The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately hurt members of minority communities in the U.S. As of late July, 73.7 Black people out of every 100,000 had died of the coronavirus—compared with 32.4 of every 100,000 white people. Structural racism accounts for much of this disparity. African-Americans are more likely to have jobs that require them to […]
Standing in my office 25 years ago was an unknown, newly minted astronomer with a half-smile on her face. She had come with an outrageous request—really a demand—that my team modify our exhaustively tested software to make one of our most important and in-demand scientific instruments do something it had never been designed for, and […]
Steve Mirsky: On October 7th, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of the gene editing tool called CRISPR. Last April, I spoke with Doudna at an event in Washington, DC: SM: A few months ago, I was at a talk about wine. And CRISPR came up. […]
“It affects virtually nobody,” President Donald Trump said of the novel coronavirus on September 21—a few hours before U.S. deaths from COVID-19 exceeded 200,000 and less than two weeks before he tested positive. Unlike the president, the numbers don’t lie. The human toll underlying that milestone figure is a number about as big as the […]
The human brain is hardwired to map our surroundings. This trait is called spatial memory—our ability to remember certain locations and where objects are in relation to one another. New findings published today in Scientific Reports suggest that one major feature of our spatial recall is efficiently locating high-calorie, energy-rich food. The study’s authors believe […]
As the carnage of the Eastern Front raged around him, a German lieutenant in World War I digested Albert Einstein’s new theory. Less than two months after Einstein published his general theory of relativity, Karl Schwarzschild, who had enlisted despite being older than 40 and a physicist, found a way to use it to describe […]
Physicists are hatching a plan to give a popular but elusive dark-matter candidate a last chance to reveal itself. For decades, physicists have hypothesized that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are the strongest candidate for dark matter — the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the Universe’s mass. But several experiments have failed to […]
The United States is on pace to install record amounts of wind and solar this year, underscoring America’s capacity to build renewables at a level once considered impossible. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. will install 37 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity this year, obliterating the previous record of almost 17 GW in […]
Editor’s Note (10/8/20): At the October 7 vice presidential debate, Kamala Harris and Mike Pence tussled over the Green New Deal. Several proposals have fallen under that banner. How many jobs would one of them create? What kinds of jobs? Scientific American has detailed data on these questions. Political candidates in the U.S. have been […]
“It affects virtually nobody,” President Donald Trump said of the novel coronavirus on September 21—a few hours before U.S. deaths from COVID-19 exceeded 200,000 and less than two weeks before he tested positive. Unlike the president, the numbers don’t lie. The human toll underlying that milestone figure is a number about as big as the […]