Scientific American Magazine

Bacteria can suddenly become resistant to several antibacterial drugs. The resistance is transferred from one strain to another by an "episome" that carries the genes for multiple resistance

What kind of animal gave rise to modern apes and man? The answer has been brought considerably closer by the unearthing in Egypt of the skull of an ancestral ape that dates back 28 million years

Rocket-borne instruments have detected a number of objects that are intense emitters of X rays. One of them is a star that produces as much energy in the form of X rays as the sun does at all wavelengths

This simple technique, in which a solid is refined by passing a liquid zone through it, has been of profound value in those technologies that call for materials of extremely high purity

Most of what physicists know about the properties of the fundamental particles of matter is inferred from experiments in which two such particles are made to collide and the scattered products are studied

The monochord gave rise to far more than Western musical scales. For the Greeks and those who followed them music was number, and the ratios of the scale were manifested in nature and in the arts

In 1963 it was proved that a celebrated mathematical hypothesis put forward by Georg Cantor could not be proved. This profound development is explained by analogy with non-Euclidean geometry

This gentle beast is a source of power and food for a substantial fraction of humanity. It has much to recommend it for these uses, yet it has been studied far less than many other domestic animals