History of Science

A bacterium famous for food poisoning has its genetics altered to produce fuel or pharmaceuticals—and to keep it from escaping the lab

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, 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.

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.

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

 

The number of exhibits combining science and art in some capacity has grown steadily since I began blogging about them in 2011. With exhibits in galleries and museums across the country, there’s something for everyone.

A 47-year-old scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on robotic systems for exploring Mars and extreme environments on Earth has died in a small plane crash in Los Angeles, officials said on Saturday.

An appeals court sets a precedent by giving an ape legal rights to life, liberty and freedom from harm

(Correcting to 115th count instead of 114th count in 2nd paragraph) By Barbara Goldberg NEW YORK, Jan 7 (Reuters) - The elusive snowy owl, rarely seen outside the Arctic, is turning up more frequently in the skies of North America than it does in the pages of a Harry Potter book, data from the National Audubon Society suggested on Wednesday.

Nature looks at what the new year holds for science

Less than a month after a New York state appeals court ruled that chimpanzees do not have legal rights and cannot be released from captivity, a case involving a second chimp has been dismissed

Books and recommendations from Scientific American