Why 76 Beavers Were Forced to Skydive into the Idaho Wilderness in 1948
Some time in the late 1940s, a very patient, elderly beaver called Geronimo was put in a box, flown to an altitude of between 150 and 200 metres, and tossed out the side of an aeroplane.
As Cuba–U.S. Relations Thaw, Medical Researchers Still Struggle to Connect
The economic embargo is still in place, so warming connections between the countries can only take biomedicine so far, scientists say
Remembering NASA Challenger and #STEMDiversity
The crew of STS-51-L: Front row from left, Mike Smith, Dick Scobee, Ron McNair. Back row from left, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, Judith Resnik.
Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned
I met my first savant 52 years ago and have been intrigued with that remarkable condition ever since. One of the most striking and consistent things in the many savants I have seen is that that they clearly know things they never learned.
Doomsday Clock Set at 3 Minutes to Midnight
Humanity's failure to reduce global nuclear arsenals as well as climate change prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to advance their warning about our proximity to a potentially civilization-ending catastrophe
Did Edgar Allan Poe Foresee Modern Physics and Cosmology?
I’ve always been an Edgar Allan Poe fan, so much so that I even watched the horrifying—not in a good way–2012 film The Raven.
The Murals of Scientific American Founder Rufus Porter
Perhaps the tweet below from editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina last weekend shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, I knew that Rufus Porter, founding editor and publisher of Scientific American, was a well-rounded fellow.
New Life Made with Custom Safeguards
A bacterium famous for food poisoning has its genetics altered to produce fuel or pharmaceuticals—and to keep it from escaping the lab
Celebrate National Hug Day with the Geology of Hug Point!
Hug Point State Park in Oregon could use a hug. Pioneers certainly weren’t very affectionate with it: they blew bits of it up. Millions of years before that, massive amounts of flood basalt intruded a nice, calm delta, which also made things pretty explosive.
NASA's Dawn Mission Captures New Image of Dwarf Planet Ceres
NASA’s Dawn mission, having performed remarkably at the asteroid Vesta, is homing in on Ceres. The spacecraft’s ion engines will bring it to a capture orbit around this 590 mile diameter dwarf planet on March 6th, 2015 – at a distance some 2.5 times further from the Sun than the Earth.
Extreme Submarine, 1915
Reported in Scientific American, This Week in World War I: January 16, 1915 Before the First World War, Simon Lake designed and built some innovative submarines for the U.S.
Ex-President Wins Campaign against Ghastly Guinea Worm
Jimmy Carter's efforts against the horribly painful guinea worm parasitic disease have helped lower the number of cases from 3.5 million in 1986 to just 126 last year. Steve Mirsky reports