Scientific American Magazine

A novel agreement among competing electronics companies has delivered an innovative plan for compatible "DVD" products--the first are due out this fall

Coaxing semiconductor crystals into lasing blue light is no easy task, but the rewards-- among them, greater storage space on optical disks--are well worth the wait

Although most skin cancers appear in older people, the damage often begins decades earlier, when the sun's rays mutate a key gene in a single cell

Two relativists present their distinctive views on the universe, its evolution and the impact of quantum theory

In his finely resolved images of surgery, a photographer sees clues to who and what we are

Disaster struck 250 million years ago, when the worst decimation in the earth's history occurred. Called the end-Permian mass extinction, it marks a fundamental change in the development of life

Computer networks challenge copyright law, but some proposed cures may be as bad as the disease

To move their limbs, cockroaches, crabs and spiders rely on organs in their exoskeletons that act as strain gauges. Their method of locomotion could facilitate the design of multilegged robots