Moviegoers have long been familiar with the benefits of viewing content on a curved screen. The screen's curvature equalizes the distance that light from the projector must travel, enhancing resolution and brightness while eliminating distortion...
Editor's Note: Welcome to ANITA, the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna! From October to December, Katie Mulrey is traveling with the ANITA collaboration to Antarctica to build and launch ANITA III, a scientific balloon that uses the entire continent of Antarctica for neutrino and cosmic ray detection...
It seems like every day we hear about another incremental breakthrough in battery technology. By tweaking existing battery chemistries or inventing new chemistries altogether, university researchers and startup companies have managed to increase the energy density, cycle life, energy efficiency, and safety of numerous potential grid battery technologies...
New technology is developed each year that lets us measure things that are smaller, colder, faster, or farther away than ever before. But there are some things, even with all of this technology, that we just can't measure...
Reported in Scientific American, This Week in World War I: January 2, 1915 In this issue of Scientific American from 1915, we published the second installment of a three-part first-hand account: "War Experiences of an Air Scout: Patrol of the Sky" by Frederick C...
In honor of January 1st being Public Domain Day, I am releasing a few of my older images from copyright: These images are now available for all uses, including commercial use, without the need for attribution or permission...
2014 was a busy year, and an odd one in terms of subject matter. Usually my stream is full of ants. I am trained as an ant biologist, after all, and these charming social insects typically weigh heavily in my photographs (see 2013, 2012, 2011)...
Note: A version of this post appeared on Anthropology in Practice in 2010. It’s New Year’s Eve in the United States, and in New York City tourists and residents are getting ready for the countdown in Times Square that marks the end of the year and the beginning of a new one...
It has been a busy year here at Plugged In. We have said a fond farewell (for now) to David Wogan and were excited to see Scott Huler launch a new project on Scientific American’s Expeditions...
The life cycle of a medical advance usually goes something like this: from discovery at the research bench and replication of findings, to translational research and clinical trials, to implementation...
Comfortably sitting in the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas in Japantown in San Francisco, I was watching The Theory of Everything with an audience of hundreds.
With the close of 2014 came the closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. At 1:04 pm EST on Monday, the 620 Megawatt plant in southern Vermont was completely shut down.
As many mysteries as the octopus holds—its comprehensive camouflage, smart suckers, agile brain—its genome is surely holding many more (including how it can regenerate its arms—suckers, nerves and all)...
Probably not, but just possibly yes. One of the reasons that the search for life elsewhere in the universe is so exciting is that it would take only one chance discovery, one lucky break, for all the walls to come tumbling down...
World events left many marks and losses in 2014, but Scientific American readers kept calm and carried on for the most part, as your top picks among the stories we published this year reveal...
Though it’s tempting to think you must spend thousands of dollars on equipment to take great photographs, Joshua White is helping prove that the best camera is the one you have on you when the inspiration strikes...
Reported in Scientific American, This Week in World War I: December 26, 1914 In this issue of Scientific American from 1914, we published the first installment of a three-part first-hand account: "War Experiences of an Air Scout: The Diary of an American Volunteer With the Aviation Corps of the French Army," by Frederick C...