Scientific American Magazine

Massachusetts Institute of Technology This eclectic investigator draws inspiration from nature's genius for building things at the nanoscale

Zurich, Switzerland A top insurer highlights the dire consequences that could result from global warming

U.S. Vice President The former presidential candidate is the preeminent spokesperson on climate change

Entrepreneurial ingenuity focuses on finding money and ideas to advance medical science

Chemists and automakers mark progress toward environmentally benign fuels and vehicles

Understanding the workings of a key protein may presage treatments

Two-dimensional light waves point toward optical imaging of viruses and the Invisible Man

Stem cell biology continues to hint at medical benefits to come

Carbon structures provide new devices and remarkable physics

The next generation of electronic tags promises to outperform RFIDs

Bioengineers can now cultivate blood vessels and other tissues from scratch

Optical technology advances toward the $1,000 genome

Improved mathematical models and sensors endow robots with enhanced mobility

Designers have crafted new structures ranging from nanorods to mimics of mother-of-pearl

Technology that could help the blind see is now in the laboratory

An array of technologies are complemented by a push toward sensible public policy

The century-old artifact that defines the kilogram, the fundamental unit of mass, is to be replaced by a more accurate standard based on an invariant property of nature

Learning how rats escape from cats also reveals how a storm of electrical pulses sweeping across the brain is translated into information

Studies of pet dogs with cancer can offer unique help in the fight against human malignancies while also improving care for man's best friend

An extraordinary new human fossil renews debate over the evolution of upright walking

"Supercontinuum" laser light has enabled the most precise frequency and time measurements ever and might drive optical data transmission rates to record speeds

New observations by rovers and orbiters indicate that liquid water not only existed on Mars, it once covered large parts of the planet's surface, perhaps for more than a billion years