Stories by Steve Mirsky

A new volume has breaking news

Pediatric cardiologist Ismée Williams discusses her young adult novel, Water in May, about a teenage girl whose newborn has a life-threatening heart condition.

Edinburgh University paleontologist Steve Brusatte talks about his May 2018 Scientific American article, "The Unlikely Triumph of the Dinosaurs," and his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.

The InSight Mission will look at Mars's seismic activity and latent heat to find out more about how planets get made--and how humans might live there.

Thierry Zomahoun, president of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, talks about the potential and needs of science on the continent.

Some moms can be murder on the family

Advice from an N.Y.U. food policy symposium: eating healthfully means you can't ever let down your guard when shopping.

Brown University biologist and author Ken Miller talks about his new book The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness and Free Will.

Today in Boston, Gates announced a $12-million initiative to foster the development of a vaccine effective against all flu strains.

A look at a database of fatal traffic accidents found a 12 percent increase on the informal marijuana holiday 4/20 after 4:20 P.M. compared with nearby dates.

Princeton University's Jennifer Rexford talks about optimizing the internet for the uses it got drafted into performing.

Photosynthesis actually is an inefficient process, but a biological chemist is trying to crank it up. 

A look at follies, foibles and fumbles

Michael Lemonick, opinion editor at Scientific American, talks about his most recent book, The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory and Love, about Lonni Sue Johnson, who suffered a specific kind of brain damage that robbed her of much of her memory and her ability to form new memories, and what she has revealed to neuroscientists about memory and the brain.

Upstate New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, who worked for decades on issues such as overuse of antibiotics in agriculture and food safety in general, died March 16 at the age of 88.

Pride and falls have a complex relationship

Freelance science journalist Kevin Begos reports from the U.S. Power and Renewable Summit in Austin, Texas, on the use of blockchain technology to make more efficient energy markets and distribution. 

Understanding an ecosystem means following changes in the abundances and identities of the species present as the clock ticks. The BioTIME database should help.

David N. Schwartz talks about his latest book, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age.  

David Lindenmayer of the Australian National University College of Science in Canberra says that older trees play outsize roles in maintaining landscapes and ecosystems.

A surprising number of animals exhibit handedness—bees included

At the first Science Meets Congress event, Energy Solutions for a Sustainable Future, energy and innovation experts from academia, government and the private sector talked with Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina about American's energy future.  

Drugs modified by chemistry Nobel laureate Ben Feringa can be turned on and off by light, which could help keep bacteria from developing antibiotic resistance.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, talked about worldwide scientific collaboration today at the World Economic Forum.