all of Earth's oxygen if he ran at nearly the speed of light...
Report says scientists lack funds to meet Congressional goal for finding smaller "near-Earth asteroids"
A new federal report on space rock detection and hazard mitigation strategies paints a disquieting picture of the current state of knowledge about how to protect the planet from a "near-Earth object" (NEO) impact that could potentially cause far more regional damage than the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, or the recent quake in Haiti...
