Originally published in July 1898 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “Of the 298 classes of objects of fear, to which 1,707 persons confessed, thunder and lightning lead all the rest. But is there any factual justification for this fear? We believe there is not. As proof we may cite statistics of the United States Weather Bureau. […]
Circling hundreds of miles above the surface of our big blue marble for 30 years, I’ve had a remarkable view of the universe. I am the Hubble Space Telescope, and I have a birthday wish for everyone out there listening while I watch the heavens. Tags: Related Video Support Science Journalism Scientific American Space & […]
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Thirty years ago a team of NASA astronauts tipped the Hubble Space Telescope out of a space shuttle’s cargo bay and into low-Earth orbit. High above our planet’s starlight-smearing atmosphere, Hubble could study phenomena across the cosmos that ground-based observatories could never hope to see. It was not the first space telescope, but it is […]
Editor’s Note (4/24/20): This article was originally published online on March 11. It has been updated for inclusion in the June 2020 issue of Scientific American and to address rumors that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab in China. The mysterious patient samples arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December […]
Hemorrhage—blood escaping profusely from a ruptured vessel—is a leading cause of potentially preventable death. Bandages often fail to stop the bleeding. But researchers say they have developed a better kind of dressing: one that repels blood and bacteria, promotes quick clotting and detaches without reopening the initial wound. While developing blood-repelling coatings for medical devices, […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages around the world, shattering our familiar realms of work, education and play, many of us in lockdown face a binary choice: We can hunker down at home, or—when we can’t stand it anymore—take a walk outside. After the crisis began, I witnessed a tenfold surge in the number of people […]
I’m coming to you from the front lines of the battle against the novel coronavirus, aka SARS-CoV-2. As an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, I spend dozens of hours a week in the emergency department. It’s my job to direct and oversee our residents, as well […]
On a recent episode of our podcast My Favorite Theorem, my cohost Kevin Knudson and I talked with Carina Curto, a mathematician at Penn State University who specializes on mathematics applied to biology and neuroscience. You can listen to the episode here or at kpknudson.com, where there is also a transcript. Curto told us about the […]
Around seven in the evening on a calm September day in 2016 an Atlas V rocket growled its way into space from Cape Canaveral. On board was NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission to study the carbonaceous asteroid known as “Bennu” and to bring back some 60 grams of material for study on Earth. Some four years later, […]
The National Hurricane Center is stepping up its warnings about storm surge and will start publishing maps this summer that show where tropical storms are likely to cause flooding along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Storm surge color maps will perform the same warning function as the center’s traditional hurricane maps, which President Trump famously […]