History of Science

New homes wired with the latest smart gadgets cluster together around shared park spaces. Blue-black panels that transform sunshine into electricity grace a majority of roofs.

One of the first things I get asked when I tell people that I work on bee cognition (apart from `do you get stung a lot?') is `bees have cognition?'.

Imagine a trio of aerobatic aircraft. Over the years they've gotten very good at their routine. But they want to add another five or six or seven members.

Alice B. Toklas truly stirred the pot when she included a recipe for hashish fudge in her memoir-cum-cookbook. She published The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook in 1954, following the death of her lifelong partner, Gertrude Stein.

BP's Macondo well disaster was bad but U.S. oil addiction is worse

It's on the beach, in the marshes, on the continental shelf and under the deep sea—and still not all of the oil has been found

For many decades, scientists have tried to understand the past by doing as our forebears did. One important endeavor in what is called experimental archaeology involves moderns crafting Stone Age tools by chipping away at rocks.

Recent questions about the validity of diagnostic criteria for mental illness have raised deeper questions about the current state of psychiatry

Over the last several days a consortium of people interested in herpetology, weird animals, animal lore, and special effects have worked together to help resolve an incredible and bizarre `mystery'*.

The journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology recently banned the use of p-values and other statistical methods to quantify uncertainty from significance in research results

Fans of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke know and love his 1979 classic novel, The Fountains of Paradise. The plot centers on efforts of a visionary structural engineer in the 22nd century, Dr Vannevar Morgan, to construct a space elevator connecting the surface of the earth with a satellite in geostationary orbit, almost a kind [...]

In the May issue of Scientific American, a familiar friend makes an appearance: a chart of fundamental particles. These particles—fermions (which include constituents of matter such as electrons and quarks) and bosons (usually carriers of force)—are at the very heart of the Standard Model of particle physics.