Scientific American Magazine

Land mines kill or maim more than 15,000 people each year. Most victims are innocent civilians. Many are children. Still, mines are planted by the thousands every day

Rather than ending abruptly at the orbit of Pluto, the outer solar system contains an extended belt of small bodies

A growing discipline called molecular epidemiology is attempting to find early biological signposts for heightened risk of cancer. The research should enhance prevention of the disease

Techniques that enable distributed computing systems to reorganize themselves can restore operation when one part crashes

New research uncovers some anti-intuitive insights into how many people are happy--and why

Although they are protected by law from hunters, these whales must struggle to survive the threat of industrial pollution

The navies of classical Greece took advantage of the sliding stroke, a technique that 19th-century competitive rowers later reinvented

The U.S. is spending billions to clean up its nuclear weapons complexes. At one of the most contaminated sites, no one knows how much the project will cost, how long it will take or how much good it will do