News

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

It is one thing to make an object invisible, like boy wizard Harry Potter’s mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker. Think of it as an art theft that … Read more

Indiana Jones doesn’t have time for coffee. Wearing corduroy and khaki, Wade Davis, Canada’s famous anthropologist and ethnobotanist, sweeps into a Toronto café and launches into a conversation about his latest book, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the … Read more

At the beginning of 2011, the United States government’s vast and sophisticated intelligence agencies thoroughly analyzed the situation in Egypt. “Our assessment,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “is that the Egyptian government is stable.” That was Jan. 25. The … Read more