COVID-19 has swept the world in a global pandemic of extraordinary proportions. The debate about its eventual health costs continues to rage, but one Centers for Disease Control estimate suggested anywhere between 200,000 and 1.7 million deaths could be expected in the United States alone, depending on the eventual fatality rate, and not adjusting for […]
Originally published in June 1954 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “After several weeks of confusion about the safety of the new poliomyelitis vaccine, mass tests got underway last month. Walter Winchell had told his radio audience that the vaccine ‘may be a killer’ because one batch had been found with live virus. The National Foundation for […]
Our recollection of events is usually not like a replay of digital video from a security camera—a passive observation that faithfully reconstructs the spatial and sensory details of everything that happened. More often memory segments what we experience into a string of discrete, connected events. For instance, you might remember that you went for a […]
Rejection stings for everyone, but for highly rejection-sensitive people, it can be a real showstopper Credit: Jenny Dettrick Getty Images Advertisement Remember the first time you asked someone out? Whether it was in middle school or well into adulthood, I bet it was at least a little bit nerve-wracking. What if they say no? Worse, […]
Scientific American April 2020 The U.S. should require a second assent for a strike and pledge to never strike first Experts generally agree that the world came closest to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. faced off on the issue of Soviet ballistic missiles being installed […]
Humans have become a dominant force on the planet, driving species extinctions, transforming the landscape and changing the climate. And this influence will likely outlast Homo sapiens by millions of years: we also look set to dominate paleontology in the distant future, according to research published in March in Anthropocene. The new study finds that […]
I thought my first summer job after starting a Ph.D. program in population studies (demography) would be staring at statistics on a computer screen, most likely in a windowless office. My prior summer research had included watching drunk driving public service announcements; poring over state laws; cleaning data for large federal surveys; and creating tables […]
Freeman Dyson was incapable of speaking a dull sentence. For more than 60 years, he was one of the world’s most accomplished living mathematical physicists, and in his later decades he earned a literary reputation as one of the few great scientists who wrote as clearly as he thought. Before I first met him 16 […]
If you have seen the documentary Free Solo, you will be familiar with Alex Honnold. He ascends without protective equipment of any kind in treacherous landscapes where, above about 15 meters, any slip is generally lethal. Even just watching him pressed against the rock with barely any handholds makes me nauseous. In a functional magnetic […]
Have you ever wondered what the subglacial lakes of Antarctica look like? I have. In this video, a team of American scientists led by Dr. John Priscu of Montana State University and including Dr. Trista Vick-Majors, lead author of a new study on Subglacial Lake Whillans, take a peek at subglacial Lake Mercer. A Glimpse of […]