Neuroscience
World Parkinson's Day Puts Spotlight on Condition
Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research CEO Todd Sherer, a neuroscientist, talks about the state of Parkinson's disease and research.
Stories by Steve Mirsky
Wellness
You Could Eat Off the Floor, It Was So Resistant to Bacterial Transfer
Let's take a time-out to review the five-second rule
Environment
Spiders Gobble Gargantuan Numbers of Tiny Prey
The low-end estimate for how much the world's spiders eat is some 400 million tons of mostly insects and springtails.
Automotive
What's Driving the Self-Driving Cars Rush
Scientific American technology editor Larry Greenemeier talks with Ken Washington, vice president of Research and Advanced Engineering at Ford, about self-driving cars.
Space
Exoplanets Make Life Conversation Livelier
Astronomer Caleb Scharf weighs what ever more exoplanets mean in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Conservation
Bring Bronx Zoo to Your Living Room
Animal Planet's series The Zoo shows viewers the biological, veterinary and conservation science at a modern zoo.
Evolution
Biology's Lessons for Business
Martin K. Reeves and Simon Levin talk about their Scientific American essay "Building a Resilient Business Inspired by Biology."
Biology
Pulling the String on Yo-Yo Weight Gain
Mice that lost weight and then gained back more than they lost maintained an obesity-type microbiome that affected biochemicals involved in either burning or adding fat--suggesting interventions...
Policy & Ethics
Poverty Shaves Years off Life
A meta-analysis found that being of low socioeconomic status was associated with almost as many years of lost life as was a sedentary lifestyle.
Biology
Early-Life Microbes Ward Off Asthma
Exposure to specific microbes when an infant is less than a year old seems to have a protective effect against the child's eventual acquisition of asthma.
Space
Jupiter Moon to Be Searched for Life
If anything's alive on the ice-covered ocean world of Europa, a future NASA mission hopes to find it.
Policy & Ethics
Forensic Science: Trials with Errors
What appears to be accepted science in the courtroom may not be accepted science among scientists.
Space
How to Find Loooong Gravitational Waves
The gravitational waves found last year were short compared with the monster waves that could be turned up by what's called Pulsar Timing Arrays.
Biology
Why a Cat's Tongue Is Like No Other [Video]
It's embedded with tiny, spiky structures that let the animal both comb its fur and lap up water
Genes for Smelling Asparagus Metabolites Determine Urine Luck
Genome analysis pinpoints the DNA that gives some people an asparagus edge
Medicine
Medical Marijuana Faces Fed's Catch-22
Doing large studies of marijuana's potential as medicine means getting it removed from an official federal list of substances with no official medical use—which requires more proof of its potential as medicine...
Wellness
Fermented Foods Find Fervent Advocate
Properly fermented foods deliver probiotics that could help cut disease risk, said a researcher at the annual meeting of the AAAS.
Vision Needed to Curb Nearsightedness Epidemic
In urban Asian areas myopia among teenagers is topping 90 percent—but foresight may be able to bring those numbers way down.
Public Health
2 Words Trigger CDC to Stay Quiet
Researchers and administrators at the CDC dare not utter the words guns or firearms for fear of budget cuts from Congress, according to health policy researcher David Hemenway. ...
Arts & Culture
Churchill's Extraterrestrials
Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio writes in the journal Nature and talks to Scientific American about the recently rediscovered essay by Winston Churchill that analyzed with impressive scientific accuracy the conditions under which extraterrestrial life might exist...
