Scientific American Magazine

The shortages of the past winter have dramatized the increasing uncertainty of U.S. gas supplies. The importation of liquefied natural gas by ship may ameliorate the situation, but is it safe?

For the past 40 million years the Indian subcontinent has been pushing northward against the Eurasian land mass, giving rise to the severest earthquakes and the most diverse land forms known

The protein that defends cells from viruses was discovered 20 years ago. It has been difficult to purify it and learn how it acts, but it still promises to be valuable against serious viral diseases

An algorithm is a set of rules for getting a specific output from a specific input. Each step must be so precisely defined it can be translated into computer language and executed by machine

The development of an elaborate crystalline skeleton within the transparent embryo of the sea urchin provides a model for the shaping of hard mineralized tissues such as shell and bone

Many stars have other stars as companions; do any of them have planets? An intensive spectrographic search for companions of 123 comparatively nearby stars provides a clue to the frequency of such planetary systems

Bantu is spoken by 130 million people in southern Africa. Linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that the original Bantu-speakers began their migration from a region in the north some 2,300 years ago

When sunlight is scattered by raindrops, why is it that colorful arcs appear in certain regions of the sky? Answering this subtle question has required all the resources of mathematical physics