Scientific American Magazine

Although entrepreneurs can now legally protect any novel plants, animals or microorganisms they invent, the courts have not yet settled many questions about the reach of biotechnology patents

Because it produces antiprotons, accelerates them in a ring using superconducting magnets and smashes them into protons, it is now the world's most powerful source of data on elementary particles

Although the recursive events leading to the birth of new cells are well known, biologists are only now learning how those events are regulated. One protein is the major regulator in virtually all organisms

The formation of giant plateaus in Tibet and the American West may explain why the earth's climate has grown markedly cooler and more regionally diverse in the past 40 million years

Nonimaging concentrators- "funnels" for light-collect and intensifY radiation far better than lenses and mirrors do. The devices are used in fields ranging from high-energy physics to solar energy

This enduring symbol of the American frontier was actually an import from southern Russia that exploited the ecology of the Great Plains, becoming a major agricultural pest in the late 19th century

A ground-level search of abandoned settlements yields enough artifacts to reconstruct urban history. It even turns up evidence that sharply focused excavation would miss

Probing the mysteries of drug addiction is revealing basic knowledge about Jhe brain and may yield a new generation of pharmaceuticals.