Scientific American

What Role Does Climate Change Play in Tornadoes?

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:31:00 EST

A powerful tornado as much as two-miles wide devastated the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on May 20. The twister reportedly boasted winds above 200 miles-per-hour as it tore through homes and schools, leaving a path of large-scale destruction and killing dozens of people, including many children.

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Audubon's Birds Live On Long after His Death [Slide Show]

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:45:00 EST

A portrait of John James Audubon shows the artist and naturalist in a dark wolf-skin cloak, cradling a gun and sporting curly dark hair that was likely smoothed back with bear grease. The picture was painted during Audubon's 1826 trip to England and Scotland, when he was playing up his role as the American woodsman to raise money for his opus, The Birds of America . Once completed, the collection included 435 prints of birds flying , eating, perching and fighting. Audubon is still lauded for his contributions to the fields of ornithology and art.

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Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out--and Accidentally Discover LSD [Excerpt]

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:00:00 EST

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400 PPM: Can Artificial Trees Help Pull CO2 from the Air?

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:01:00 EST

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have touched 400 parts per million for the first time in at least 800,000 years. The jagged saw-toothed line of the Keelings' father-and-son measurements climbed above that milestone briefly this month before the budding growth of the Northern Hemisphere's spring began sucking CO2 back out of the sky. But human greenhouse gas pollution looks set to continue to rise--and photosynthetic plants on land or at sea can only do so much. As greenhouse gas levels increase further, could machines help wash the skies of the excess CO2? [More]

West Africa Struggles to Fill a Climate Knowledge Gap

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

DAKAR, Senegal – Just two seasons exist here: the rainy and the dry. At the best of times, the temperamental rains come for three or four months and turn dusty plains into green pastures, forests and fields.

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Birds of Burden: 7 Ways Humans Harness Avian Abilities [Slide Show]

Sat, 11 May 2013 09:00:00 EST

Many of the 10,000 or so bird species on the planet are pretty, melodic or tasty. But birds are much more than that. Over the centuries, humankind has come up with some distinctive and surprising ways to take advantage of the unique abilities of our feathered friends. At various points in the history of civilizations, birds have served as hunters, guides and messengers. And we haven’t run out of new things for them to do. Farmers have employed raptors to strike terror into the hearts of crop-destroying birds, such as starlings and seagulls, scattering them back into the wild. With the proper training, birds might one day perform search and rescue.

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Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup Plant May Be Too Dangerous

Thu, 09 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

The most toxic and voluminous nuclear waste in the U.S.--208 million liters --sits in decaying underground tanks at the Hanford Site (a nuclear reservation) in southeastern Washington State. It accumulated there from the middle of World War II, when the Manhattan Project invented the first nuclear weapon, to 1987, when the last reactor shut down. The federal government’s current attempt at a permanent solution for safely storing that waste for centuries--the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant here--has hit a major snag in the form of potential chain reactions, hydrogen explosions and leaks from metal corrosion. And the revelation last February that six more of the storage tanks are currently leaking has further ramped up the pressure for resolution.

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Tests Confirm Pablo Neruda Had Terminal Cancer

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:00:00 EST

Originally posted on the Nature news blog

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Communicating with Pheromones

Sat, 04 May 2013 10:00:00 EST

May 1963

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Airplane to Fly across U.S. Powered by Sunshine [Slide Show]

Fri, 03 May 2013 07:01:00 EST

The goal is to fly around the world using no fuel other than sunlight . But first a prototype of the solar plane to circumnavigate the globe will fly across the U.S.--taking off on May 3 and potentially proving that airplanes can fly long distances on nothing more than sunshine. [More]

3,000 Years of Abusing Earth on a Global Scale

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:01:00 EST

Wherever you go on this blue, green and white globe of ours, odds are some person has been there before you--and left a mark . That's because the hunting, farming or burning practices of our most distant ancestors have shaped most land areas on the planet , argues an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and ecologists in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If we are indeed living in the Anthropocene --a new geologic epoch brought on by the outsized environmental effects of the human species--then this new interval isn't just a few hundred years old, it is older than the industrial revolution. [More]

James Cameron Donates His Tricked-Out Deep-Ocean Sub to Science

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:00:00 EST

Before setting his sights once again on the far-off moon Pandora for the next Avatar adventure, filmmaker and aquanaut James Cameron has bequeathed arguably his greatest technological accomplishment to science. Cameron’s DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submarine, which he drove to the deepest part of this planet last March, will in June arrive at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, ultimately helping researchers there better understand life in Earth’s last unexplored frontier. [More]

DNA at 60: Still Much to Learn

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EST

This week's diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA's molecular structure rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the 'genomic age' by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the double helix. Yet the conventional narrative -- in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine -- is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism's observable characteristics, or phenotype.

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Crowdsourcing in Manhunts Can Work

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:00:00 EST

The social news website Reddit was left red-faced last week after misidentifying suspects in the bombings at the Boston Marathon in Massachusetts, raising questions about whether crowdsourcing might do more harm than good in during a manhunt. But work by an international team of scientists suggests that crowdsourcing is a powerful tool in such situations, if used carefully.

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House Built by Evolutionary Theorist Alfred Russel Wallace Up for Sale--£1.5 Million

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EST

The house built by Alfred Russel Wallace after he returned from his exotic travels is about to come on the market.

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The Fascination of the Foreign, 1913 [Slide Show]

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EST

In the beginning of the 20th century, technology and standards of living rose in Europe and America. With more spendable money and better technology for travelling (such as ships and trains) tourism and cruising became much more popular. With this exposure to the foreign there was a new appreciation for culture, art, philosophy in a much wider context than modern Western society. And with modernization abroad, science and technological expertise more easily crossed national boundaries.

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Mary Roach Cruises the Alimentary Canal

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:05:08 EST

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Amateur Astronomers Spot Missing Russian Mars Lander

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:00:08 EST

For a brief moment, it was the robot king of Mars. Then it shut down unexpectedly and was lost for good.

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Recommended: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-Century Bestiary

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 12:00:00 EST

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary [More]

A Private Spaceflight to the International Space Station [Video]

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EST

In the April issue of Scientific American , veteran planetary scientist S. Alan Stern writes about how private spaceflight companies aren't just going to open space travel to wealthy tourists--they're going to revolutionize the way scientists study the environment around our planet. One of the programs that Stern and others are so excited about is SpaceX's Dragon space capsule. Last year the company became the first to launch to the International Space Station. In the future these capsules will offer space access to anyone, and at a price that is much lower than researchers currently have to pay to ride on a traditional rocket.

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