A “megadrought” gripping the western United States is the worst one in 500 years, scientists say. And it’s the first to be influenced by human-caused climate change. A study published this week in the journal Science investigates the occurrence of megadroughts in western North America over the last 1,200 years. While a megadrought has no strict scientific definition, most […]
Best known for inventing the game of Life, John H. Conway is adept at finding the theorems hidden in simple puzzles — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com Source link
In recent weeks, a flurry of headlines about healthcare workers treating people with COVID-19 have utilized a wide array of military metaphors: Doctors are fighting on the frontlines without sufficient ammunition. They are battling the enemy. They are at war. But we are not at war. And we certainly have not enlisted. We are doctors. What […]
Originally published in July 1948 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “Nineteen years after Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the galaxies seem to be running away from one another at fabulously high speeds, the picture presented by the expanding universe theory—which assumes that in its original state all matter was squeezed together in one solid mass of extremely […]
The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may […]
Imagining things that do not exist in nature and weaving them into narratives are unique signatures of the human psyche. These abilities are abundantly evident in the earliest example of narrative art, which was recently discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In these newly reported images, one or more Pleistocene-epoch humans […]
As the world scrambles to contain the spread of COVID-19, many economic activities have ground to a halt, leading to marked reductions in air pollution. And with the skies clearing, researchers are getting an unprecedented chance to help answer one of climate science’s thorniest open questions: the impact of atmospheric aerosols. What they learn could […]
Is density really the driver of this epidemic or is the idea misplaced? When people are packed tightly into urban areas they come in contact more often, and thus have more opportunities to spread disease. This intuition coincides with our standard understanding of the spread of infectious disease—but only partly. To understand how widely and […]
Scientific advances over the last several centuries have not only resulted in a greater understanding of the universe; they’ve raised the standard of living for many people across the globe. However, there are still massive challenges we’re ill equipped to meet, as evidenced by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, which have shown that we […]
We may be a big step closer to cracking one of the universe’s biggest and most fundamental mysteries. Scientists think that, when the universe was born nearly 14 billion years ago, it contained equal amounts of matter and its bizarro counterpart, antimatter. Antimatter particles have the same mass as their “normal” cousins but opposite electrical charges. […]