Scientific American August 2020 An outbreak in Italy in the 1630s forced him to find new ways of doing his research and connecting with his family The novel coronavirus has upended our world over the past several months, forcing people to learn how to work in entirely new ways. For scientists in particular, Isaac Newton […]
Memory loss and forgetfulness are common warning signs for dementia. But a dulling of the senses also appears to be associated with dementia. “Smell is definitely the strongest one we found, but it does seem like it’s not just smell.” Willa Brenowitz, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Her team studied cognitive […]
A lot will be riding on the European Space Agency’s (ESA’S) Euclid spacecraft when it blasts off in a rocket from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, in September 2022—far more than its 1.2-meter telescope and twosophisticated wide-field-imaging instruments. Paired with complementary measurements from two other next-generation facilities—the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and […]
Americans from Maine to Texas have recently reported receiving mysterious packages sent from China. Often labeled as jewelry, the parcels instead contain clear plastic bags with unknown seeds of various shapes, sizes and colors. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and state agriculture agencies are urging people not to plant—or even throw away—these organisms. Instead they […]
My views on climate change—and, more generally, on humanity’s future—have never been stable. Depending on what I’m reading, and perhaps shifts in my neural weather, I ricochet between optimism and dread. Last spring I was feeling pretty glum about, well, everything when iconoclastic environmental activist Michael Shellenberger sent me a prepublication copy of his book […]
Originally published in August 1968 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “If by some special arrangement humans could be made to breathe water instead of air, serious obstacles to attempts to penetrate deeper into the ocean and to travel in outer space might be overcome. Suppose we prepare an isotonic solution that is like blood plasma in […]
Some ocean animals have a clever form of camouflage—they’re transparent. But being see-through is far less common on land. “And there’s a few reasons why that may be.” Jim Barnet is a postdoctoral research fellow at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. (He began this research as a doctoral student at the University of Bristol.) “Differences […]
People in the path of Hurricane Isaias are shunning emergency shelters as officials from Florida to North Carolina have urged evacuating residents to stay with friends or relatives instead or to rent hotel rooms. Ten shelters were opened in Florida in recent days, yet they received a total of 266 people, according to a Federal […]
Colleges and universities in the U.S. are currently being forced to make a seemingly impossible decision between in-person and remote classes this fall. As a professor, I am all too familiar with both the pros and cons of bringing college students back to campus. Students benefit from the full college experience filled with dorm living, […]
We’re in a terrifying and confusing pandemic, with new and sometimes conflicting information about COVID-19 emerging all the time. In the early days, a lot of public health advice was based on what we knew about previous disease outbreaks. But this new coronavirus behaves in unexpected ways, and it’s hard to keep up. What’s more, […]