Stories by Steve Mirsky

In his announcement today that he was taking executive action to require more gun sellers to be licensed and to do background checks on gun buyers, Pres. Barack Obama also touched on the problems facing public health researchers who try to study gun violence and deaths.

The numbers of large carnivores, especially leopards, are increasing in private lands and lands outside the protected-area systems in India, bringing new challenges for coexistence.

Math can be fun for readers of all h's

Nicholas Matzke, an American evolutionary biologist currently at the Australian National University in Canberra, performed a phylogenetic-style analysis of dozens of antievolution education bills in various state legislatures to track their relatedness

Marion Nestle, author of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning), talked December 14 in New York City about Coca-Cola's attempt to fund research designed to find sugared soft drinks innocent in contributing to obesity

Ken Perlin, a New York University computer science professor and virtual reality pioneer, talks with Scientific American tech editor Larry Greenemeier about the state of virtual reality, its history and where it's heading

A brief portion of the December 9 conversation during the climate talks in France between Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Scientific American’s David Biello

Science journalist and equestrian Wendy Williams talks about her new book The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion

Scientists can provide the info to make sure that the correct areas are chosen for protection to help ensure the continued robustness of a region's biodiversity

Walking on water takes a man with mighty big shoes to fill

Researchers took cells from donated vocal cord tissue and successfully grew them on a three-dimensional scaffold to produce new vocal cords that can produce sound

Harvey Mudd College math professor Arthur Benjamin talks about his new book The Magic of Math: Solving for x and Figuring Out Why  

The recently discovered small galaxy Leo P contains only about a hundred-thousandth as many stars as the Milky Way, but it's bucking the small galaxy trend by continuing to make new ones

Stephen Hoover, CEO of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, talks with Scientific American tech editor Larry Greenemeier about the revolution underway in machine learning, in which the machine eventually programs itself
 

In which Tushi the chimp extends her species's known tool use to drone removal

At the “Innovation: An American Imperative” symposium October 20 on Capitol Hill, industry leaders and members of Congress talked about shoring up federal support for basic research and development

Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons Mission, explains that with Pluto in the rearview mirror, the spacecraft will continue on to a smaller Kuiper Belt body

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for discoveries of the mechanisms by which cells maintain the integrity of their DNA sequences

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, Aziz Sancar for mechanistic studies of DNA repair

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for the discovery that one kind of neutrino can change into another, which shows that neutrinos have mass

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for their discoveries of a medication against roundworm parasites and to Youyou Tu for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria. Some 3.4 billion people are at risk for the diseases these drugs treat
 

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for their studies leading to novel therapies against infections caused by roundworm parasites and to Youyou Tu for her work developing a novel therapy against malaria

Harvard neuroscientist Beth Stevens wins a MacArthur Fellowship for studies of how microglia cells prune away excess neuronal synapses during brain development and how that necessary function might go awry in neurodegenerative diseases