You’re at the supermarket trying to choose a ripe tomato when behind you you hear [cough sound]. If you’re like most people, you probably hold your breath, tighten your mask, and hope you don’t catch whatever Patient Zero is spraying over the fresh produce. And, if you’re like most people, chances are you’re overreacting. Because […]
Twenty-five years ago this week, the Chicago coroner’s office was swimming in corpses. It began as a trickle, when four bodies were discovered in poorly ventilated homes and low-rent apartments on Monday, July 13, 1995. The temperature was 113 degrees Fahrenheit, but it felt like 126. Then it got hotter. As temperatures spiked—peaking at 115 […]
With a five-meter-wide, 57-meter-tall rocket waiting to blast off from China’s southern island of Hainan, the nation is quietly making final preparations for its first independent trip to Mars. When the launch window opens in mid-July, Chinese scientists will strive to send a probe to a planet that confused their ancestors with its constantly changing […]
This image—the closest ever taken of the Sun—shows the corona teeming with thousands of miniature solar flares, which scientists have dubbed ‘campfires’. The pictures are the first released from the Solar Orbiter satellite mission, led by the European Space Agency. “When the first images came in, my first thought was this is not possible, it can’t […]
Originally published in November 1954 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “When a golden pheasant cock displays his brilliant plumage before the hen, we are accustomed to say he is courting her. Just what this expression means when applied to a nonhuman animal is far from clear; the idea is so obviously anthropomorphic that zoologists have been […]
Half a year into the coronavirus pandemic, many of its enormous public health, economic and political ramifications are still poorly understood. The virus itself has turned out to be maddeningly complex. It manifests itself in different populations in diverse and confusing ways, depending on age, environmental and social conditions, blood type, form of exposure, and […]
Scientific American July 2020 Florida will soon reopen to launches for pole-orbiting spacecraft Sixty years ago the U.S. Air Force repurposed its Thor missile as a launch vehicle to put small scientific, weather and military satellites into orbit. Or at least that was the plan. Many of those early satellites ended up in the ocean, […]
In the 12th episode of Cosmos, which aired on December 14, 1980, the program’s co-creator and host Carl Sagan introduced television viewers to astronomer Frank Drake’s eponymous equation. Using it, he calculated the potential number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way that could contact us using the extraterrestrial equivalent of our modern radio-communications technology. […]
The hubbub around mutations in the virus that causes COVID-19—and how they might make it more infectious—has been around since the early phase of the pandemic. A preprint study about a particular mutation involving the “spikes” studding the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen had previously drawn attention, and that investigation has now been peer-reviewed and published in Cell. […]
Galileo could be, let’s say, prickly. “Look, he was a genius, and he was a truly unusual person, but he wasn’t exactly nice,” astrophysicist and author Mario Livio, whose latest book is Galileo and the Science Deniers, said by phone. “He was nice to his family, he supported the members of his family … and […]