Originally published in January 1960 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “The press of the Soviet Union has been astounding its readers with accounts of a ‘revolution’ in science and a ‘miracle’ of technology. Nikolai A. Kozyrev, an astrophysicist, was said to have wrought the revolution, with his hypothesis that the passage of time is the source […]
The thin atmosphere of Pluto may be far more resilient than scientists thought The dwarf planet’s thin shell of air is generated by the vaporization of surface ices, which leads to the lofting of nitrogen and small amounts of methane and other gases. That vaporization is driven by sunlight, the intensity of which varies greatly during Pluto’s […]
One of the oldest tales in the history of medicine is the story of the archetypal “wounded healer,” Chiron. As legend goes, Chiron, an immortal centaur, who both taught medicine and served as a physician, attended a gathering hosted by another centaur named Pholus. After a series of events involving other centaurs fighting over wine, […]
“The Destroying Monster Continues the Work of Destruction Making a Vast Graveyard of Stricken Cities.” That is how a newspaper headline from Little Rock, Ark., described a yellow fever outbreak in 1878. The mosquito-borne illness infected 120,000 individuals and killed between 13,000 and 20,000 during the spring and summer of that year in the southern U.S. […]
Scientists are scrambling to learn how the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, causes disease, as well as racing to develop treatments and, critically, a vaccine. The work relies heavily on a rarely acknowledged player: research animals. One of the most unusual things about SARS-CoV-2 is the wide range of disease severity it has in humans—from mild or […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has rendered the behavior of most Americans unrecognizable. Handshakes have turned into elbow bumps. School and work are conducted remotely. Socializing happens virtually. And now even our faces are becoming nearly unrecognizable as we don a mask in order to go out. Outside of an operating room or a bank robbery, masks […]
In many ways, coronavirus has functioned like an x-ray. With the flip of a switch, it has stripped us of our skin and revealed our internal state, which was once so deliberately hidden, so to avoid the gaze and judgment of the outside world. We are left exposed, vulnerable, illuminated. In this state, we are […]
As scientists work to create a vaccine against COVID-19, a small but fervent anti-vaccination movement is marshalling against it. Campaigners are seeding outlandish narratives: they falsely say that coronavirus vaccines will be used to implant microchips into people, for instance, and falsely claim that a woman who took part in a UK vaccine trial died. […]
A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University has set out to measure what percentage of the billions of dollars that world governments are spending on the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic might result in lasting reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Jonas Nahm, an assistant professor of energy, resources and environment at Hopkins and one […]
Unless there is widespread testing for COVID-19, experts warn, cases will surge as governments reopen more businesses and public spaces. But there is still a woeful shortage of diagnostic tests for coronavirus infections, because of unprecedented demand for chemicals and supplies. The U.S., for instance, does hundreds of thousands of tests a day, but that […]