News

  Why not bring elephants to Australia? That’s the proposal made by biologist David Bowman of the University of Tasmania in a comment published February 2 in Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The pachyderms could help to polish off … Read more

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has commissioned composer Tod Machover to write a symphony about Toronto using the ideas and suggestions of the city’s own citizens. No musical expertise is required in the interactive project which will use the internet to … Read more

Aeroplanes can fly because their wings cause the air pressure underneath to be greater than that above, lifting them into the air. But engineers have for years been frustrated by a theory which wrongly explains what causes the change in … Read more

In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician named Ivan Pavlov was analyzing dogs’ saliva output over time. Pavlov noticed that dogs tended to salivate more before eating and that merely the … Read more

Orchids are seducers. They trick animals into pollinating them and usually give nothing in exchange. Some orchid species mimic nectar-producing flowers to lure bees; others emit the fetid smell of rotting meat to attract carrion flies. In China, Dendrobium sinense orchids release … Read more

From Sheril Kirshenbaum‘s blog, The Culture of Science. Popular Mechanics has a nice article by David Kushner about the portrayal of science in Hollywood. It’s a topic I’m extremely interested in because the scientists that appear on film and television inform a great … Read more

Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, responds: Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet … Read more

California’s catalog of historic artifacts includes two pairs of boots, an American flag, empty food bags, a pair of tongs and more than a hundred other items left behind at a place called Tranquillity Base. The history registry for New … Read more

Though it is probably happening too late to be overly gratifying to her, events are piling on to vindicate Margaret Thatcher completely in her reservations about British integration in Europe. Her response to the proposal to reduce Britain to a … Read more

Without genetic change we’d be nowhere—well perhaps just unicellular blobs kicking around in ponds. Alterations in DNA, such as point mutations, duplications, rearrangements and insertions from microbial neighbors, have helped humans and our deep-time ancestors climb out of the swamps … Read more