History of Science

Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas, which helps drive global warming, haven’t been this high in somewhere between 800,000 and 15 million years

History is rife with unethical experiments on inmates. But with proper safeguards prisoner studies may hold the key to the accurate representation of vulnerable groups and lead to health benefits

As readers of this blog know, since 2005 I’ve been teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. One of the best parts of being an academic is hanging out with cool (compared to me), young (compared to me), up-and-coming scholars, some of whom know far more about the history of science and [...]

Long cloaked in mystery, the ancient Teotihuacán culture is at last giving up its secrets

After decades of investigation, fresh clues are emerging from Mexico’s City of Gods

Recommendations from Scientific American

Nobel Prize winners have published 245 articles in the pages of Scientific American. Here we present excerpts from stories in our archives that highlighted new insights into how the body functions. 

A Centennial Commemoration

It’s summer. The kids are out of school. You want to keep them engaged and active. Most parents also want to keep them on track academically, but not necessarily with a strong hand approach to learning.

Protoceratops © by John Conway, from All Yesterdays As someone fascinated by prehistoric life during my entire existence, my love for paleoart is experiencing something of a renaissance: I have children now.

Last post we talked about traditional peer review, which is at least single-blinded. This time we will focus on Open Peer Review (OPR). The narrowest way to describe OPR is as a process in which the names of the authors and reviewers are known to one another.

Physicist Sean Carroll has some words of wisdom for physicists who might have less than complimentary things to say about philosophy. The most recent altercation between a physicist and philosophy came from Neil deGrasse Tyson who casually disparaged philosophy in a Q&A session, saying that it can be a time sink and it doesn’t actually [...]