Culture

On this 210th anniversary of Darwin's birth we hear evolution writer and historian Richard Milner perform a brief monologue as Charles Darwin, and former Scientific American editor in chief John Rennie and Darwin's great-great-grandson Matthew Chapman read excerpts from The Origin of Species.

Humpback populations from the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet up south of Africa and trade song stylings.

Book recommendations from the editors of Scientific American

The Mona Lisa effect is the illusion that the subject of a painting follows you with her gaze, despite where you stand. But da Vinci's famous painting doesn't have that quality. Christopher Intagliata reports.

And Twitter is taking note

Subject who saw a Superman poster were more likely to offer help than were people who saw another image.

As the New Horizons mission approached Ultima Thule, Rowan University paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara put our close-up study of the Kuiper Belt object into a deep-time perspective.

Users of the social network said they'd require payment of more than $1,000 to quit the platform for one year. Christopher Intagliata reports.

Christopher Skaife talks about his new book The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London, in front of a live audience at Caveat, “the speakeasy bar for intelligent nightlife" in Lower Manhattan.

But microbes living on canvases may also help preserve irreplaceable works of art

The magazine is more widely cited than the King James Version of the Bible by the Oxford English Dictionary

Book recommendations from the editors of Scientific American