Scientific American Magazine

New technological developments have put practical electric cars within reach, but politics may slow the shift away from internal-combustion engines

The fabulously complex immune systems of humans and other mammals evolved over hundreds of millions of years -- in sometimes surprising ways

Sharks, which have existed for as many as 450 million years, offer glimpses of a distant period in the evolution of the immune system

Quantum optics demonstrates the existence of interaction-free measurements: the detection of objects without light—or anything else —ever hitting them

Today a frozen world, Mars at one time; may have had more temperate conditions, with flowing rivers, thawing seas, melting glaciers and, perhaps, abundant life

Some surprisingly reasonable policy changes would enable the world's largest nation to produce more food for its 1.2 billion citizens

A new model of this reading disorder emphasizes defects in the language-processing rather than the visual system. It explains why some very smart people have trouble learning to read

Paintings and engravings made by ancestors of the San peoples encode the history and culture of a society thousands of years old