News

Americans are falling out of love with marital bliss. Look at the data. As of 2010, only 51 percent of Americans 18 or older were married, compared with 72 percent in 1960. Exacerbated by a weak job market, the drop … Read more

The publisher is ditching its weighty tomes to concentrate on an internet version, after recognising that knowledge was changing so quickly that the they were becoming obsolete as soon as they were issued. Its handsomely-presented volumes have been in print … Read more

The summer before his last year in high school, Ben Gulak went to China with his parents. Growing up in the small city of Milton, Ont., he was shocked by the transportation challenges facing China’s high-density population. The movie An … Read more

The Pentagon’s far-out research agency, Darpa, has just released a new video of its Cheetah ‘bot — designed to mimic the rapid movements of cheetahs, the speediest animals in nature — absolutely killing it on a laboratory treadmill. In fact, the ‘bot … Read more

The rise of the locavore movement introduced millions of people to the100-mile diet, which involves eating only food produced within one’s own region. Now, a new focus on sustainable architecture is applying the same concept to homes. The idea of … Read more

Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and … Read more

After twenty years of drilling, a team of Russian researchers is close to breaching the prehistoric Lake Vostok, which has been trapped deep beneath Antarctica for the last 14 million years. Vostok is the largest in a sub-glacial web of more than … Read more

  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