Scientific American Magazine

The development of a "self-anchoring" scale makes it possible to study the hopes and fears of people in different countries and to find where each man thinks he stands in his own world

As the sun turns, its equator moves at two kilometers per second. Some stars turn at 550 kilometers per second, fast enough to spin off matter. Such measurements are clues to the history of a star

The term is applied to subtle types of behavior recently observed in a primitive worm. Heretofore such behavior had been associated only with animals standing much higher in the evolutionary scale

How is it that whole groups of animals have simultaneously died out? Paleontologists are returning to an earlier answer: natural catastrophe. The catastrophes they visualize, however, are not sudden but gradual

Clay tablets unearthed at the site of Kanesh in Anatolia describe in detail an Assyrian merchants' colony there, the headquarters of an extensive commercial system, that linked two ancient cultures

New versions of the shock tube, the device that is used to produce shock waves under controlled conditions in the laboratory, can heat a gas to temperatures approaching those of thermonuclear reactions

Lichens are composite plants, associations of fungi and algae. The problem is to separate the two partners and study the fungi in isolation, and then to try to put the lichen together again

This celebrated consequence of the special theory of relativity is that two clocks that are moving with respect to each other run at different speeds. The effect rests on nothing other than the Pythagorean theorem