The number of U.S. homes that face repeated flooding has grown significantly in the past decade despite federal and state agencies spending billions of dollars to protect at-risk properties, a new government report shows. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that government programs that move homes out of floodplains or fortify them through elevation or […]
If space exploration was a popularity contest, Mars would be struggling for admirers. Once the darling of 20th-century planetary scientists, the world’s allure has cooled somewhat as other exciting locales—the woefully unexplored Venus, for example, or Saturn’s thrilling moon Titan—begin to turn more heads. But Mars is not relinquishing its time in the limelight quite yet. […]
Originally published in February 1950 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “Could a machine be designed that would be capable of ‘thinking’? Some of the possibilities can be illustrated by setting up a computer in such a way that it will play a fair game of chess. Under some circumstances the machine might well defeat the program […]
What makes the human brain special? That question is not easy to answer—and will occupy neuroscientists for generations to come. But a few tentative answers can already be mustered. The organ is certainly bigger than expected for our body size. And it has its own specialized areas—one of which is devoted to processing language. In […]
If space exploration was a popularity contest, Mars would be falling lower in the pecking order. Once the darling of 20th-century planetary scientists, the world’s allure has cooled somewhat as other exciting locales—the woefully unexplored Venus, for example, or Saturn’s thrilling moon Titan—begin to turn more heads. But Mars is not relinquishing its time in […]
Arguably, all of scientific inquiry in modern times begins with some sort of model. A model takes different parameters you are studying and uses them to make some claim about how our world works. It is a reduction of reality with the aim of reconstructing a picture of truth, whether about the spread of disease, […]
They give us paper and fuel, as well as vital ecological services—like cleaning the air, storing carbon and providing habitat. We’re talking about trees, of course. But human changes to the environment appear to be causing profound changes to trees around the world. In a new study, scientists reviewed global research on trends in tree […]
Physicists have reported what could be the first incontrovertible evidence for the existence of unusual particle-like objects called anyons, which were first proposed more than 40 years ago. Anyons are the latest addition to a growing family of phenomena called quasiparticles, which are not elementary particles, but are instead collective excitations of many electrons in […]
A climate scientist says Facebook is restricting her ability to share research and fact-check posts containing climate misinformation. Those constraints are occuring as groups that reject climate science increasingly use the platform to promote misleading theories about global warming. The groups are using Facebook to mischaracterize mainstream research by claiming that reduced consumption of fossil […]
Originally published in August 1894 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “The citizens of Buffalo, N.Y., were treated to a remarkable mirage between 10 and 11 o’clock on the morning of August 16. It was the city of Toronto, with its harbor and small island to the south of the city. Toronto is fifty-six miles from Buffalo, […]