Scientific American Magazine

Global warming has become such an overriding emergency that some climate experts are willing to consider schemes for partly shielding the planet from the sun's rays. But no such scheme is a magic bullet

The big challenges in the fight against HIV/AIDS

Logic gates made of DNA could one day operate in your bloodstream, collectively making medical decisions and taking action. For now, they play a mean game of in vitro tic-tac-toe

How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?

A portable version of a room-size nuclear magnetic resonance machine can probe the chemistry and structure of objects ranging from mummies to tires

Repeated failures in the quest for an AIDS vaccine have sent investigators back to the drawing board

In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, nature is filled with examples of order emerging from chaos. A new theoretical framework resolves the apparent paradox