History of Science

(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

For 500 years, explorers and marine archeologists have exploited the latest technologies to reach new depths, often at great risk to themselves

Amir Aczel explored jungles and ancient temples to trace the history of the number zero

My fermentation obsession has reached new heights – on Christmas day I bottled my first mead, and it was delicious. My wife also gave me a book on mead making, and I’m getting ready to start a wild-ferment mead.

When I visited the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in early 2013 for an open house for prospective students, in many senses I was feeling under the weather.

Haruko Obakata caused a sensation earlier this year with papers, now discredited and retracted, that claimed a simple method for creating pluripotent stem cells

It's time to wind things down for Christmas, so what better way to do it than to write a short article about robins. And here I mean the `original' or `proper' robin - the European robin Erithacus rubecula - a Eurasian passerine that also occurs in northern Africa and is (conventionally) regarded as the only [...]

The Christmas holiday approacheth, and for those of a Maker bent, here’s how to Build A Sled For Slinging Snowballs — Winter Warfare Will Never Be the Same.  If you’re more the craft-y sort, now you can deck the halls with Nobel physicists with this physics twist on the craft of cutting paper snowflakes.

Penicillin and its relatives have been in wide use since the 1940s, but researchers have only now discovered another way that it thwarts bacteria. Karen Hopkin reports