Scientific American Magazine

The noise of billions of brain cells trying to communicate with one another may hold a crucial clue to understanding consciousness

Botanists have collected seeds from one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth

Shifts in rainfall patterns and shorelines will contribute to mass migrations on a scale never before seen

If we are ever going to pick up a signal from E.T., it is going to happen soon, astronomers say. And we already have a good idea how events will play out

The greatest energy payoffs, says investor Vinod Khosla, will come from fundamentally reinventing mainstream technologies

The next pandemic virus may be circulating on U.S. pig farms, but health officials are struggling to see past the front gate

The tobacco industry has known for decades how to remove a dangerous isotope from cigarettes but has done nothing about it. The government now has the power to force a change

Machines can devise a hypothesis, carry out experiments to test it, and assess results--without human intervention

Fish fossils push back the origin of copulation in backboned animals and suggest that it was a key turning point in our evolution