Scientific American Magazine

In one approach to controlled fusion a pellet of fuel is imploded by an external energy source. Supplying the energy with intense beams of particles is being explored in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

The tobacco-mosaic virus is made up of a strand of nucleic acid encased in a rod of one kind of protein. The two components come together spontaneously but in a way that is unexpectedly complex

The X rays of crystallography and medical radiography are "hard," or short-wavelength. The "soft," or long-wavelength, X rays are being examined for microscopy, astronomy and microelectronics

How do children learn to speak? It seems they do so in a highly methodical way: they break the language down into its simplest parts and develop the rules they need to put the parts together

Some 10 percent of all galaxies belong to rich clusters, systems with thousands of members embedded in hot gas. Such a cluster is a gravitational maelstrom with giant galaxies close to its center

Much machining is done not by cutting but by abrasion. How the abrasive grains do their work is investigated so as to improve the efficiency of the abrasion process

Two decades ago it was discovered that the brain has "pleasure centers." These centers are now seen as belonging to a system of pathways that appear to play a role in learning and memory

The Wrights' gliders and powered "Flyers" had an elevator in front instead of in the rear. The system has seemed inherently unstable, but it appears that the Wrights had good reasons for selecting it